Course corrections

A group of notable U.S. academics, journalists, artists, and business people have just this week announced plans for the University of Austin, a new liberal-arts school to be founded near the Texas state capital. The school bills itself as “committed to freedom of inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse”—a response to what its founders see as an elite college system in crisis, with diminished academic freedom, a waning commitment to free speech, and a lack of viewpoint diversity. Arguments over these issues have played out in mainstream media for years, with a growing partisan divide over the broader role colleges play in American life. Have things in U.S. higher education really gotten so bad?

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor in the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and the author of Free Speech, and Why You Should Give a Damn. Zimmerman says America’s universities and colleges may be the best they’ve ever been when it comes to teaching quality and the ways they serve large, diverse populations of students. But he’s sympathetic with a lot of the concerns that the group behind the University of Austin are voicing about trends at elite schools—including that students and faculty members are feeling increasingly hesitant to express beliefs that could be seen as controversial or offensive.

Zimmerman says the U.S. education system isn’t doing enough to teach students how to talk to people they disagree with—just one of the ways schools are failing to foster citizenship. Meanwhile, the enormous cost of college and the perception of its political bias have hurt the reputation of American higher education, which postsecondary institutions have to address if they’re ever again to be considered a “public good” and enjoy high levels of public funding, as they did in the last century …

Graham Vyse: The founders of the University of Austin are moving on the belief that higher education in the United States is deeply broken. What do you make of that?

Jonathan Zimmerman: The University of Austin represents some good critiques of higher education, but to say it’s broken misses the fact that there are now 4,700 places in the U.S. to get a B.A. Although these places are under strain and stress in different ways, there are 20 million people attending these institutions. There are enormous problems with the model—but acknowledging that is different than saying it’s broken.