Given everything we now know about institutional inertia, bureaucratic constraints, faculty governance, accreditation capture, federal funding streams, and political realities, is meaningful reform of existing universities even possible?
I always advise friends in China not to send their children to American universities (with the possible exception of graduate-level STEM fields). The danger is that they will return as Marxists.
It's time to build a chain of Classical Education K-12 schools across the country. Require Latin and Greek, foundational US and World History, grammar, reading and composition, Great Authors, advanced math and science, computer and AI literacy, debate, rhetoric, and formal logic.
Agreed on everything except including "computer and AI literacy" as elements of classical education (or as subjects in a school devoted to them). Young people with interests in and aptitudes for these things will learn them to a basic level (a threshold worthy of calling literacy) on their own, especially in the current social climate. Someone who does this, and who has a solid foundation in the other areas you list provided by their schools, will be a much better programmer than someone who is made to take classes in computer programming as part of their early education, because they'll be able to reason well, understand things, and figure things out for themselves rather than having been taught which steps to follow in using a program (which is an overly broad way of putting it, but which is also broadly true of what mass/mandatory teaching and learning computing at these early levels will end up involving).
I have long thought that we needed to push more down into grade schools (as used to be common a century or more ago). Yes, some students would not be able to handle it, so there would have to be some "streaming" or "tracking" as used to be common. One of my regrets now is that I did not study more grammar and debate in high school. Latin and Greek would have been handy as well. I craved classical history enough that I studied it in college since it had by then been removed from our grade school curricula where I grew up.
There is much truth in this article...but I must re-emphasize an important point regarding the K-12 Education system. The universities provide the nation's teachers so the failings of the teacher corps and the schools they run arise directly from the universities themselves. One major reform to restore the K-12 schools would be to STRIP universities of any role in teacher preparation with the appropriate defunding of the universities with resources being dedicated to new institutions designed for this purpose.
That is often true...but the problem is the wider faculty and administration of the university as a whole as well as the scientific community's arrogant presumption of its own over importance.
At my university the state legislature allocated funds to support training all elementary teachers in science as lack of content knowledge in this cohort was seen as the cause of the poor outcomes in science for K-12 students. The decision was made to put the science content courses in the College of Science to insure that science content specialists, not education faculty, would provide instruction. I was hired to build the geoscience course content for these teachers. Immediately, however, these efforts were undermined by the Dean of the College of Science. His attitude was that the students in these courses were less important than "science" students and the faculty who taught these "service" courses were a waste of "science" resources. His philosophy, often stated publicly was, "These students are only going to be teachers...what do they really need to know?" justifying shifting resources away from them by increasing their class sizes, refusing to staff their courses for them to graduate on time, and making it impossible for the faculty to meet their needs.
This occurred despite the fact that the resources to fund these courses came from the legislature to meet the needs of teachers. This Dean abused the faculty in the relevant positions (Geology/Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Astronomy) so he could get the faculty to quit, freeing up the positions and use them to build an engineering program and give course releases to science faculty for "research". As the former Normal School for Minnesota founded specifically to train teachers, the mission of these positions from the legislature was far more relevant to the purpose of the institution than diversion of resources for "science". While the faculty of Biology, Physics, and Astronomy stood up to the Dean's efforts and protected their new faculty positions, Chemistry/Geology was willing to betray the purpose of their new position. The resulting disruptions to the education majors ability to graduate on time caused a crash in student interest at the program reducing the largest major in the university by 100's per year reducing the supply of new teachers in Minnesota and the sun belt states many moved to for jobs.
20 years later, Minnesota now struggles with declining student performance and a shortage of teachers, not the surplus it exported. The engineering program built on stolen resources is about to be cut due to its lack of economic viability, and the course releases for "research" have led to know appreciable scientific advances. The Colleges of Education aren't the only cause of this problem. The arrogant scientific faculty and inappropriate misallocation of resources to science was the problem here.
Perhaps. I am not saying this example is the norm...but it is important that we not point fingers just as the Colleges of Education. They are corrupt...but that corruption seems to be the norm in academia including...perhaps especially in STEM. Crooks go where the funds are...
Don't hire the college educated teachers I think is one approach. If one can create charter or private schools in states with enough educational freedom to do so then hire people who are passionate about this project of reviving the West's classical heritage. Yes these new teachers won't be skilled or experienced but if they have enough intellectual ambition they could at least provide an above average instruction on the basics such as the classics, logic, argumentation, history, math, science etc. For states such as Oregon that are near the bottom of educational achievement, competing with public institutions shouldn't be too hard. There are many challenges but there are also a lot of people who care about this issue as well.
The problem is that most schools, even non-public ones, are still required to hire certified teachers which is where the universities get their monopoly.
Courage. The ability to challenge entrenched nonsense without fearing consequences is key to destroying DEI and related evils. Compromise must be avoided, and saying over and over that Leftist “ideals” are pure evil is mandatory.
You are too kind to DEIism. It is a civilization in the same way Nazi Germany was a civilization. Yes, Nazis had their own laws and mores, but to call it a "civilization" cheapens the term. Thinking of good and evil gives clarity to our thoughts.
I agree with Professor Klainerman. Things look very grim. Institutions are highly unlikely to reform themselves without immense outside pressure, and maybe not even then.
Some of this outside pressure can be provided by competition.
I hope we can reform these organizations, but I am doubtful, given what I know and have observed.
The key to reform is to remove taxpayer money from the political patronage scheme that is academia and university system. By reducing the rentier system of credentialism and increasing competition with education systems based on more efficient economics, the DEI will be purged by economic necessity instead of legislative fiat. Whether it be in grade school, high school, or universities the funding must be tied inextricably with student choice. This will require a revolution in funding education at the local, State and Federal levels. Subsidized Federal loans need to be eliminated entirely. Government schools will need to compete for students if they want to survive. Creating an economically advantaged taxpayer funded system would inevitably result in mediocrity and political corruption.
Agree that reforms must be wide-ranging and much broader than universities themselves. For example, one seemingly minor but important factor in the dilution of meritocracy stems from ADA. Schools and universities freely hand out 'accommodations' including extra time to students who know how to use the system, effectively dividing students into two cohorts. Professors are not allowed to push back (possibly threatened with lawsuits) and not allowed to mention in recommendation letters that a student took the course under relaxed conditions. This has to be battled in the court system, likely by people who did not receive accommodations and were therefore at a relative disadvantage, but I have not seen much interest in this. These 'accommodations' have also ruined the even playing field of standardized testing, including for competitive high school admissions.
Thank you for this article! It is indeed of crucial importance for the West in general – and not just for the US – to rebuild an education and higher education system worthy of the name. There is absolutely a great deal at stake. Otherwise, we will continue to suffer under an incompetent and ideologised elite and produce empty-headed individuals in whom totalitarianism – for example, of an Islamist nature – will take root very effectively.
Thank you for your words; there are many of us whose hearts are breaking, despairing at the way our leaders are colluding with those who are destroying France....
Another key measure that is necessary to starving this system is to get rid of or massively reduce government student loans. Maybe restrict them to STEM and/or the trades, like nursing and business. Not all degrees should be supporting by loans.
Nope. Liquidate them. There is no requirement for a society to have universities. The progress of knowledge and the arts would be much higher without them.
I am interested in your comment, I would disagree as I think the ability for an instructor to incentivize excellence through the consequence of academic failure enables organized institutions like universities to create sharp minds - at least back when they were creating sharp minds.
But failure has consequences outside the academy too, and more realistic. That's what ultimately creates sharp minds, being a student is just a simulation.
Along these lines, if anyone is interested, today I've published a (work-in-progress) interactive mapping of every four-year college and university in the U.S., positioning each institution along two composite dimensions: Institutional Resilience and Post-College Market Position, along with a new Artificial Intelligence Exposure measure.
The tool is designed for institutional leaders, enrollment strategists, and policy researchers in higher education, but also, it's meant to aid and facilitate conversation about the myriad challenges the industry faces.
You can also use the tool to search for your institution, compare across peers, and examine the component-level scores driving each school's position.
That's an interesting measure set, both the AI exposure and the Resilience v Post market.
I'm not sure how to capture what Klainerman discusses here on such scales. Why? Because what he talks about is not measured much. If we cannot measure it we cannot track it. So being able to measure and track it becomes a possible avenue. Think of how the ratings by US News have affected universities.
My growing alarm regarding AI is that students are not learning how to think! This is way worse than what Sowell spoke of. I see exposure to AI as having terrible effect. What kind of terrible? Losing a war and becoming vassals because we're stupid now terrible. Because that is what happens to idiot societies.
And decline in math skills is worrisome. The WW2 generation had excellent skills. The Boomers, not as good. The gen X and millennials? Whoa. I am, right now in a situation with a powerful high ranking professor who is pulling out all the stops on some math that is just... astonishing. And his buddies are all with him. Supposedly physicists.
Appreciate the thoughtful engagement. A few threads to pull apart here.
On measurement: you're putting your finger on a real limitation. The framework measures what federal data can measure — institutional finances, completion rates, earnings outcomes, program mix, demographic pipelines. It can't measure what students are actually learning, how well they're thinking, or whether graduates can reason through novel problems. Those are genuinely important outcomes, and you're right that if we can't measure them we can't track them. The hope is that a tool like this at least makes the structural positioning visible, even if it can't speak to the deeper educational quality question.
On AI and learning: the framework treats AI exposure as a labor market construct — which career pathways have task structures that overlap with current AI capabilities. That's a different question than whether AI is affecting how students learn to think, though I take your point that they're connected. An institution could score well on every structural indicator in this framework and still be failing its students intellectually. That's a limitation worth being honest about.
On the U.S. News comparison: that's actually a live question in the feedback I'm getting. The short version is that I deliberately avoided producing a single ranking because the most consequential and least empirically grounded step in any composite measure is the weighting — and a single ranking invites exactly the kind of Goodhart's Law dynamic that U.S. News created. Two dimensions isn't perfect, but it at least forces the conversation to specify which dimension matters for which question.
I wasn't intending to say that a one-dimensional measure was the way to go.
What I meant is that measurement itself, and publicizing ranking(s) is an effective tool for moving universities. I remember when my brother and I were fighting University of Phoenix, they got their graduation rate removed from the ranking database we started citing. That was 20 years ago, U of Phoenix had a 4% graduation rate. But, we could keep citing it for the year we had copied off. While I can't claim, "We did that." those documents and legislative education efforts were ultimately successful. At least we helped stall them until John Sperling, the (IMO socipathic) founder of Apollo Group died.
Accreditation was the original method used to get rid of junk schools of yore. But now, we have entities like CACREP that have captured universities. CACREP appears to create garbage education programs, and I suggested that a lawsuit to destroy that organization and tear a lot of money out of the universities that bent over for them is the way to go. Perhaps Thiel or Jordan can fund that. It could be a Qui Tam case, taking back the grant money given to students for that junk education.
It's going to take a variety of tactics and strategy. The cadres certainly have that.
"The probability that universities can reform themselves from within, in the absence of powerful external pressure, is very close to zero."
Sadly true, I'm afraid. The positive is in the qualifying phrase "in the absence of powerful external pressure". The good news: the US under Trump is the one bright spot in starting to fix this whole sordid mess. Another bit of good news is that students seem to be getting fed up with the political indoctrination. The bad news: it's just/mainly the US - the rest of the developed democracies are the same old dross.
Still, Klainerman has the uplifting last paragraph. What is necessary to make the last paragraph happen? Everyone knows the necessary prescription: courage.
The probability of internal reform could be far from zero but only if we include negative probabilities, whatever that means. I want to state my opinion that it is impossible for universities to reform themselves. I welcome any external help, especially that from the Manhattan Institute.
I am an optimist when it come to almost everything. I am an optimist that universites can be reformed but a pessimist when it comes to whether universites can reform themselves.
What stands out is how the system reproduces its own assumptions. Over time, it stops testing against reality and starts stabilizing around its own internal logic.
I always advise friends in China not to send their children to American universities (with the possible exception of graduate-level STEM fields). The danger is that they will return as Marxists.
Hahaha
It's time to build a chain of Classical Education K-12 schools across the country. Require Latin and Greek, foundational US and World History, grammar, reading and composition, Great Authors, advanced math and science, computer and AI literacy, debate, rhetoric, and formal logic.
Agreed on everything except including "computer and AI literacy" as elements of classical education (or as subjects in a school devoted to them). Young people with interests in and aptitudes for these things will learn them to a basic level (a threshold worthy of calling literacy) on their own, especially in the current social climate. Someone who does this, and who has a solid foundation in the other areas you list provided by their schools, will be a much better programmer than someone who is made to take classes in computer programming as part of their early education, because they'll be able to reason well, understand things, and figure things out for themselves rather than having been taught which steps to follow in using a program (which is an overly broad way of putting it, but which is also broadly true of what mass/mandatory teaching and learning computing at these early levels will end up involving).
Definitely a worthwhile point. Maybe we could compromise and make them electives.
I have long thought that we needed to push more down into grade schools (as used to be common a century or more ago). Yes, some students would not be able to handle it, so there would have to be some "streaming" or "tracking" as used to be common. One of my regrets now is that I did not study more grammar and debate in high school. Latin and Greek would have been handy as well. I craved classical history enough that I studied it in college since it had by then been removed from our grade school curricula where I grew up.
And we're all the poorer for it.
There is much truth in this article...but I must re-emphasize an important point regarding the K-12 Education system. The universities provide the nation's teachers so the failings of the teacher corps and the schools they run arise directly from the universities themselves. One major reform to restore the K-12 schools would be to STRIP universities of any role in teacher preparation with the appropriate defunding of the universities with resources being dedicated to new institutions designed for this purpose.
An old "joke" from academia:
Q: What is the fastest way to improve the quality of a university?
A: Blow up the faculty of education.
That is often true...but the problem is the wider faculty and administration of the university as a whole as well as the scientific community's arrogant presumption of its own over importance.
At my university the state legislature allocated funds to support training all elementary teachers in science as lack of content knowledge in this cohort was seen as the cause of the poor outcomes in science for K-12 students. The decision was made to put the science content courses in the College of Science to insure that science content specialists, not education faculty, would provide instruction. I was hired to build the geoscience course content for these teachers. Immediately, however, these efforts were undermined by the Dean of the College of Science. His attitude was that the students in these courses were less important than "science" students and the faculty who taught these "service" courses were a waste of "science" resources. His philosophy, often stated publicly was, "These students are only going to be teachers...what do they really need to know?" justifying shifting resources away from them by increasing their class sizes, refusing to staff their courses for them to graduate on time, and making it impossible for the faculty to meet their needs.
This occurred despite the fact that the resources to fund these courses came from the legislature to meet the needs of teachers. This Dean abused the faculty in the relevant positions (Geology/Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Astronomy) so he could get the faculty to quit, freeing up the positions and use them to build an engineering program and give course releases to science faculty for "research". As the former Normal School for Minnesota founded specifically to train teachers, the mission of these positions from the legislature was far more relevant to the purpose of the institution than diversion of resources for "science". While the faculty of Biology, Physics, and Astronomy stood up to the Dean's efforts and protected their new faculty positions, Chemistry/Geology was willing to betray the purpose of their new position. The resulting disruptions to the education majors ability to graduate on time caused a crash in student interest at the program reducing the largest major in the university by 100's per year reducing the supply of new teachers in Minnesota and the sun belt states many moved to for jobs.
20 years later, Minnesota now struggles with declining student performance and a shortage of teachers, not the surplus it exported. The engineering program built on stolen resources is about to be cut due to its lack of economic viability, and the course releases for "research" have led to know appreciable scientific advances. The Colleges of Education aren't the only cause of this problem. The arrogant scientific faculty and inappropriate misallocation of resources to science was the problem here.
An ugly, sad story in your case.
I think, however, that far more deans and provosts are guilty of cowardice in folding to the neomarxists than the kind of scheming you describe.
Perhaps. I am not saying this example is the norm...but it is important that we not point fingers just as the Colleges of Education. They are corrupt...but that corruption seems to be the norm in academia including...perhaps especially in STEM. Crooks go where the funds are...
Not just - of course. But there are degrees of corruption, and most have a pretty accurate understanding of that hierarchy.
Don't hire the college educated teachers I think is one approach. If one can create charter or private schools in states with enough educational freedom to do so then hire people who are passionate about this project of reviving the West's classical heritage. Yes these new teachers won't be skilled or experienced but if they have enough intellectual ambition they could at least provide an above average instruction on the basics such as the classics, logic, argumentation, history, math, science etc. For states such as Oregon that are near the bottom of educational achievement, competing with public institutions shouldn't be too hard. There are many challenges but there are also a lot of people who care about this issue as well.
The problem is that most schools, even non-public ones, are still required to hire certified teachers which is where the universities get their monopoly.
Courage. The ability to challenge entrenched nonsense without fearing consequences is key to destroying DEI and related evils. Compromise must be avoided, and saying over and over that Leftist “ideals” are pure evil is mandatory.
100%
it is a civilizational conflict
You are too kind to DEIism. It is a civilization in the same way Nazi Germany was a civilization. Yes, Nazis had their own laws and mores, but to call it a "civilization" cheapens the term. Thinking of good and evil gives clarity to our thoughts.
I agree with Professor Klainerman. Things look very grim. Institutions are highly unlikely to reform themselves without immense outside pressure, and maybe not even then.
Some of this outside pressure can be provided by competition.
I hope we can reform these organizations, but I am doubtful, given what I know and have observed.
The key to reform is to remove taxpayer money from the political patronage scheme that is academia and university system. By reducing the rentier system of credentialism and increasing competition with education systems based on more efficient economics, the DEI will be purged by economic necessity instead of legislative fiat. Whether it be in grade school, high school, or universities the funding must be tied inextricably with student choice. This will require a revolution in funding education at the local, State and Federal levels. Subsidized Federal loans need to be eliminated entirely. Government schools will need to compete for students if they want to survive. Creating an economically advantaged taxpayer funded system would inevitably result in mediocrity and political corruption.
Agree that reforms must be wide-ranging and much broader than universities themselves. For example, one seemingly minor but important factor in the dilution of meritocracy stems from ADA. Schools and universities freely hand out 'accommodations' including extra time to students who know how to use the system, effectively dividing students into two cohorts. Professors are not allowed to push back (possibly threatened with lawsuits) and not allowed to mention in recommendation letters that a student took the course under relaxed conditions. This has to be battled in the court system, likely by people who did not receive accommodations and were therefore at a relative disadvantage, but I have not seen much interest in this. These 'accommodations' have also ruined the even playing field of standardized testing, including for competitive high school admissions.
Excellent, I agree with all you say.
Thank you for this article! It is indeed of crucial importance for the West in general – and not just for the US – to rebuild an education and higher education system worthy of the name. There is absolutely a great deal at stake. Otherwise, we will continue to suffer under an incompetent and ideologised elite and produce empty-headed individuals in whom totalitarianism – for example, of an Islamist nature – will take root very effectively.
I see the bleedings of France's conflict with Islam through your words, such a beautiful country and people.
Thank you for your words; there are many of us whose hearts are breaking, despairing at the way our leaders are colluding with those who are destroying France....
Another key measure that is necessary to starving this system is to get rid of or massively reduce government student loans. Maybe restrict them to STEM and/or the trades, like nursing and business. Not all degrees should be supporting by loans.
No, universities cannot be reformed.
Thomas Hobbes, 1588 - 1679
“The universities have been to the nation as the wooden horse was to the Trojans.”
Nope. Liquidate them. There is no requirement for a society to have universities. The progress of knowledge and the arts would be much higher without them.
I am interested in your comment, I would disagree as I think the ability for an instructor to incentivize excellence through the consequence of academic failure enables organized institutions like universities to create sharp minds - at least back when they were creating sharp minds.
But failure has consequences outside the academy too, and more realistic. That's what ultimately creates sharp minds, being a student is just a simulation.
Along these lines, if anyone is interested, today I've published a (work-in-progress) interactive mapping of every four-year college and university in the U.S., positioning each institution along two composite dimensions: Institutional Resilience and Post-College Market Position, along with a new Artificial Intelligence Exposure measure.
The tool is designed for institutional leaders, enrollment strategists, and policy researchers in higher education, but also, it's meant to aid and facilitate conversation about the myriad challenges the industry faces.
You can also use the tool to search for your institution, compare across peers, and examine the component-level scores driving each school's position.
Link directly to the tool: https://kylesaunders.com/university-map/
Link to my substack about the tool: https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/mapping-the-structural-divide-in
I hope you'll find it useful, and share it with others.
That's an interesting measure set, both the AI exposure and the Resilience v Post market.
I'm not sure how to capture what Klainerman discusses here on such scales. Why? Because what he talks about is not measured much. If we cannot measure it we cannot track it. So being able to measure and track it becomes a possible avenue. Think of how the ratings by US News have affected universities.
My growing alarm regarding AI is that students are not learning how to think! This is way worse than what Sowell spoke of. I see exposure to AI as having terrible effect. What kind of terrible? Losing a war and becoming vassals because we're stupid now terrible. Because that is what happens to idiot societies.
And decline in math skills is worrisome. The WW2 generation had excellent skills. The Boomers, not as good. The gen X and millennials? Whoa. I am, right now in a situation with a powerful high ranking professor who is pulling out all the stops on some math that is just... astonishing. And his buddies are all with him. Supposedly physicists.
Appreciate the thoughtful engagement. A few threads to pull apart here.
On measurement: you're putting your finger on a real limitation. The framework measures what federal data can measure — institutional finances, completion rates, earnings outcomes, program mix, demographic pipelines. It can't measure what students are actually learning, how well they're thinking, or whether graduates can reason through novel problems. Those are genuinely important outcomes, and you're right that if we can't measure them we can't track them. The hope is that a tool like this at least makes the structural positioning visible, even if it can't speak to the deeper educational quality question.
On AI and learning: the framework treats AI exposure as a labor market construct — which career pathways have task structures that overlap with current AI capabilities. That's a different question than whether AI is affecting how students learn to think, though I take your point that they're connected. An institution could score well on every structural indicator in this framework and still be failing its students intellectually. That's a limitation worth being honest about.
On the U.S. News comparison: that's actually a live question in the feedback I'm getting. The short version is that I deliberately avoided producing a single ranking because the most consequential and least empirically grounded step in any composite measure is the weighting — and a single ranking invites exactly the kind of Goodhart's Law dynamic that U.S. News created. Two dimensions isn't perfect, but it at least forces the conversation to specify which dimension matters for which question.
I wasn't intending to say that a one-dimensional measure was the way to go.
What I meant is that measurement itself, and publicizing ranking(s) is an effective tool for moving universities. I remember when my brother and I were fighting University of Phoenix, they got their graduation rate removed from the ranking database we started citing. That was 20 years ago, U of Phoenix had a 4% graduation rate. But, we could keep citing it for the year we had copied off. While I can't claim, "We did that." those documents and legislative education efforts were ultimately successful. At least we helped stall them until John Sperling, the (IMO socipathic) founder of Apollo Group died.
Accreditation was the original method used to get rid of junk schools of yore. But now, we have entities like CACREP that have captured universities. CACREP appears to create garbage education programs, and I suggested that a lawsuit to destroy that organization and tear a lot of money out of the universities that bent over for them is the way to go. Perhaps Thiel or Jordan can fund that. It could be a Qui Tam case, taking back the grant money given to students for that junk education.
It's going to take a variety of tactics and strategy. The cadres certainly have that.
Fine analysis by Klainerman.
"The probability that universities can reform themselves from within, in the absence of powerful external pressure, is very close to zero."
Sadly true, I'm afraid. The positive is in the qualifying phrase "in the absence of powerful external pressure". The good news: the US under Trump is the one bright spot in starting to fix this whole sordid mess. Another bit of good news is that students seem to be getting fed up with the political indoctrination. The bad news: it's just/mainly the US - the rest of the developed democracies are the same old dross.
Still, Klainerman has the uplifting last paragraph. What is necessary to make the last paragraph happen? Everyone knows the necessary prescription: courage.
Dear Sergiu,
The probability of internal reform could be far from zero but only if we include negative probabilities, whatever that means. I want to state my opinion that it is impossible for universities to reform themselves. I welcome any external help, especially that from the Manhattan Institute.
I am an optimist when it come to almost everything. I am an optimist that universites can be reformed but a pessimist when it comes to whether universites can reform themselves.
Bring in the Manhattan Statement!
thanks,
randy
What stands out is how the system reproduces its own assumptions. Over time, it stops testing against reality and starts stabilizing around its own internal logic.