Victor Davis Hanson: America's Universities Are In Crisis

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (1:49)
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson. There's been a lot of news lately about the university's higher education in crisis.
And the universities are now competing for students, rather than students competing with each other to get into universities. Maybe the elite universities still because of their brand name, although they've suffered a great deal and their admissions reflect that, and their applications are down, they'll always make it seven or eight so-called top tier. But most four-year colleges and universities are in a bad straight. Why is that? First of all, it's demography. During the 1960s, the fertility rate reached in 1960, about 3.6 children per family. It's recovered a little bit the last three years, but it's 1.7. So the cohort of 17, 18-year-old, 19-year-olds is only about, it's less than half. So they are competing for a much smaller pool of young people. The second thing that's really turned people off is the tuition has increased the last 50 years three times, three times more than the annual rate of inflation. Now, why is that? Mostly, it is because of administrative bloat. Where I work at Stanford University, the Wall Street Journal recently suggested that if you count graduate and undergraduates at Stanford and you count administrators and their staff, there is roughly one administrator or staffer for every student. This is because the university became in local parentage. It said, I am a parent, and I'm going to monitor the 360 degree, 24-7 life of a student. If he's not happy, we're going to deal with it. If somebody accuses you of sexual harassment, we're going to deal with everything. And we're going to try to also be political. Our job is not disinterested inductive education. It is to turn out left-wing people who can offer an antithesis to the family, nuclear family, the community, the religion, etc.
We believe society is biased with corporations and family and religion and we're going to offer an antithesis. That turned off people, believe me. Professors themselves are unique in American life. Nobody else has the same conditions of employment. After six years, they get tenure. Outside the exclusive schools, it's almost automatic. Where I worked at the CSU, I think 90% of assistant professors got tenure. Release time is very common now that you can say, I want to be a part-time administrator or I am tutoring or I have a special project and you can get a reduced teaching load.
Remember that the teaching load has gone way down. In most colleges, it's between two and four courses a year.
Maybe not the CSU team, but even CSU has gone down on many campuses from, that's the California State University system, the largest in the world from four classes to three classes a semester. Part of the way that they finesse that was, when you increase the administrative budget and you increase the release time for full-time faculty and decrease the teaching, you hire part-time temporary lecturers and you exploit them. You pay them about 40% per class what you would pay a full or associate professor. You don't really give them the same type of benefits. And at some universities, the number of courses, the percentage of courses that are taught by part-time exploited lecturers is getting up to 40 and even 45%.
Another thing that turned the public off about these universities, they grant gouge. We're starting to learn that, say, on NIH grants, many of these universities were charging not 10 or 15% commission, but 40% and even higher. In other words, if a professor got a million dollar grant from the federal government, a university would step in and say, well, you're using your office or your phone or your lab or so. We want 40% of it. And they use that because the whole system is financially unsound, financially unsound, largely because again, of administrative bloat and the creation of centers and programs that have nothing to do with education but form a huge overhead. Another thing that got people very worried is another way they financed this debt, expanded their administrators, cut back on teaching, was they brought in over a million foreign students. And unlike American students, there are no scholarships, there are no discounts. Foreign students pay the premium if not a little bit higher rate of inflation. Now, the problem with that of tuition, the problem with that is when you bring in 300,000 students from China or over 200,000 from the illiberal Middle East, and when you look at the origin of most of these students, they are from autocratic and illiberal places in Africa, Asia, the Western Hemisphere, particularly the Middle East and China, then you start to politicize the student body, and you can see what had happened after October 7th. We had an enormous demonstrations often led by foreign students chanting from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. That's essentially code for destroying the state of Israel. And we had violent demonstrations often led by people from the Middle East. And of course, the FBI suggests 1 to 5% of Chinese students are actively engaged in espionage. The public knows this, and they're not fond of that idea, that sometimes their children don't get into school because the universities are letting in foreign students because they pay a premium. DEI did damage, diversity, equity, inclusion. The idea that the universities, despite state referenda and Supreme Court decisions, the Civil Rights Acts, they were deliberately, consciously, insidiously using race as a barometer to admit people, to hire people, to retain people, to promote people on the basis of their superficial appearance, their sexual orientation, or their gender. It was entirely merit, anti-mericratic. It was like the Soviet commissar system. It was like the McCarthy period. If you wanted to get a job at a university, you had to fill out in most cases a diversity statement. And believe me, if you wrote on that diversity statement, honestly, I believe that DEI is anti-mericratic, you were not going to be hired.