Old North

Growing disdain for universities distorts their role and value

December 17, 2017  |  Raleigh News & Observer 

The News & Observer recently published a front-page story under the headline, “Advocates see growing disdain for universities.”

Disdain is a bleak word. I understand skepticism toward higher education – concern over the value of a degree or the depth of learning. Those are all fair questions, especially for public universities that rely on taxpayer support.

But disdain is something different. It captures a belief that colleges are not merely flawed, but actively working against the greater good. 

“In July, a Pew Research Center study found that 58 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents believe colleges and universities have a negative effect on ‘the way the things are going in the country,’ up from 37 percent two years ago,” the article noted.

Former Arizona legislator Frank Antenori, giving voice to that new majority, put it this way: “Why does a kid go to a major university these days? A lot of Republicans would say they go there to get brainwashed and learn how to become activists and basically go out in the world and cause trouble.”

I thought about that story a few days later as I stood in the back of our little conference room here in the financial aid office, watching 20 students cram themselves around a narrow table. They came to hear a young woman from Monroe, North Carolina describe how she went from a nervous first-generation freshman to a third-year medical resident, delivering babies and caring for new mothers in the mountain region of our state.

She spoke about majoring in psychology and women’s studies, about working and saving money before medical school, about her daily rounds at the hospital. 

The students stayed late into the evening, asking questions and confessing their anxieties. They asked about the responsibility of holding someone’s life in your hands and strategies for surviving a 28-hour hospital shift (“Drink lots of water, and find time to walk around outside, if you can”).

If this gaggle of undergraduates harbored troublemaking impulses or vitriolic partisanship, they hid it well.

The view of higher education as an elitist, out-of-control playpen of protest and immaturity is easy to glean from cable news snippets and internet clickbait. In the age of impulsive tweets and 24-hour outrage, it’s easy to cherry pick examples of bad behavior from any large institution.

By contrast, “Sophomore masters organic chemistry” is never going to be a viral headline. But it happens by the hundreds every semester, and it’s a wondrous thing to behold.

That’s why I find it impossible to square the disdainful view of higher education with any sustained experience of campus life.

Just this week, I’ve met with a colleague who spends her nights and weekends studying dual-enrollment programs that help high-schoolers earn college credit. I had lunch with a professor who writes thoughtful New York Times essays on the intellectual history of the evangelical movement, giving readers across the country insight into the deep roots of religious thought in American public life. I talked with a student who’s learning Chinese in his spare time through online video chats with a student in rural China. He’s teaching her to read Charlotte’s Web.

There’s an earnestness to all of this effort that stands in sharp contrast to the cynicism and scorn that have become the default language of our politics. The sincerity and optimism I encounter every day are unrecognizable in the grim caricature that mocks universities as just another culture war battleground.

There’s some solace in remembering we’ve been here before. Writing about ongoing campus unrest in 1970 – “causing public tolerance to wear thin” – University President Bill Friday noted that students are influenced by broader political trends and cultural anxieties.

“It is our responsibility to contribute to their valid experience and to encourage their mature reflection, and in all such efforts we must take care not to crush their healthy idealism,” he wrote. “It is our task to help each student to broaden his knowledge, to deepen his understanding of our society, and to qualify himself for a useful and meaningful life. No institution should seek to impose upon a student any preconceived dogma.”

That mission still holds.

Eric Johnson works in the financial aid office at UNC Chapel Hill. The views expressed here are his own.

Originally published on the op-ed page of the News & Observer. 
http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article190169889.html