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Colleges and Universities

Universities' universal irrelevance: Column

Being a university president used to matter, but now it is a customer service job.

Ross K. Baker

Unremarked in the recent demonstrations at Princeton University demanding the removal of Woodrow Wilson's name from the university's school of public policy and international affairs is the fact that universities once played a major role in American politics. There's no better example than Wilson himself, who rose from the leadership of Princeton to the governorship of New Jersey and then to the White House.

Woodrow Wilson

Nowadays, if universities play any role at all, it is as a foil for candidates deriding the excesses of political correctness or as objects of public indignation for the outlandish misbehavior of their athletes. In terms of political stature, the university today is not just a nullity; it is an absolute liability.

As late as the mid-20th century, university presidencies were launching pads for the White House. Dwight Eisenhower's decision to accept the presidency of Columbia University was designed to convey the impression of intellectual heft. Likewise, Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen's occupancy of the presidential chair at the University of Pennsylvania was calculated to position him for a White House run. Going back as far as James Garfield's leadership of Hiram College in Ohio, a university presidency was a crown jewel on the résumé of a presidential hopeful. Making a White House bid today from the top position on a U.S. campus would be justly viewed with puzzlement or even amusement.

While there is much debate over the value of political endorsements, top executives at American universities would probably be among the last people sought out to provide testimonials for a presidential aspirant; a Republican hopeful would do better getting the nod from the pastor of a small evangelical church and a Democrat from the leader of an obscure labor union. The political coinage of the university is debased.

The reasons for the political neutering of the university are many. The first would probably be the decline in public esteem of elite institutions and those associated with them. Years ago, to be spoken well of by Harvard's James Conant or Yale's Kingman Brewster was a significant testimonial. If the name of Columbia President Lee Bollinger were invoked today, it would probably be only in the context of a candidate's attack on affirmative action from the time that Bollinger was the defendant in a racial preference case as the president of the University of Michigan.

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In this connection, the increasing racial diversity on American campuses has also contributed to the decline in the political influence of universities by making them battlegrounds between students who are typically the first in their families to set foot on a college campus, and administrators more eager to use diversity as a selling point than to seriously tend to the needs of students who are often the products of substandard primary and secondary education.

Even worse is the uncomfortable encounter of minority students with some of the most privileged of this country's young people. The clash is most dramatic at elite schools such as Yale, Princeton and Amherst, where some of the most serious disturbances have taken place. Neither are public universities immune, as the recent clashes at the University of Missouri demonstrate.

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And universities, to their undying discredit, have been rightly singled out as the principal incubators of political correctness. Contempt for the muzzling of unpopular opinions has reached portions of the public that have had little contact with institutions of higher education. Too many campuses have become the domain of euphemism and inoffensiveness rather than vigorous debate. Most horrifying of all is when they become places of inquisition and persecution based on the contagion of hysteria, such as occurred at Duke and the University of Virginia, when fabricated allegations of sexual assault produced a purge mentality worthy of the Red Guards in Maoist China. It should be no surprise, then, that it is more profitable for politicians to revile universities than to identify with them, other than, perhaps, with their football teams.

The most charitable explanation for the decline of the political potency of universities is that they are part of a more general disrepute for institutions: government, the scientific establishment and journalism, to name just a few.

One is entitled to ask why young people still strive to be accepted at the college of their choice. The answer is simple, if disheartening: Universities are the great turnstiles of American social mobility, places to get your ticket punched. The economic value of a college degree is beyond question, but the value of a university as a political asset is a thing of the past.

Ross K. Baker is a distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers University and a member of the Board of Contributors of USA TODAY.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of ContributorsTo read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page.

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