By CHRIS POWELL
With the Trump administration beating up on higher education and especially colleges and universities with the biggest endowments, which are now to be brutally taxed by the federal government, Yale University seems to have decided to guard against being seen as pretentious.
School finance study committee is rigged in favor of educators
Democrats howl at enforcement of 20-year-old deportation order
‘Investing’ euphemizes spending; and two more empty gestures
Not that Yale isn’t entitled to think well of itself. It is often considered among the 10 best universities in the world, its endowment exceeds $44 billion, five U.S. presidents have earned degrees there, and almost singlehandedly it keeps otherwise impoverished New Haven from slipping into Long Island Sound. The university’s economic and cultural impact on Connecticut is enormous.
Quite apart from that the Yale campus is beautiful.
But Yale is also politically skewed so far to the left, to Democratic Party partisanship, and to political correctness that it practically dares any national Republican administration to cut off its federal patronage. These days there are so few Republicans and conservatives on Yale’s faculty and in the university’s management and so few connected to the university generally that one is most likely to be found on campus in the university’s Peabody Museum along with the skeletons of other extinct creatures.
So, according to the Yale Daily News, a faculty committee recently recommended that the university try to rebuild public trust, and part of that may be to humble itself a little. For starters, Yale has simplified its mission statement.
The statement that has been replaced was grandiose and conceited to the point of chest-thumping: “Yale is committed to improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice. Yale educates aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society. We carry out this mission through the free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community of faculty, staff, students, and alumni.”
Of course the “free exchange of ideas” in any institution is a lot easier when nearly everyone there, despite differences in race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, and age, thinks the same way about politics, as long has been the case at Yale.
But the new mission statement is spare, modest, and politically unobtrusive almost to the point of timidity: “Yale’s core mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”
This might be the mission statement of any community college. Indeed, it’s barely a step ahead of the motto of the imaginary college that was depicted in the hilarious 1978 movie that exploded the pomposity of higher education, “Animal House.” That college, named for its founder, Emil Faber, purportedly the pencil magnate, erected a statue of him inscribed: “Knowledge is good.”
So it is, and so is Yale, especially if it realizes that with some political diversity and the critical thinking that tends to come with it, the university might be better still and never lack the public’s trust.
Because of its international prestige and its generous financial grants to students — among the benefits of a huge endowment — Yale isn’t going to get many complaints that its degrees are overpriced. But that is a big problem with higher education generally.
Bloomberg Businessweek reported the other day that as of last December 43% of U.S. college graduates between 22 and 27 are “stuck in a job that doesn’t require the degree they earned.” That’s a 3% increase from the previous year.
It’s a longstanding problem. While lower education tends to presume that everyone should go to college, it fails to prepare most of its students adequately, and even then many of the jobs being created by the always evolving economy don’t require a college degree. So millions of students graduate from college carrying heavy debt from college loans and end up with uncomplicated work that leaves them poor after they make their loan payments.
That doesn’t mean college is useless for people whose jobs won’t require a college degree. College can introduce them to many life-enhancing things. It just means that college is usually too expensive, benefiting educators more than students.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 