DARK THOUGHTS ON A SUNNY DAY

I sit here, safe and isolated, brooding about the world, about the devastation that the virus is causing, about police murder of black men and women, about the millions of Americans being driven even further into poverty, and since I spent my entire life in the Academy, my thoughts turn to the future of higher education. I am terribly fearful that this virus will accelerate trends that have been long evident and extremely distressing.

The discussions about the prospects for higher education, of which there have been many, tend to focus almost entirely on a handful of elite institutions with large endowments. But the most damaging effects of the virus will be felt in the hundreds, or even thousands, of institutions lower down in the pecking order, private colleges that depend almost entirely upon tuition and state university campuses that, although ostensibly publicly supported, in fact get most of their funds from other sources.

What do I foresee? A large number of small private colleges will simply go under, unable to survive even a semester or two without the tuition flows on which they depend. State university campuses, pressed for funds, will start firing tenured faculty in the humanities and perhaps also in those branches of the social sciences that are unable to raise significant grant funds. The long-standing rush to replace full-time faculty with adjuncts will accelerate and senior professors will either be forced out of their jobs or required to take early retirement. Independent humanities departments will be amalgamated into a single humanities division providing introductory survey courses and little else. Graduate programs will be closed, journals will fold, and the glory days – those four decades or so after World War II – will only be a memory, rather like the days of silent films in Hollywood.

Even the elite universities with a billion-dollar endowments will face problems. Columbia has recently embarked on a multibillion-dollar expansion campaign to build a new campus devoted to the hard sciences. The humanities and social sciences, the fond memories of which prompt alumni to make large donations, depend very heavily on the fully 30% of their student body who come from overseas. In the last 50 years or so, these elite schools have raised their tuition five or 10 times as rapidly as the rate of inflation, relying on the willingness of parents to go deeply into debt in order to shoehorn their young sons and daughters into the stratosphere of the gilded jobs in the American corporate world.

The problems facing the United States are now so great that the future of higher education must rank low on the order of our priorities, but as someone who has spent 70 years as a student and professor in higher education, these prospects saddened me.

On the other hand, there are glimmers of good news. Several extremely left-wing candidates won Democratic primaries in which they defeated establishment members of the House of Representatives. And this morning, on Morning Joe, the thought was first bruited about that perhaps Trump, confronting sinking poll numbers, would choose not to run again. I am, I realize, clutching at straws, but that is the way with drowning men.