Exposing the Moral Flaws in Our Higher Education System

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | July 5, 2019 | George Leef

[reaganaut1]

Many if not most professors and higher education leaders enjoy pontificating about their high-minded ideals in contrast with the grubby, self-interested world outside of academia. What few people have done is to turn the lens around and ask about the morals of those professors and leaders. Are they in fact paragons of virtue, or could it be that their own actions are suffused not with concern for students or society, but their own welfare?

In their recent book Cracks in the Ivory Tower, authors Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness explore those questions and find higher education to be “a moral mess.”

They write,

From a business ethics standpoint, the average university makes Enron look pretty good. Universities’ problems are deep and fundamental: Most academic marketing is semi-fraudulent, grading is largely nonsense, students don’t study or learn much, students cheat frequently, liberal arts education fails because it presumes a false theory of learning, professors and administrators waste students’ money and time in order to line their own pockets, everyone engages in self-righteous moral grandstanding to disguise their selfish cronyism, and so on.

That is a strong indictment, but at every step, Brennan and Magness support their arguments. They don’t smear anyone, but merely point out that the system of incentives we have created in higher education inevitably leads to self-interested actions. They have nothing against self-interested action, but can’t stomach the way college leaders hide their pursuits behind a smokescreen of rhetoric about the social good.

The tools that the authors use throughout are insights into human behavior that economists (particularly those working in public choice theory) have developed:

[Lurkinanloomin]

Found your candidate for 2020 yet, NeverTrumper?

[knarf]

[MuttTheHoople]

I wasn't influenced by any of my professors in college. Generally, if they went off pontificating on something, the general question from the students would be, "Is that gonna be on the test?"

BTW, I graduated with a Petroleum Engineering degree. However, I did take plenty of Humanities courses, and that was the gist of the questions we asked.

[Truthoverpower]

All this liberal Marxist crap is just the social sciences

if you go to university get a real degree in engineering, physics - computers - something real. Where you can get a job with the skill

Then get PAID to go to graduate school Be a TA or RA

[Sergio]

bkmk

[faturism]

I will not be schooled on morality by the least moral among us.