Welcome, Instapundit readers! \u00a0And welcome, Transterrestials!<\/p>\n

Over the last few years, talk of a Higher Education Bubble<\/a> has grown. \u00a0As the costs\u00a0have skyrocketed and returns have dropped, both students and employers are increasingly questioning the value of what’s being taught.<\/p>\n

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Higher ed, as currently packaged, marketed, and sold, is increasingly being valued on the basis of past performance rather than underlying value, which is pretty much the investment definition of a bubble.<\/p>\n

While some established colleges and universities are moving towards online offerings, Stuart Butler argues convincingly in the current National Affairs<\/a>\u00a0that the more likely development is new schools using new technology and models to provide a different, more relevant mix of skills:<\/p>\n

In truth, a takeover scenario is less likely than an end run \u2014 in which new technological developments, and new educational institutions with very different business models, circumvent higher education’s established players. Today, competitors are exploring markets that are ill-served by the traditional model, such as working Americans who want to enhance their skills and lower-income potential students looking for much cheaper degrees. Meanwhile, rapid change in information technology is giving creative new entrants a growing technological edge \u2014 an essential precondition for transformative change.<\/p>\n

The most obvious technological threat to the comfortable world of higher education is online education. Online learning changes the entire relationship between student and teacher; it enables information to be transferred, and student performance to be monitored, at a fraction of conventional costs. Often called “distance learning,” online education has the potential to completely upend today’s established universities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Following the election, PJ Media made the case that restoring American values ultimately rests on cultural, rather than political solutions. \u00a0This coming shakeup presents the perfect opportunity for conservatives to retake the liberal arts classroom, without the overhead of faculty battles, “going undercover,” or otherwise remaking the culture of a hostile academy. \u00a0The model is much the same as when the right, beginning with Heritage, created a parallel system of think tanks to get conservative or free-market thought into the hands of policy-makers. \u00a0Cultural conservatives and classical liberals can give themselves back the voice they’ve lost in undergraduate education, while beginning to undo the massive damage the Academic Left has done to students and the culture as a whole.<\/p>\n

Jacques Barzun, who passed away recently, published a collection of essays in the late 80s,\u00a0The Culture We Deserve. \u00a0<\/em>He discusses the baleful effects of handing over our culture to college liberal arts departments. \u00a0The proper repository of culture is the people, and it is the proper job of education to transmit that culture from generation to generation. \u00a0Instead, universities, beginning in the late 1800s, began to teach scholarship instead. \u00a0Rather than experiencing<\/em> the cultural canon, students were taught to analyze it in increasingly narrow and politicized terms. \u00a0The purpose of “Hamlet” isn’t to serve as a template for the study of patriarchal roles in Tudor England, it’s to teach about the failure of thought as a substitute for action.<\/p>\n

The liberal arts ought all to be pulling in the same direction to teach a common cultural literacy, understanding of each enhancing appreciation for the others. \u00a0\u00a0Barzun understands that historical knowledge is necessary to know the mindset of the artist. \u00a0But chasing after the respectability of science, college history departments have increasingly forsaken broad historical themes for narrow, isolated problems, what he terms, “retrospective sociology.” \u00a0Victor Davis Hanson observed<\/a>\u00a0the same thing, in the difference between how his Fresno State students read Thucydides, and how it was taught at Stanford:<\/p>\n

Scholars and graduate students talk grandly of Thucydides ”the realist” whose bleak assessment of human nature was a valuable antithesis to romanticism. But this remote, literary language takes us far from the actual Thucydides, a hard-eyed pragmatist whose judgments derive from first-hand experience. As a working mother at Fresno put it, ”Thucydides might like Carter better, but he’d want Reagan dealing with the Russians.” Another student, an immigrant, agreed: ”Be trusting with someone else’s life — not mine.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Liberal arts departments also began to teach more and more contemporary art and literature. \u00a0So it’s no wonder that the culture has stagnated as it is deprived of the chance to be experienced on its own terms before being subjected to analysis. \u00a0New art and literature has evolved to please critics and provide scholars layers of meaning, rather than to please audiences and ruminate on life. \u00a0This line of thinking would lead Barzun to write\u00a0From Dawn to Decadence<\/em>, arguing that western culture had reached an impasse.<\/p>\n

Though Barzun didn’t say so, this situation is tailor-made for the Left. \u00a0With contemporary culture stagnating, and cultural literacy reduced to analysis, leftist political philosophy fills the vacuum. \u00a0Allan Bloom decried this development in\u00a0The Closing of the American Mind. \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0It’s also true that the success of companies such as The Teaching Company show that working Americans know that they’ve missed out, and thirst for something to fill that gap. \u00a0If for themselves, why not for their kids?<\/p>\n

The opportunity for conservatives, with the creation of new institutions, is clear. \u00a0Our view of how the liberal arts ought to work is the traditional view – as a set of studies to enhance and understand the human condition. \u00a0We are aided by the fact that the reasoning and writing skills necessary for their mastery are in demand in the world.<\/p>\n

While the shakeup provides an opportunity for conservatives, we shouldn’t overestimate the window available. \u00a0Many of the most successful of the big-money, high-wealth donors to the Democrats have been Internet entrepreneurs. \u00a0Many of those fortunes have been made in social media, and education, at its best, is an intensely social activity. \u00a0First movers will be able help shape both expectations and will have a leg up on defining credentialing and certification standards.<\/p>\n

Barzun closed\u00a0From Dawn to Decadence<\/em>\u00a0with the hope that we could replace or reinvigorate the university, and revive our cultural creativity. \u00a0With the right effort, conservatives could use the coming shakeup of higher education to do both.
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