PROF. JENKINS: Higher education and the crisis of competence

Rob Jenkins is a Higher Education Fellow with Campus Reform and a tenured associate professor of English at Georgia State University - Perimeter College. In a career spanning more than three decades at five different institutions, he has served as a head men’s basketball coach, an athletic director, a department chair, and an academic dean, as well as a faculty member. Jenkins’ opinions are his own and do not represent those of his employer.

As journalist John Leake recently observed, “Our era in the United States is…characterized by a catastrophic loss of competence.”

Leake was referring to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the utter ineptitude that marked the Secret Service’s handling of the incident. But his observation might just as easily apply to other aspects of public life, including higher education.

Indeed, colleges and universities are not merely implicated; they are largely responsible for this crisis of competence.  

For one thing, as my colleague Nicholas Giordano has argued, colleges are failing in their primary responsibility of equipping students with the intellectual skills they need to succeed in their careers and in life.

At many institutions, the curriculum has been watered down to the point where students can graduate without having read Shakespeare or studied European history or completed a math course beyond the level of basic algebra.

Even worse, they’re not being taught fundamental critical thinking skills. Instead, students are being indoctrinated with Marxian “critical theory,” which encourages them to explore their emotions rather than engage their brains.

Hence the performatively emotive but irrational behavior we see today on so many campuses, like the “Queers4Palestine” movement. Can you imagine those students actually visiting Gaza? Or holding down a real job?

College leaders have further exacerbated the crisis by squandering the moral and intellectual capital acquired over more than a century through a series of public embarrassments showcasing their own incompetence. 

A new Gallup poll, as reported by Campus Reform, found that “confidence in higher education is decreasing,” with “only 36% of adults [having] ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in American universities.” That’s down from 57% in 2015.

The poll cites several reasons for this loss of confidence, including the high cost of obtaining a degree, the difficulty of finding a high-paying job upon graduation, and the perception of college campuses as leftist indoctrination camps. But I believe the rot goes much deeper.

Consider what has happened in just the past year. In addition to the cowardly and inept response of many college leaders to the pro-Hamas takeover of their campuses, we learned in October that the president of Harvard (!) is a serial plagiarist.

That revelation spurred further investigation by the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo, et al., who uncovered a plethora of other plagiarists and academic fraudsters at Harvard and similar “elite” institutions.

No wonder young people these days don’t trust colleges. Turns out some of the same people urging them to become lifelong student-debt serfs got their own jobs by cheating.

Finally, our higher education system has contributed to the crisis of competence by promulgating the toxic ideology known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI.  Indeed, higher ed basically invented the idea, and now it has come back to bite us—hard.

Much has been written in the past week, for example, about the Secret Service Director Kimberly A. Cheatle’s public push to “diversify” her agency by hiring more female agents—and how that played out during the assassination attempt, with a woman eight inches shorter than Trump trying to shield his head.

What does that have to do with higher education? Nothing, except the insane notion that women are basically just like men and thus should be able to do literally everything men can do comes straight out of academia.

Ditto the belief that, because women have faced discrimination in the past, the only way to rectify that “injustice” is to give them jobs they aren’t qualified for.

To “women” we could also add racial and sexual minorities. Because that’s what DEI is all about: hiring and promoting people based on membership in “oppressed” groups rather than on merit. The results have been, in Leake’s word, “catastrophic.”

Look no further than the Biden administration itself, which promised the be the most “diverse” in history. How has that worked out? Biden’s policies have failed across the board, leading to record inflation, energy dependence, a border crisis, and multiple foreign quagmires.

That’s not because the administration is diverse; it’s because Bidenites prioritized diversity over merit. And where did they get that idea? From the same people whose own failures have cost them the confidence of the American public.