Redefining ‘Academic Excellence’ Will Not Save Colleges

Since March of 2020, “at least 64 public or nonprofit colleges have closed, merged, or announced closures or mergers,” affecting an estimated 46,720 students. More than 500 have shut down in the past decade. 52.9% of students who experience a college closure do not enter another program; those who do transfer will undoubtedly bring some relief to surviving colleges, but rapidly declining enrollment rates have exerted downward pressure on colleges to adjust their admissions standards to reach their mandatory class sizes.

When admissions standards decline, academic standards must soon follow. Professors do not particularly care for doing remedial work but often find they have no choice. In fact, they can spend so much time devoting attention to unprepared students that bright and competent students find themselves poorly served. Grade inflation soon follows, rendering employers and post-graduate schools unable to use GPA as a metric to predict success.

Much has been written about the ideological origins of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, and I’ve written critical things myself, but I think inadequate attention is given to the material conditions that make schools especially vulnerable to such claims. As schools become more desperate for students and their tuition dollars and water down their academic standards, DEI claims offer a useful justification.

My alma mater, Calvin University, recently released information about its incoming class. Originally founded by the Christian Reformed Church to serve the denomination primarily and the world secondarily, Calvin has been facing serious financial and enrollment problems. It changed its name from “college” to “university” as a way of attracting international students, most of whom pay full freight for tuition. Of course, Calvin loves to advertise its number of international students as testimony to its increased diversity, without ever asking how such diversity serves educational purposes or whether these students are sufficiently prepared to do work on an English-speaking campus. According to a recent story in the campus newspaper, “Lauren Jensen, vice president for enrollment strategy … told Chimes reporters that growth in international and BIPOC populations, as well as in students from outside of Michigan, have been ‘bright spots for our long-term planning.’” Ms. Jensen is not obligated to tell us how or why this amounts to bright spots in the classroom, and college administrators who are obligated to do so are notably silent on these issues. The numbers justify themselves, but clearly market forces are profoundly at play. In the meantime, Jensen’s office proudly proclaimed an incoming class of 1,195 students, which includes students in their prison program, non-degree-seeking adults, “as well as students obtaining a certificate through the Life and Career Studies program”—whatever that means. These numbers cover the fact that the college fell short of its FTIAC (First Time in Any College) goal by about 70 students.

We are supposed to take Calvin’s 30.1% of its incoming class being BIPOC students as self-evidently good. In my own experience teaching, a good number of these students, including the international ones, are prepared to do college work in the U.S. Perhaps more are not. Independent of the academics, an overemphasis on using DEI initiatives to boost enrollment creates other difficulties. Albion College’s monomaniacal focus on increasing the number of BIPOC students has resulted in a series of cultural problems—including resentment from white students who fund the initiatives by paying higher rates of tuition—that have actually weakened the college’s financial position. I recall some years ago the president of Hope College standing in front of the faculty and presenting us with the numbers as to how much more it costs to recruit and retain minority students, and telling the faculty he was fully committed to the idea but it would mean pay freezes for all of us. The faculty rejected this deal, thereby demonstrating that DEI commitments proliferate where people have no skin in the game, except for those who run the initiatives and need to maintain the conceit, never defended, that they somehow produce better outcomes.

I would not be misunderstood: The emphasis on inclusion addressed a genuine problem. Students were excluded from participation in college life based on accidents of birth, which worked unjustly to the disadvantage of the students and robbed the colleges of opportunities to develop genuine talent. To the degree that these initiatives undermined privileges that resulted in untalented people going to college, also as a result of accidents of birth, they are to be applauded. Women and members of racial minorities have much greater academic opportunities now than they did 50 years ago, and that’s a good thing.

Those initiatives, however, resulted from a concern with academic opportunity and the upholding of standards. Admissions officers realized they had legacy kids on campus who couldn’t do the work and kids who were being unjustly excluded who could. The maintenance of those standards remained the guiding principle.

Colleges have largely decoupled the interest in diversity and inclusion from academic concerns, however, and this relates to the fundamental battle taking place on campuses: the division between those who see the purpose of the university to be the production and dissemination of knowledge within a disciplinary nexus and tradition of inquiry, and those who see the purpose of the university to be an agent of social change. For the latter group, a college campus should reflect the world not only as it is demographically but as they imagine it will be. This is why free speech debates are so intractable on campuses, for the former group sees free speech as essential to clarifying and justifying our knowing, while the latter group sees free speech as an opportunity to foment the atavistic hate not part of their future world. This is why they’re willing to deplatform speakers they disagree with, because in their utopia those ideas will have long since been purged from the species. The campus is supposed to be a microcosm of what this fully just world will look like.

This drama plays itself out on campuses when debates about academic standards arise. Those who insist that the purpose of the college is to produce and disseminate knowledge realize that the maintenance of high academic standards is essential to the enterprise. Just as professional athletes are expected to train and dedicate themselves to their craft, so are students. Academic work is understood as strenuous and difficult and admits of failure. The microcosmic view more likely stresses self-esteem, empathy, and other caring virtues. While the former insists on getting the best out of a person intellectually, the other wants to get the best out of a person socially. Part of the problem, no doubt, redounds to the fact that it’s probably easier to agree on what the “best” is when it comes to whether someone has been properly educated than whether someone has been properly adjusted.

These dynamics were very much at play on Hope’s campus when I served on the faculty there. The emphasis on “diversity” often left faculty in the helpless position of trying to teach students who were simply not prepared for college-level work. On occasion, when I gave students failing grades, I would get a call from admissions or the Student Life division asking if there was “anything I could do.” My last semester I had about seven students who, discouraged by their inability to do the work, missed more than half the classes. The final week of the semester, I received a call from the dean of Student Life, asking what the student could do to pass the class. “Buy a time machine” was my advice, but short of that there was nothing the student could do. The dean beseeched me, saying that surely there was some kind of arrangement that could be made, to which I replied, “I want to make sure I have this straight: Is it officially the position of your office that classroom instruction is irrelevant to whether a student has demonstrated facility in the subject matter?” To which there was no reply.

Little did I know that much was going on behind the scenes. Just prior to the advent of COVID, the Dean’s Council took it upon itself to “redefine academic excellence.” Hope, like most colleges, had no working definition of academic excellence. Having gone through the rigors of an undergraduate education and graduate school (assuming they received a rigorous education in both), most faculty had a sound intuitive grasp of academic excellence. Resistance or a failure to uphold the concept typically came from very soft disciplines that emphasized relationships more than knowing.

Faculty in those soft disciplines, however, are adept at getting themselves into positions of authority, be it in administration or on faculty committees. Our Dean’s Council was composed of some whip-smart and tough-minded people who successfully filibustered this redefinition, but once they stepped aside the opportunity for the tender-minded ones to take control presented itself, resulting in the announcement of a new definition of academic excellence.

I feel obligated to prepare the reader for what’s about to come. People don’t typically need to theorize about things they’ve trained for and are good at. It’s only after they’ve lost the capacity to uphold or communicate those standards in actual practice that they’ll seek to turn it into a definition. So definitions arise only in the twilight of practice. These definitions (or mission statements) often take on an air of unreality—so abstract and so jargon-laden that one suspects the purpose was to obscure meaning rather than express it.

Behold! I present you with Hope College’s new definition of academic excellence: “Students reflect, examine themselves, examine the world, and connect their new self [sic] to enhance the physical and spiritual lives of their community.” The alert reader will notice right away that the definition says nothing about either academics or excellence, nor is there any expression of a discernible or measurable standard.

Then, too, the statement exacerbates what is already a big enough problem on campuses: an undue attention on the student rather than the subject matter. Young people don’t typically need encouragement toward narcissism, and a statement that raises navel-gazing to a creed is unlikely to direct their attention outward where, in an academic setting, it properly belongs. Neither am I confident that such introspection will produce “new selves,” nor, if it did, whether those new selves would enhance anything other than their own self-regard.

Perhaps the statement’s greatest offense is its complete indifference to grammatical sense or meaning. I’ve read the statement a hundred times and I’m still not sure what it means. Part of the confusion stems from linking the verb connect to another verb. Typically, we use the word connect to link one thing to or with another thing. If the statement had said “to connect their new selves to their communities,” it would have at least made some sense, but in this instance the statement purports to “connect their new selves to enhance.” Nor do we have any idea what these “new selves” are because they’re purely imaginative creatures. The complete absence of any concrete nouns or images reinforces the sense that this is an empty gesture.

The vacuity is confirmed by the final phrase. Note that the statement doesn’t say anything about the intellectual life of the community, only its spiritual and physical life. Furthermore, it doesn’t say anything about the flourishing of the student but only that of the community. Perhaps these “new selves” will, as a result of introspection, be better ones than they are, but perhaps not. Perhaps all this self-reflection and examination will result in more fragile and selfish persons.

So why would a reputable institution engage in such solipsistic nonsense? It’s precisely because such a definition, so vague and so indefinite, provides cover for the fact that it is admitting students, whether for economic or ideological reasons, who aren’t prepared to do college-level work. By trying to be inclusive, it has altered the terms of what is by nature an exclusive enterprise. Most things worth doing provide discriminatory standards distinguishing those who can do them well against those who can’t. No one running a sports team would regard “inclusivity” as its primary virtue, nor would someone running a three-star restaurant. Only once we have redefined what the very purpose of a college education is can the elevation of inclusivity over all other goods be accomplished. In this, once again, colleges make themselves increasingly irrelevant, and thus insolvent.

Correction: Sources indicate that, even though the Hope College statement on academic excellence was announced to the campus community as a fait?accompli, it is actually a draft still under discussion.

By Jeff Polet , professor emeritus of political science at Hope College and director of the Ford Leadership Forum at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation