The public exposure, resignation, and subsequent death of the British fabulist Jason Arday have reignited the longstanding (if not eternal) debate about the purpose of higher education in our society and whether it is fulfilling that purpose. On the one side, conservatives are frustrated because, to them, the Arday case is emblematic: universities today are overwhelmingly leftist; leftists dominate the humanities and liberal arts faculties, and leftists are rewarded for poor or even fraudulent scholarship simply because it reinforces the preexisting beliefs of their contemporaries and superiors.
On the other side, progressives and other leftists insist that the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment is definitionally a left-leaning enterprise, at least in contemporary society. Of course, leftists are overrepresented in academia; leftists seek awareness and understanding, while conservatives are simply less inquisitive and less interested in attaining knowledge, both temperamentally and practically, the latter for fear of learning that what they perceive as fairness and equality is, in reality, prejudice and discrimination.
Ironically, the progressives’ explanation is itself bigoted, in addition to being trite and largely self-serving. At the same time, however, the conservative account is inadequate. It describes the problem within academia today reasonably well but fails to explain why that problem exists. Indeed, it fails even to acknowledge that the problem has an underlying cause and isn’t merely the result of choice or happenstance.
As I have argued previously in these pages, as well as in my book, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, higher education today, especially in the humanities and liberal arts, really is a project that appeals to men and women of the left far more than their right-leaning contemporaries. This isn’t because progressives are more inquisitive and temperamentally thirsty for knowledge, however. It’s because the higher education system, as we have built it, is less about the acquisition and transmission of knowledge and more about the “discovery” of “new” things. That credo works well in the hard sciences and mathematics, where true discovery is not merely possible but indispensable, but in the humanities and social sciences, it’s worse than useless. It encourages both frivolous and fraudulent “research,” which neither produces substantive gains in understanding nor transmits knowledge to students. This isn’t universally the case, of course, but it is frequently so, as the enduring debates over the Jason Ardays of the world demonstrate.
The case of Syracuse University is, I think, instructive here, offering both an explanation of how the preoccupation with knowledge “discovery” is ultimately destructive and a warning to American academia about the price it will likely pay for its frivolity and fraudulence.
As you may or may not have heard, Syracuse University is struggling. The debt and enrollment issues that previously had plagued only smaller and less prestigious institutions are starting to creep into larger, more mainstream, and more esteemed universities:
Syracuse University is facing its first budget deficit in years after falling short of its undergraduate enrollment target for Fall 2026, Chancellor J. Michael Haynie warned faculty and staff in a Jun. 11 email.
The enrollment shortfall directly threatens the university’s financial footing because undergraduate tuition represents the primary source of operating revenue….
Haynie told faculty and staff that the university “will not bring in enough revenue to cover its spending” and described the moment as one “for urgency and purpose, not panic.”
Part of this is, of course, structural. Many schools rely on foreign students to keep their enrollment numbers up, and the Trump administration’s immigration policies have reduced the number of foreign applicants as well as the length of time foreign students are able to stay in the country. Additionally, natural demographic trends are at play here. Fewer 18-year-olds means fewer college freshmen, which, in turn, means fewer applicants and lower enrollment.
Another part of this is Syracuse-specific. As The Wall Street Journal noted over the weekend, Syracuse is “a private school in one of the snowiest cities in the country at a moment when students are gravitating toward public institutions in the Sunbelt.” Additionally, when applications and acceptance decisions fell this past spring, Syracuse administrators panicked and started offering massive financial aid packages to students who had already decided not to attend the school or who were less qualified for aid than others who had accepted earlier offers.
The entire process became a joke among students and competitor schools and a disaster for Syracuse itself. Add in ever-increasing tuition, expensive new dorms, and general administrative bloat, and it becomes clear that not all of the school’s problems were beyond its control. Many of them were self-inflicted.
Perhaps the biggest part of all of this, however, is ideological (for lack of a better term), which has largely gone undiscussed but is especially ironic for Syracuse. In its weekend story, The Wall Street Journal briefly mentions that “Fewer young people are enrolling in college, as the country reconsiders the value of a university education.” It doesn’t go any further, though, and doesn’t explain why the perceived value of a university education is declining.
The distinction between hard-science discovery and social-science discovery is, as I said, endemic to the structure of the contemporary university, but the manifestation of that difference as social-science fatuousness/indoctrination wasn’t necessarily inevitable and, in any case, didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, steady process of infiltration and degradation that featured many players, some of whom believed that their efforts were genuinely directed at educational improvement, and others who manipulated the structure of academia in pursuit of personal and ideological power.
The members of the Frankfurt School, especially its most enduring American representative, Herbert Marcuse, fall into this latter category, while educational “reformers” like John Dewey comprise the former. Dwight Waldo, a public administration theorist and the godfather of the “New Public Administration” movement, also falls into the former category, although one can hardly imagine that his legacy could possibly have been more destructive than it is had he been a power-mad ideologue. Unlike the Cultural Marxists, Waldo didn’t see his mission as one in which he was preparing the ground for the eventual revolution. Rather, like Dewey, he believed he was helping to foster a better, more productive interpretation of his field of expertise but in so doing undermined any pretensions his adherents might have to objectivity or adherence to neutral evidence.
In 1948, Waldo wrote a book called The Administrative State, which challenged the standard interpretation of public administration, attacking the longstanding expectation that administrators should be “value neutral.” In essence, he argued that administrators should be advocates of policies that aligned with their personal beliefs. He more or less told them to let their freak flags fly. Or, as I put it in the book, detailing Waldo’s much-hyped arrival at Syracuse University:
In 1968, Waldo hosted a very famous public administration conference that came to be known as “Minnowbrook” because it was held at the Minnowbrook Conference Center on the campus of Waldo’s then-new employer, the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. The conference was not only an enormous hit among educators, but it also took on legendary status among administrators—that is to say, public bureaucrats. In 2018, on the conference’s fiftieth anniversary, the Maxwell School remembered the man and his contributions, noting that “Waldo’s 1948 book challenged the idea that public administration is value-neutral, performed in a dispassionate, almost mechanical manner. He argued that public servants should become active, informed, politically savvy agents of change” [emphasis added]. George Frederickson, a public administration professor at the University of Kansas and the organizer of “Minnowbrook II” in 1988, told the Maxwell School magazine that Waldo’s contributions included “three lasting themes in PA: social equity; democratic administration; and proactive, advocating, non-neutral public administration.”
Waldo, the Maxwell School, and Minnowbrook changed everything in the administration of public-facing institutions—not the least of which are universities. Waldo, you see, didn’t introduce a new methodology or a new lens through which to view old data. He encouraged administrators to believe that neutrality (or neutral competence, more accurately) is a myth, that execution and outcomes don’t matter nearly as much as process and intent. In short, Waldo, Maxwell, and Minnowbrook taught an entire profession that its transmission function doesn’t matter; only its values and sentiments do. By the nature of the overlap between public and university administration, as well as the intertwined nature of the educational aspect of the Waldo/Maxwell/Minnowbrook enterprise, this dismissal of the transmission function bled over into the broader academic complex, helping to create the Weltanschauung that dominates higher education today.
The most profound irony of all is that this Weltanschauung itself is still nearly universally respected by social science academics, even as its effects on the public at large are destructive. While Syracuse struggles to attract students and to pay its bills, the Maxwell School remains the No. 1-ranked school of public affairs. Even as its ideological offspring destroy the world around it, the Waldo-Minnowbrook legacy is unspoiled among those offspring.
A couple of months ago, I wrote a column here noting that Elon Musk’s abandonment of the Democratic Party he formerly embraced was inevitable. While he focuses on outcomes, they focus on process. They are incompatible. Likewise, academia, as it is currently constituted, is incompatible with the societal need for civics and humanities “education.” In part because of Waldo and Minnowbrook, academia is about process, whereas society demands outcomes. As I noted in that column, “while process values have their place, they can be self-defeating, particularly when they are allowed to serve as a substitute for experience and reality.”
Syracuse University is learning that lesson right now.
American Greatness, Stephen Soukup
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 