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The Daily Tar Heel

Column: The Trump administration devalues the legacy of university education

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If you asked any Harvard student in 1636 what their post-grad plans were, chances are, you’d get the same answer: become a member of the clergy. Today? Odds are they’d tell you all about an exciting opportunity to give back to their community through investment banking with Goldman Sachs

The most coveted jobs have changed in the past couple centuries, but the fundamental function of higher education remains consistent. College operates as a private good that students purchase to advance their social status. Through priesthood or private equity, a degree has always promised a return on investment, both social and financial.

However, the Trump administration cutting billions of dollars in research funding and deporting law-abiding international students strips universities of many of the benefits of a college education that have been promoted for centuries, seeking to hollow universities into nothing more than the most surface-level return on investment.

The original role of an American university was to educate future Puritan ministers, drawing directly from the curricula of monastic traditions (from which universities evolved in the first place). Since the early days, American higher education has secularized away from the monastic job market. Grant acts in the second half of the 19th century allocated federal land to states to fund institutions focused on agricultural, mechanical and scientific education. Following this act, the number of higher education institutions increased from 23 in 1800 to 821 by turn of the century. Universities began producing not just ministers, but engineers, doctors, teachers and eventually bankers, consultants and tech entrepreneurs.

However, this exponential enrollment growth has also increased tuition and propelled a paradigm shift reframing higher education as an industry. The liberal arts curriculum that aims to create societally engaged, life-long learners in addition to upwardly mobile professionals is weakening; the Trump administration’s attacks on academia have only exacerbated this trend. Its misinformed and outwardly hostile academic policies undermine the universities' role as a public good, robbing the centuries-old liberal arts ethos of broader civic or social value.

The administration’s war on higher education is all-encompassing. Executive orders slashing the departments of Education, Justice, Defense, Energy and Health and Human Services, coupled with direct cuts to federal funding, have jeopardized the cutting-edge research being conducted in universities across the country. Even STEM disciplines traditionally thought “safe” from political attacks are under firepunitive cuts to Harvard’s federal funding following the university’s refusal to comply with the Trump administration’s policies have ground cancer research to a halt. Across the country, public and private universities are being subjected to the rhetoric of constant growth by short-sighted people who worship shareholder value above all else.

Universities have long been subjected to accusations of indoctrination, elitism and complacency — and not without basis, considering higher education began as a means for elite Puritans to secure social capital — but the president’s crusade against modern universities’ wasteful, “woke” curriculum is flimsy and incoherent. Cutting funding to humanities research with the word “woman” in them is not only ridiculous posturing, but an active threat to Americans’ public health and longevity. 

Across the country, public and private universities are being subjected to the rhetoric of short-sighted people who resent educational initiatives that go against their views. The immediate accounting profit of university activity has become the only valid justification for its existence. The Trump administration’s mission to convert universities into soulless degree mills robs America of not only the immediately tangible benefits from research and intellectual scholarship, but the broader social benefits that an educated populace yields.

A degree is so much more than an investment in a career path — it’s an investment in society as a whole. Cultivating a citizenry with broad interdisciplinary knowledge, critical thinking, communication capacity and problem-solving skills results in a more productive and engaged society. What’s the point of earning a degree in mechanical engineering if you lack the social responsibility to understand where to apply your expertise?

Higher education is far from perfect, but stripping its foundations of holistic learning and social responsibility only leaves America worse off. 

@dthopinion | opinion@dailytarheel.com

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