As someone who has spent his entire life in academia at one level or another, I always find it odd to start talking about the “new year” in December. For me, as for most in my profession, the new year begins in August.
Yet, as slowly as higher education moves, it’s probably not a bad idea for college administrators, trustees, and lawmakers to begin thinking now about how to address issues that, although certainly relevant today, will likely become even more so in the next academic year and beyond.
They should consider four such issues: developing a sustainable AI policy, continuing to root out DEI, and fixing the accreditation and peer-review systems. Doing so will protect and preserve the liberal arts, the long-term health of which is inextricably bound up with the health of our colleges and universities.
Much has been written about AI and its effects on higher education, and I’m sure much more will be written in the months to come. I’ll be the first to confess that I don’t know exactly how we should react to AI’s not-always-friendly takeover of our institutions. It does seem to me that the three responses currently in vogue—ignore it, embrace it, or reject it altogether—are insufficient. AI is here to stay, and we need a systematic and sustainable set of policies for recognizing that fact and incorporating AI into our pedagogy without losing our identity or abandoning our mission as higher-education institutions.
The long-term health of the liberal arts is inextricably bound up with the health of our colleges and universities.
I’m not the one to fill in the specifics, but I can, I think, provide a broad outline. A sustainable AI policy should first of all be faculty-driven. Right now, our policies seem decidedly top-down, driven by administrators, often in response to pressure from lawmakers and industry leaders. Yet, under the shared-governance model embraced by most institutions, faculty members are the custodians of the curriculum. How much and in what ways we use AI in our classrooms should be determined primarily by them and will no doubt vary widely among disciplines.
Our AI policies must also be focused on student learning and should consistently promote critical thinking—which, in my view, is the single most important skill students can develop in college. To the extent that AI becomes a cognitive shortcut, a way for students to outsource their thinking, it must be eschewed. To the extent that it can enhance critical-thinking skills, it should be embraced—and, again, that is for the faculty, the pedagogy and subject-matter experts, to decide.
A second issue institutions must tackle moving forward is the reality that “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” although currently out of political fashion, is far from dead. Conservatives celebrate when colleges and universities across the country, especially in red states, “eliminate” their DEI programs, without realizing that, in reality, those programs probably aren’t going anywhere. Often, they’re simply renamed something more politically acceptable, with the same people in charge, carrying out the same agenda.
Even worse, the DEI ethos, which can be summed up simply as open discrimination against straight white males, has come to permeate higher education in ways that are not always obvious to outside observers. We can ban diversity statements in hiring, for instance, and tell search committees not to use demographic data in their hiring decisions. But if everyone around that table is of the same mind, they will simply do so anyway.
The only solution to this problem is a long-term one. Decisionmakers must continue to monitor institutions and push back against those that try to carry on as before with merely cosmetic changes to their DEI programs. And they must prioritize hiring faculty, staff, and administrators who embrace the values of fairness, open-mindedness, colorblindness, political neutrality, and heterodoxy that ought to characterize academia.
Of course, one of the main difficulties with completely eradicating the DEI virus is that our accrediting bodies have been thoroughly infected. It’s relatively easy for a state’s leaders to say to its public colleges and universities, “No more DEI,” but it’s much harder for the institutions to comply if their accreditors expect them to have such programs in place. They’re caught between losing state funding for failing to follow directives or losing their accreditation for not adhering to agency “guidelines.”
That’s why the movement to create new accrediting bodies is so important, as we see in states such as Florida and North Carolina. Yet that initiative will succeed, long-term, only if it is embraced by more states—enough so that the old-guard, ideologically captured accreditors ultimately lose their power. For that reason, I would encourage higher-education leaders across the country, particularly in red states (which seem most amenable to the idea) to abandon the old accrediting bodies and join a new one, such as the Commission for Public Higher Education championed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
Finally, I want to talk briefly about something my son Michael and I wrote about at length for the Martin Center late last year: fixing the peer-review system. To recap that article briefly, peer review, like accreditation, has also been ideologically captured. It is now more about gatekeeping and ensuring intellectual orthodoxy than about promoting new ideas. This is antithetical to the true purpose of academic inquiry, resulting in bad, irreplicable research and obstructing true progress. The current peer-review system must be replaced.
The main goal of a liberal-arts education should be to teach students how to think independently.
Our solution, as we outline in that article, is to use the internet to create a true “community of scholars,” where new ideas can be bandied about, discussed, critiqued, and argued in a collegial way. In our essay, Michael and I focused more on the sciences and social sciences than on other liberal-arts disciplines, such as the humanities. However, the principle is the same. The current peer-review system promotes conformity over independent exploration across the board, thus hindering the search for truth and understanding in literature, philosophy, and the fine arts as much as in the sciences.
In order for this idea to work, however, it too must be embraced by academia, starting with individual institutions and maybe a handful of online journals. The journals can create the kind of communities we’re talking about, while higher-education leaders who wish to break the stranglehold of the old, corrupt system can encourage faculty to join them. Leaders must also consider how to evaluate faculty contributions to these communities for the purposes of awarding promotion and tenure. Only when institutions create this sort of permission structure will scholars truly feel free to question orthodoxy and explore new ideas.
What does all of this have to do with the liberal arts, the celebration and preservation of which is the theme of this issue? The short answer is, “everything.” The main goals of a broad-based liberal-arts education should be to teach students how to think critically and independently; to be unbiased, dispassionate, objective, and open-minded; and to relentlessly pursue truth regardless of discipline or where that search may lead. The excessive and inappropriate use of AI, the DEI agenda backed by accrediting guidelines, and the current peer-review system’s emphasis on gatekeeping are all antithetical to those goals.
There’s no doubt that higher education will face many challenges in the coming years, as we continue reinventing ourselves to best serve our students and all of humanity. These are just a few of those challenges. But if leaders can begin to get a handle on the ones I’ve listed, that will go a long way toward ensuring we remain relevant and continue making positive contributions to society well into the future.
Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University-Perimeter College. The views expressed here are his own.