Why The University Is Failing Democracy
The Ivy League colleges, those bastions of privilege and wealth, are called Ivy Leagues because they were the colleges that existed before the Revolutionary War. These institutions, founded to train men to to teach, to preach, to uphold English Common Law, were the first American invention. They, in their search for truth, and light, trained the people who would lead a revolution. Harvard educated John Adams. Columbia educated Alexander Hamilton. You get the idea. These men, with their educations, used the idea that they did not have to be subservient to England, that they could create a country. The idea, that “all men are created equal,” was inspired. That we had institutions that created the ideas that created a country is the point. Yet, here we are, 245 years later, and the University has lost its way. We now see an education at an Ivy League college as an indicator of economic prowess: A Princeton degree is seen as a “golden passport,” a guarantee of a good life. Yet, the ministers that founded Princeton, the Jesuits that founded Georgetown and Holy Cross understood that their institutions were meant for more: to teach their students how to run a democracy, how to forward the ideas that the founders first found.
Why did all of this go so wrong? We can find all sorts of answers, but it seems to me that we again have class warfare, and that the best armor against the economic waves washing over the country is a good education. That may indeed be true, but it is also short sighted, and wrong. America has always done well when we have all seen ourselves as equal: the amazing economy and opportunity that existed in post World War II America, the tremendous expansion of the country after the civil war, when economic opportunity and westward expansion provided huge opportunities. Abraham Lincoln, looking beyond the carnage of the Civil War, pushed through the Homestead Act, but also pushed through the act that made federal lands available to states, to be sold to fund the great land grant college system. President Lincoln saved the Union, but he also installed the mechanism that would allow more people to excel, to own a farm, to prosper, to get a good, publicly funded education. This is the real genius of Lincoln — his belief that education for more people was best.
The modern university has become a nightmare. Political Correctness run amok, group think, the idea that everyone has a say, faculty that are overworked, other faculty that are underpaid, and on the verge of starving. The university has become a microcosm of America: The have, and the have nots. The amount of money that is required to obtain a degree is absurd. Many elite institutions are reluctant to reduce prices, fearing that they will be seen as inferior. Public institutions have sports programs that defy logic: billions of dollars in TV contracts, and athletes that are barely scraping by. The amount of student debt floating around is astounding. We have made education about money, which is why it is so nuts.
My group, “Everybody Votes,” recently had two really distressing encounters with higher education. There are 4 million people turning 18 this year, there are 12 million kids that have turned 18 going back 4 years, there are another 30 million in the pipeline. We made the leap that these people should be registered to vote, and that they should vote. We approached two major public institutions, hoping for classroom access to quickly and efficiently register these thousands of kids. We were denied, for several reasons. Yet, if we don’t register and educate the young, to let them choose the future, and do it at the university, then what are we doing? What is the value of an education if we don’t have engaged, informed citizens? What, exactly, are we doing here?
We need to change all of this, and quickly. We need a national push to register the young. We need them to vote, to be engaged, to choose, deliberately, the future. We need to use the resources of the country, ie. public money, to eliminate their school debt. We need to adjust, to use the power of an idea, first formed in the pre-revolutionary Ivy League colleges, that “all men are created equal,” and to work toward that. We can, and should do that. We have no choice.
Dave Mulryan is Co-Founder of “Everybody Votes.”
He is President of Mulryan/Nash Advertising.
