of universities. Enrollment in colleges and universities in the United States increased threefold between 1910 and 1940.6 Another great expansion began as the postwar baby boomers were reaching college age. The total number of people enrolled in college in the United States grew from 5 million in 1964 to over 7.6 million in 1970, and then to some 20 million today.7 The percentage of college graduates in the labor force soared from under 11 percent in 1970 to over 30 percent in 2010—a proportion that has remained about the same since then.8
The increase in college attendance is even greater globally. Across the world, the number of enrollments in higher education was expected to grow from 214.1 million in 2015 to 250.7 million by 2020, and may rise to 377.4 million by 2030 and 594.1 million by 2040. Some 40 percent of college students will then be in East Asia and the Pacific, while South and West Asia will be home to more than a quarter of all college students.9
Cutting against this democratizing trend in the United States, however, is the soaring cost of a university education: it more than tripled as a proportion of the national median salary between 1963 and 2013.10 This has made the top universities more socially exclusive, even as they have become more important for success. The elite universities have grown richer both in their endowments and in the academic qualifications of the students they admit, relative to less well-positioned institutions.11
Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent.12 Well-to-do families can better afford not only the high tuition costs of elite universities but also the expense of excellent primary and secondary schools. Only 2.2 percent of the nation’s students graduate from nonsectarian private high schools, yet these graduates account for 26 percent of students at Harvard and 28 percent at Princeton.13 High-income parents can also give their children such advantages as museum trips, SAT coaching classes, and unpaid internships. Robert Reich, a lion of the left and a former Harvard professor, characterizes the modern elite universities as being designed mainly “to educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class.”14
Today’s leading universities are filling the role envisioned by Charles Eliot, who became Harvard’s president in 1869: taking the lead in creating an enlightened national ruling class—the Alphas, if you will.15 A National Journal survey of 250 top American public sector decision makers found that 40 percent of them were Ivy League graduates. Only a quarter had earned a graduate degree from a public university.16
Top universities have considerable power over access to the best jobs in the private sector. Nitin Nohria, dean of the Harvard Business School, has shown how corporate leaders in the second half of the twentieth century shifted away from reliance on family networks or religious communities in hiring, toward a preference for an MBA or similar credentials from a business school. This change might have had a democratizing effect, but the intense competition for jobs effectively winnows down the pool to graduates of the most select institutions. Those without an elite degree may find a corporate niche, but often as a contractor or in a low-level position that offers little chance of climbing the ladder through hard work and experience.17
In Britain likewise, the expansion of higher education was once regarded as a means of breaking down class barriers, but university degrees now accentuate these divisions instead. As the emphasis on academic credentials grew, notes David Goodhart, so did the advantage of the graduates from elite schools, who are mostly upper-class. These schools account for 7 percent of all college graduates, but 50 percent of the nation’s print journalists and 70 percent of the senior judiciary.18
There are not only class divisions between elite schools and the rest, but even a growing class divide within universities in the United States. Administrators, deans, and tenured faculty live in what one writer compares to a modern form of manorialism, where luxury and leisure come as of right.19 Yet much of the actual academic work is done by a class that more closely resembles the impoverished parish priests of medieval times. Teaching adjuncts now constitute 70 percent of the U.S. academic workforce—up from 55 percent four decades ago—and one in four of this group lives on some form of public assistance. Some of them actually see their commitment to the academy as akin to a monk’s “vow of poverty.”20
Redefining Knowledge
The historian J. B. Bury, in 1913, described the Middle Ages as a time when “a large field was covered by beliefs which authority claimed to impose as true, and reason was warned off the ground.”21 The relationship between reason and revelation was a challenging question in medieval universities, which all had a liberal arts curriculum in addition to one or more of the advanced professional faculties: law, medicine, and theology. Church authorities wanted to have clergy trained in the defense of orthodox doctrine after heretical movements had arisen, and they were watchful over the teaching of theology in the universities. Theology was the dominant field at Paris, where scholars were licensed to teach by the bishop. The University of Paris became a staunch guardian of orthodoxy, and in the 1300s it held a conclave to affirm the reality of demons that were supposedly infecting society.22
At the same time, medieval scholars regularly debated contrary propositions, and tried to reconcile reason with revelation, or the natural philosophy of Aristotle with Christian doctrine. Church authorities attempted to suppress ideas considered heretical, with condemnations and sometimes imprisonment, though in the long run they were not successful.23 John Wycliff espoused heretical doctrines at the University of Oxford in the fourteenth century, and Jan Hus did likewise at the University of Prague in the early fifteenth century. In other fields, the idea of an expanding body of knowledge gradually began to displace a focus on learning what had already been said by “authorities.”
Over the centuries, the university gradually emerged as a beacon of open inquiry and tolerance for different viewpoints. The liberalizing trend was strongest at first in the Netherlands, which in the seventeenth century had more university students than England and attracted many from other countries. In other parts of Europe, professors could still be fired for deviations from orthodoxy, but all in all the university became a leading center for contending opinions, for experimentation, and for the synthesis of disciplines.24 It was a place for pushing the frontiers of knowledge and for passing down the accumulated wisdom of the past.
Half a century ago, Pitirim Sorokin observed something different appearing in the academic world: “a frantic eagerness to know ‘more and more about less and less.’”25 University professors today seem determined to narrow the field of inquiry, specializing in obscure topics of little interest to anyone outside the university, or even to many inside. The vast majority of academic articles—so crucial for getting tenure—are rarely cited, especially in the social sciences and humanities.26 Academic life has grown sterile and irrelevant to most people, even as an academic degree has become more important than ever for an individual’s prospects.27
Repressing Tolerance
Once seen as champions of free thought and inquiry, universities have been reverting to something more like a medieval model in which heretical ideas come under assault. Today the attack is likely to come from inside, rather than from an external oversight body like the Catholic Church. Even so, the zeal for enforcing ideological orthodoxy is reminiscent of the pattern in states such as the Soviet Union,28 or Nazi Germany, where universities served as a “stronghold” of the regime.29
The current mission in universities, and even in lower schools, is “to promote” a particular set of beliefs rather than “to teach,” notes Austin Williams.30 Instead of celebrating a diversity of opinion, academia seems to have adopted the notion of “repressive tolerance” developed by the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who said that tolerance
