This morning I read the 
Report of the Senate Task Force on Higher Education. It's a good piece of analysis and work. It gets a lot of stuff right, although it misses in two key places I think they could have emphasized better. First, refuting the idea that education is solely about an individual improving their own long-term earning potential. Education needs to be about society creating an environment that empowers people to contribute to the level of their own ability. It is society as a whole that loses out when people are unable to rise to their full potential -- we lose out both in terms of their contributions and in lost efficiency when others have to compensate. Ideally, the system would allow people to rise frictionlessly to their ideal educational attainment. In fact, the system has a lot of friction and the guidelines provided here would reduce the friction incrementally by a bit, but we need a committment to the ideal that education benefits society as a whole, not solely through increasing the earning potential of employees or through making the state more attractive to employers. Education benefits society by enabling people to make more substantial contributions at every level of human engagement. Second, I believe the report fell short of indicating how dire the situation has become in public higher education. This was probably to avoid discouraging students from attending. The report has most of the facts, but doesn't connect the dots to show how precarious the situation has become. They talk about what is needed to maintain a research institution, and how those factors have been lacking for 20 years, but they don't come out and tell you what that means in concrete terms. The life sciences are a good example -- life sciences being transformed by genomics, but that kind of work just isn't being done here. We've missed that whole revolution. The report is a strong statement, but falls short of laying the full argument before the people.
Cal Thomas wrote recently that the Liberal bias in colleges bleeds into classroom. He pretends shock that among college professors
84 percent of those surveyed are strongly or somewhat in favor of abortion rights, 67 percent think homosexuality is acceptable, 88 percent want more environmental protection "even if it raises prices or costs jobs" and 65 percent want the government to ensure full employment, which puts the professors to the left of the Democratic Party.
He claims this is because colleges discriminate against conservatives and suggests that colleges should use principles of affirmative action to hire conservative faculty. This is a ludicrous suggestion to anyone who has actually served on a faculty search committee before. In the sciences, the claim that potential faculty are discriminated against based on their political leanings is simply false. In the sciences, the hiring committees are focused on the potential of a new scientist to successful fund and publish their research. This covers a lot of territory, but the candidates views on abortion or politics just don't play into it much. And yet, the vast majority of the faculty, even among the scientists, are overwhelmingly liberal. In fact, education in general seems to be correlated with liberal social values. Could this be because, as people become educated, they are less likely to approach social issues with superstition and dogma, and instead use understanding and compassion? No, I didn't think so.
StevenBrewer