The Federal Aviation Administration and the Transportation Security Administration are supposed to regulate aviation not only to keep planes safe but also to keep those of us currently grounded safe from planes. When we think about higher education regulation, we usually think about quality regulation of educational credentials. Accreditation is used to make sure that institutions actually teach something and aren’t diploma mill scams.
Regulation through accreditation is supposed to protect the public and protect students. Accreditation is a quality stamp that is supposed to protect students by ensuring they are offered genuine learning and skills in return for their time and tuition money. Accreditation is also supposed to make sure that the would-be teachers, engineers, physicians, oral hygienists, and lawyers that our institutions turn out actually know what they are doing. Since the 1970s there has also sprung up a whole sphere of civil rights and student rights regulations on how institutions must treat students respectfully and equally and ensure their safety.
The FAA regulates the airplanes produced by Boeing, but a whole slew of other agencies regulate Boeing’s production of what we political economists call “potentially harmful externalities”: effects of Boeing’s production and sale of airplanes that go beyond the company and its direct customers. The EPA makes sure that Boeing doesn’t damage the environment, and OSHA that it doesn’t cripple its workers.
Universities also produce externalities, and these go beyond the possibility of poorly prepared students who will botch our defibrillator implantation or our defense to the federal charge of selling raisins without a license.
Some of those externalities are the result not of a poor-quality product but of a reliable one. American university researchers collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on creating viruses with “enhanced pandemic potential.” Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Laboratories built nuclear weapons for years under the management of the University of California. A long list of violent revolutionary terrorist groups, ranging from Peru’s Sendero Luminoso to America’s own Weathermen, were organized by students or students and faculty and came out of the “revolutionary pedagogy” of radical faculty members.
That last bit raises the specter of McCarthyism, the notion that the public or politicians should somehow respond to the fact that universities host or even give birth to ideologies and factions, some violent, that are hostile to our way of life, our freedoms, and our religious beliefs. But both the failures of actually existing McCarthyism and our experiences in the last four decades have shown that the real danger is not a campus that harbors supposedly subversive thinkers but a campus where criticisms of “settler colonial” America, of market economics, and of a free society go unanswered because the onetime campus radicals are now policing themselves and all new hires for ideological conformity.
What, as that favorite of dorm room posters, Vladimir Ilych Lenin asked, is to be done?
We should be wary of notions that universities are exempt from laws about biohazards or racial discrimination because they are supposed to be privileged sites of academic freedom, First Amendment institutions whose core research and teaching functions will be impinged upon. If you are doing gain-of-function research on potentially deadly viruses or developing supposedly secret new nuclear devices or encryption schemes, you better believe that your freedom of research should be impinged upon where that is beneficial to society and the world at large. Every citizen has the right to be informed about the activities and inactions of government officials, but at least in federal law there is no privilege of licensed journalists, no newsman’s shield law that allows some supposedly credentialed reporters to conceal the names of those who leaked to them illegally that is denied to bloggers in pajamas. Similarly, what universities do, even when they are doing their best, does not need any protection or privilege that is not offered to anyone who tries in good faith “to do their own research.”
Moreover, many universities are failing in their supposedly core mission of training citizens to deliberate on controversial issues despite differences of interests or values. This probably requires state- or federally-mandated programs to promote pro-American and pro-freedom “diversity” on campuses where teaching and learning appear ideologically straitjacketed. But it also requires us to think about ways in which public deliberation can be taught and encouraged beyond the necessary constraints of a campus setting.
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