Ben Sasse and the Harvard of the Unwoke

It's fair to say that Ben Sasse is a recovering politician. It's fair to say, too, that he isn't quite a perfect fit as an academic. Perhaps, that's why he's perfectly positioned to help rebuild the institution of higher education. James Taranto's column is as much an exploration of Pres. Sasse's mind as it is a trip though Dr. Sasse's ideas for rebuilding higher education. Saying that I'm a little excited about starting this discussion is like saying I'd be excited if the Twins won the World Series or the Vikings won the Super Bowl. Let's get started.

Taranto's column opens with a brief discussion of the Ivy League testimony back in December. Next, it transitions into President Sasse elaborating on his thoughts for what went wrong with higher education. Taranto wrote "Mr. Sasse, 51, says higher education is having an 'emperor-has-no-clothes moment.' Illiberalism, anti-intellectualism and identity politics were spreading on campus for decades before they congealed recently into open and pervasive antisemitism. For those of us who have long been dismayed by this trend, it has been satisfying to watch institutions like Harvard suffer well-deserved reputational damage."

Who can forget this moment?

The Ivy League presidents merely exposed themselves and their schools. That isn't the same as reforming them and putting them on the right path. To fix these iconic institutions, we'll need a movement led by 'academics' like Ben Sasse and Mitch Daniels, coupled with the 'financial incentives' that Bill Ackman and others like him from the world of Wall Street can bring to the equation. If the money keeps rolling in, Harvard, M.I.T. and UPenn don't have an incentive to change./p>

The Transition

Maybe the answer lies in good old-fashioned competition. To be sure, Ivy League and similarly selective schools have only enough capacity to serve a tiny segment of the higher-ed market, leaving plenty of room for others to capture market share by offering a similar product to a wider customer base. And if parents and prospective students are learning that the merchandise is defective, they ought to be open to sellers that offer something different.

The University of Florida may be ideally positioned to become the Harvard of the Unwoke. It is the flagship public institution in a state whose governor and Legislature have declared war on identity politics. There are no racial preferences in admissions, thanks to a 1999 executive order by the underappreciated then-Gov. Jeb Bush. Mr. Sasse himself is a conservative Republican with a scholarly background. He holds a doctorate in history from Yale, and before entering the Senate he taught at the University of Texas and served as president of Midland University in Fremont, Neb.

If there's anything that academia hates, it's competition. Whether it's K-12 union bosses like Randi Weingarten or university presidents like Claudine Gay, they don't like competition or oversight. They see themselves as experts who shouldn't be questioned. That's why they're called experts.

During the COVID shutdown, the American people got to see what the title of expert meant. Saying that they weren't impressed is understatement. Saying that antisemitism didn't get proper oversight is understatement. Woke culture was left to grow far too long. Now it's time for a correction. This can't continue.

UF also has what Mr. Sasse calls “a healthy radical bias toward practicality” owing to its status as the state’s land-grant university—established under the Morrill Act of 1862 “for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts.” The university has extension offices in all of Florida’s 67 counties, most specializing in agriculture. It has impressive technical facilities, the crown jewel of which is a supercomputer called HiPerGator that was donated by Nvidia and its co-founder Chris Malachowsky.

"There’s a lot to say about the healthy large land-grant institutions being the most important institutions of American higher ed 10 years from now," Mr. Sasse says. As rapidly advancing technology transforms the economy, "students are going to have to get retrained for a new job not just when they come out of high school and go through college, but at age 30, 35, 40, 45, 50—you’re going to have more and more job disruption over the course of your life."

People who are prepared to be flexible will be essential. Those who aren't flexible will still have jobs. They just won't have the high-paying jobs that they'd have if they'd been flexible.

Reforming Higher Education

Yet the liberal arts are also central to Mr. Sasse’s educational vision: "I think the best people to navigate a complex world are people who have a broad worldview and are well and widely read." He wants to institute a "dual core" so that humanities majors would be required to take courses in science, technology, engineering and math and STEM majors in the humanities.

He sees the crisis in higher ed as having arisen in part from an overemphasis on training for employment. In the mid-20th century, as he tells it, "we were going through the late stages of the Industrial Revolution and the very, very early stages of the rise of knowledge-economy jobs." With the need for farm labor rapidly dwindling and factories becoming more efficient, "you have a whole bunch of people who are just not going to be able to have brawn jobs for their whole life." Anticipating that World War II veterans would need training, Congress enacted the GI Bill in 1944. "So you grow higher ed as a sector with an assumption that this is going to be practical first."

But the idea that the purpose of education was, as Mr. Sasse puts it, "to prepare for life and thoughtful citizenship and engagement and caring about the good, the true and the beautiful" also held a good deal of sway. "I think people kind of intuitively understood in the late ’40s and early ’50s that you needed more of both."

It's time to unwoke the universities. It's time to unwoke the faculties, too. After that, it's time to fix our education system from K through post-graduate school.