Bobby Miller writes for National Review Online about bad news for American higher education.
According to a newly released global index produced by the Times Higher Education (THE), U.S. predominance among the world’s leading research universities continues to falter as Chinese schools are rising. This news comes on the heels of a paper published last spring that found that the U.S. has fallen behind China as the world leader in the output of “high impact” studies.
Higher education is becoming an increasingly important theatre of America’s Cold War 2.0 with Beijing. THE editor Phil Baty said that “the data is very clear: America can no longer take for granted its decadeslong dominance of world higher education and research, and it is China that is leading the challenge. If current trends remained the same, we would see China overtaking the US in the coming years.”
Is it any wonder why this is happening? Once again, corporate America’s ongoing fling with progressivism can help illuminate the nature of the problems plaguing the academy. Much like in the shotgun marriage between big business and wokeism, left-wing activism has frequently debilitated the institutions that sanction it. “Go woke, go broke” isn’t just a right-wing cliché. It’s often very real.
A similar phenomenon has emerged in the high-education sphere. In recent years, the American educational establishment has gotten even crazier and more our of touch with the public. As universities have prioritized equity over instruction and diversity over the pursuit of truth, they’ve lost sight of their original mission: to educate the next generation of citizens and add to the body of human knowledge. In turn, they’ve watched as their Chinese counterparts surpass their research output. This happened because, unlike in the United States, Chinese universities still care about meritocracy.
We’re witnessing the suicide of the West in real-time.