How the rise of woke educrats is destroying higher education

The nation’s universities, particularly so-called elite ones, are in crisis.Speakers are shouted down, professors are afraid of students, students can’t discuss certain topics, and nobody trusts the gowned “experts.” And that’s before Hamas’ attack on Israel revealed these bastions of progressive enlightenment to be the heart of antisemitism in America.

Why is this happening?Truth be told, what’s different now from when I was in school 25 years ago isn’t so much that faculties have shifted left.They have a bit, and millennial professors are more activist than their boomer elders, but this is not just the latest conservative lament about the liberal takeover of the academy.

Instead, university officials at best placate, and at worst foment, illiberal mobs that stifle education.And that’s largely a story of growing bureaucracies.The statistics on the growth of nonteaching staff are mind-boggling.

In the 25 years ending in 2012, the number of professional university employees who don’t teach grew at about twice the rate of students.In the same period, tuition at public colleges more than tripled.

Those trends have only accelerated, though useful statistics are hard to come by as surveyors change methodologies and the Department of Education fails to collect or disclose uniform data.What all this really means is that students are paying more and more to fund an expanding cohort of well-compensated bureaucrats, without getting anything in return.And this isn’t just a budget issue.

Administrators are more radical than professors, and not steeped in norms of academic freedom, all of which detracts from the educational environment.A 2018 survey found that faculty had a liberal-to-conservative ratio of about 6 to 1, with 13% of our nation’s professors self-identifying on the right.Students are more balanced: 42% of freshmen called themselves centrist, while 36% said they were liberal and 22% conservative.

In contrast, two-thirds of higher-ed adm...