What Universities Owe Democracy by Ronald Daniels is published

Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, United States. ISBN 9781421442693.

Ronald J Daniels makes four recommendations he believes will put American universities and colleges in fighting trim to graduate students who understand and care about democratic processes – and will reconfigure universities and colleges so they are models of a functioning liberal civil society.

Each recommendation is supported with a wealth of data and, just as importantly, the author of What Universities Owe Democracy shows that each recommendation grows out of the most progressive strains in American history, which means they run counter to some of the most powerful forces buffeting America today.

Legacy admissions

Take the first recommendation: the ending of legacy admissions and the restoration of generous federal financial aid.

The “almost exclusively American custom” of giving preferential treatment to children of graduates (and wealthy donors) is at the heart of a request that the Canadian born and educated Daniels, who in 2009 became president of the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, Maryland, received when he was dean of the law faculty at the University of Toronto.

A wealthy and well-known alumnus called to ask Daniels to admit the man’s son who had not made it into Canada’s most prestigious law school on his own merits. Daniels told him he did not have the power to do so. The deep-pocketed, irate parent responded: “If you really want to stand shoulder to shoulder with the great Ivy League schools in the United States, you better start acting like one.”

Ended by Oxbridge more than three generations ago, legacy admissions still exist at 70 of America’s 100 top-rated institutions of higher learning. One study estimates they add the equivalent of 160 (or 10%) of the score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to a students’ application. The SAT is used by thousands of colleges and universities in lieu of their own admissions test.

Not surprisingly, the cadres that enter a Harvard or a Yale under a banner that could read “My Father Went Here”, are wealthier and whiter than those who enter these schools via the equivalent of the servants’ door.

In 2009, when Daniels arrived at JHU, 12.5% of the freshmen class were legacy admissions while 9% were eligible for Pell Grants (a US federal government grant available for the poorest students). In 2020, six years after ending the legacy admissions process, 4.2% of students are children of graduates, while 20.5% are Pell eligible.

Pell Grants, however, are not enough. In the 1970s, they covered approximately 70% of the cost of attending a college or university. Today, 50 years after former US president Ronald Reagan’s cuts to government spending and others inspired by him, Pell Grants cover 25% of a student’s costs. Similar cuts by state governments have only exacerbated a problem that, Daniels argues, can only be solved by a massive recommitment to education by the government in Washington.

Democracy requirement

Daniels’ second recommendation, instituting a “democracy requirement for graduation”, is necessitated by the fact that the majority of American college and university students know little about the nation’s governance or the philosophical foundation for free speech, for example.

In this context, oddly, Daniels quotes Plato who describes education as “inspir[ing] the recipient with passionate and ardent desire to become the perfect citizen, knowing both how to wield and how to submit to righteous rule”. Odd, because, as Daniels knows, Plato’s image of the “perfect citizen” rules out more than 50% of the population – women – even as his notion of “submit[ting] to righteous rule”, as made clear in The Republic, has more than a whiff of autocracy.

Still, Daniels’ argument here is solid. Tellingly, he notes that the United States (the nation in which I was born and where every day at school I recited the ‘Pledge of Allegiance’, with phrases such as “and to the Republic for which it [the flag] stands” and “with liberty and justice for all”) does not participate in the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study conducted every few years.

With apologies to management consultants, “you can’t improve what you don’t bother measuring”.

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