Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And we are so excited today to be joined by our friend Will Bunch. Will is the national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. And honestly, I subscribe to the Philadelphia Inquirer just to read his columns. And I am not exaggerating. So we’re thrilled to have you here, Will.

Will Bunch:

Well, as a longtime listener of this show, I can’t tell you what a thrill it is to be actually on it. So thank you.

Joanne Freeman:

I am happy that you are here too, Will. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Will has written a number of really incisive books about American politics and culture. One that is particularly relevant to the discussion that we’re going to be having today, his most recent book is titled After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics―and How to Fix It.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So not much? It doesn’t cover very much at all.

Joanne Freeman:

No. Not at all.

Will Bunch:

I mean, the podcast is half over now that you’ve read the title, right?

Joanne Freeman:

I love those kinds of titles though. That’s a very 18th century kind of title.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But it does enable us to go ahead and take a look at the present, the past, and perhaps even the future of higher education in America in today’s episode of Now & Then.

Joanne Freeman:

Our conversation today is sparked by President Biden’s recent student loan forgiveness plan. It’s worth noting that we did cover the history of American loans when the plan was first announced back on September 6th in our episode titled Forgiving and Unforgiving Debts. What we’re interested to talk about is how are we thinking about college education these days? What does it mean? What do we think about when we think about who should or shouldn’t be going to college? Or more relevant perhaps, who is or isn’t? What can we tell from college education really more broadly speaking about how Americans and America envisions itself as a nation?

Heather Cox Richardson:

So I want to start with something that has bothered me well quite a bit and that you answer very well in your book. And that is, how the heck did we get to a point in America where we have this extraordinary crisis in paying for college and who pays for college after World War II? And even when we were kids, to some degree, college was affordable. So for a lot of us, I think this crisis came out of nowhere. I promise you that all the extra cost of college has not gone to the college professors.

Will Bunch:

I worked a couple semesters as an adjunct professor so I can talk to even the lower rungs at the level, and that level is definitely not getting paid. So no, you’re absolutely right. There’s basically two, I think, big questions that loom over college. College has always been a big part of American history in how we see ourselves. And I think it really went to the next level though after World War II as college access really expanded. But as more and more people started going to college, we had two questions, which is what is college for? Why are we doing this? Is it just to learn a job skill or is it to develop a philosophy of life, become a better critical thinker, become a better citizen? That’s a fundamental question.

But the other question then is as we debate that, whose responsibility is it to pay for it? Which is where the loan situation comes in, because I’m a baby boomer myself, went to college in the ’70s. College was starting to get a little bit more expensive, but it was still affordable. I would hear the stories from my friends’ older siblings about college in the ’60s when it was $200 a semester. Or if you went to the University of California in the 1960s, it was tuition free. There were a few fees and whatnot, but it was basically free. You could make enough in a summer job to pay for those fees and have enough to buy your books. These state university systems got a lot of taxpayer support in that era.

So in doing so, you’re basically saying on one level we’re not quite fully, not in the sense of say Medicare or some other government programs, but we were largely looking at college as a public good. Society was benefiting from this economically. We were benefiting from developing smarter citizens. Even in the Cold War, we thought we were developing people who’d be better soldiers because they were more educated. So we saw this civic virtue in paying for education.

And then came the 1960s. And it seems like I know from listening to many of your episodes, so often it’s then came the 1960s, right? And decisions were made by higher ups that essentially privatized college. And I didn’t always know what privatize meant. To me the term always meant hiring a janitorial firm and firing all the janitors at city hall. But in the case of college, when you say it’s privatized, what you’re really saying is the burden is placed on the students and their families, that it’s your responsibility now to pay for most of this and the philosophy that you should be paying for this because you’re getting this incredible benefit of an education and looking at the personal benefit rather than the societal benefit.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But you actually identify a couple of specific laws and loan programs that shift the balance from state funded or government funded education to individuals that make it easier to borrow. And I just thought that was fascinating because I was not aware of how Congress had really gotten behind the idea of privatization of the cost of education.

Will Bunch:

In the ’80s or ’90s, you had several things going all at once. I mean, tuition was starting to skyrocket for a lot of complicated reasons, and we can talk about some of them. But the government was not willing to increase Pell Grants which don’t have to be paid back. So, increasingly the gap had to be made out with these loans. And politicians being politicians, what they did was, “Well, we’ll just make it easier for people to get more loans with less restrictions and they’ll be happy and they won’t bother us not worrying about what was going to happen 10 or 20 years down the road when people were struggling to pay these loans back.”

One of the programs they approved in the ’80s or ’90s, and I’m sure some listeners are very familiar with this program called the Parent PLUS Program, which gave new opportunities for parents to borrow money to pay for their kids’ education. Really virtually no credit check, virtually no limits on the amounts that parents could borrow. Their kid is dying to go to NYU or George Washington or some school with a big price tag that that’s going to be the thing that’s going to make them happy and make their life. These parents buy into that and take out these enormous loans. And you read these horror stories the New York Times has written about some of these parents who owe 200,000, $500,000.

In my book I profile this recent graduate of Temple University. Not a super elite school, it’s a very good school, but it’s a state supported university. He owes 30,000, but his mom owed another $150,000 through this Parent PLUS Program.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Wow.

Will Bunch:

Likewise with student loans, a lot of things were done to make it easier for people to borrow more without much accountability for the program.

Joanne Freeman:

We can think about what you’re saying, Will, and think about the financial logic of it and the sort of big businesses logic of it. But in effect, by privatizing education in that way and making it rest on colleges almost as businesses and students and families, in some sense education gets removed from the community, right? It becomes a private enterprise and it’s no longer really immersed as it might be seen in an age before you had these kinds of skyrocketing prices. It gets isolated a bit and made more elitist.

Will Bunch:

No, you’re absolutely right, Joanne. I mean this has had a huge impact on the way that people get educated. And if you go back to the ’50s and the ’60s, which in the book I kind of call the golden era of college because tuition was so low and so much was being done to encourage access, you had an explosion in people studying the humanities and studying social sciences. English literature or philosophy became a hugely popular major, so did sociology. The US job market in the 1960s was so good that people weren’t terrified that they wouldn’t be able to get a job because they were a philosophy major. So that was important.

There was just a whole different, dare I use this word, zeitgeist, around what college was all about. UCLA, they did a huge national survey every year of entering college freshmen and their attitudes. The most fascinating finding was that if you go to 1969, which is the perfect point, at that time you found that more than 70% of freshmen said the purpose of going to college was to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. As quickly as the 1980s, you had a majority saying, “No, the purpose is to develop a marketable job skill.” These things that we’re talking about start running together, right? Because part of it was the decline in the US economy that started in the ’70s into the ’80s and people started focusing more on skills, but also this privatization of college. As people took more and more loans, there’s a lot of calculation that goes into, “What do I need to do to come out of this with a job that’s going to pay me enough that I can pay these loans back?” And it’s probably not studying philosophy, right?

Joanne Freeman:

You don’t want to upset the philosophy folks out in the audience.

Will Bunch:

Yeah. Yeah, I don’t.

Joanne Freeman:

We are talking about this moment in which college is kind of a big business and it’s about major loans and it’s elite in some ways, and it’s purpose is being questioned. But certainly in any number of ways, what you’re describing is very much in the same as you put it, the zeitgeist, right? It makes perfect sense that that’s what it seems like in this moment.

If you look at college education around the time of the American Revolution, the 1770s, the 1780s, shortly thereafter, again, in the same way that what we’re looking at now reflects where we are now. You see that there were a handful of colleges, universities in the colonies and then in the early United States, and a lot of them were the colleges that now we consider to be the Ivy League schools. They were very elite. They had small numbers of elite young men matriculating at any given time. The assumption was that the people going to these schools were going to go on to become public men and/or merchants, but there was a certain kind of man of a certain social class with a certain kind of future ahead of him who went into college. And that was so reflective of that moment in time.

If you think about it, there’s something almost a little aristocratic about the way that people thought about education at that time, because when people went to college, when you look at the matriculation list of students attending a college at a given time, it’s in rank order, social rank order based on the parents of the student involved.

So for example, if you look at the list of who is attending Kings College, now Columbia University, in 1774, you see a list of about 18 names. And Alexander Hamilton, the guy from the Caribbean, illegitimate, has no family.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Who?

Joanne Freeman:

Don’t even take me there, Heather. But he’s at the bottom, right? It makes perfect sense.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, wow.

Joanne Freeman:

This is not an alphabetical list. It’s, “Oh, there are all of these people. Oh, and then there’s this guy.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

How did he get there to begin with?

Joanne Freeman:

He had actually people put together a charitable fund to send him to the North American colony so he could get an education and he had sponsors writing on his behalf, but he was very much on the bottom of that class.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Can I ask you a question about that though? When they let those young men, because of course there’s no women into those schools, do they have to have any educational ability at all? Is it just like a fraternity? Is it just like your… I can’t think of a single last name from the.. You’re George Wigglesworth. What if George Wigglesworth is spending all of his time playing, I don’t know, dice and drinking and carousing? Can he still go to Harvard or does he have to meet some minimum?

Joanne Freeman:

If his parents are people of high rank in society in some way and if, as one would’ve assumed for most young elite men, they have a basic education, that they can read and they can write and they’ve read a lot of the classics as they would have in some kind of education leading to college, then yeah, he could. I mean, Hamilton’s a great example. He didn’t have any real formal education before he went to Kings College so he was sent to a kind of grammar school for a year to catch up. It’s not like people were generally told that, “You’re not good enough to go here.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

So to go back to Will’s point, what were they learning?

Joanne Freeman:

I mean, they were certainly breathing classical works, ancient Greek and ancient Roman works. Hamilton, college for him it’s going to be a kind of make or break moment. He’s going to find some way to make himself something from there or he’s going to be left with nothing. So he undergoes a kind of plan, He’s a planning kind of guy. But he makes a plan to take a certain number of different kinds of courses so that he’ll have several options that he can pick from to be a gentleman when he leaves school. So he takes anatomy courses in case he wants to go on and become a doctor. He takes-

Heather Cox Richardson:

I was going to say, why does the gentleman need anatomy courses?

Joanne Freeman:

Doctor. Doctor. He joins a debating society and he studies rhetoric in case he’s going to go on and become a lawyer or perhaps going to the clergy in some way. He joins another club that is joined by basically people who want to go on in one way or another to study the law, and he’s borrowing legal techs. So he has a list of the four or five things a gentleman can do in that time period, and he signs up for courses that he thinks are going to train him for those things. Basically, you were getting a sort of good elite young man’s education, reading the right things and learning to present yourself and to argue and do the things that a public man in one way or another would be doing down the road.

Will Bunch:

It is fascinating that elitism and the importance of what this is going to mean, what this means now and what it will mean for your social rank, I mean, these are some of the complaints about college today, right? It’s kind of what comes around, goes around. To me it’s like these trends have been there for 300 years. And that period of the after World War II, the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s was kind of the anomaly where this opening up and democratization of college was the exception, not the rule. And so maybe there was always going to be this inertia to bend it back towards elitism, which is absolutely what has happened.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, how does that break down, Joanne? I don’t think they still let us in based on where your social rank is.

Joanne Freeman:

It begins to break down as, in one way or another, American society becomes more democratized. You can see that in all kinds of levels of society. You can see that, for example, in the curriculum of schools at the time. Suddenly they’re not teaching Latin anymore. “Why do you need Latin? If you’re a politician, you’re not going to get up in front of the public and speak Latin because the public doesn’t know it, and that’s not popular and you’re not going to get elected to office.” So it begins to break down in part as American politics and society becomes more democratic. And along those lines, one of the things that rises and when we start to inch our way away from the, “You’re a certain rank and thus you belong in a certain place,” the idea of grading, judging students on the basis of a seemingly objective scale begins to rise. You can judge students that way and then ideally there’s some kind of merit involved with that, right? Good students do well and do better maybe than other students. Yale’s supposedly came up late. Actually, in the 1780s, Yale’s president, Ezra Stiles, began to-

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay, Joanne, just so you know, that’s not late.

Joanne Freeman:

In my world, it’s late.

Will Bunch:

It’s like what Yogi Bear said, “It gets late early out there.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, thank you, Will. I appreciate that.

Joanne Freeman:

Okay, I’ll take back the late. In the 1780s, Yale’s president, Ezra Stiles, begins to play around with grades. Of course, he’s using Latin words for the grade, so it’s not like ABCD, it’s like, “Ooh, optimi, second optimi, inferiores,” right? But they’re playing with the idea that you can judge, you can evaluate and judge people not just based on their rank, but in some other way that odd as it sounds given those Latin names, is a little bit more democratic.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The democratization of education though, like you say, is really a reflection of that expanding idea of a polity and of what education’s supposed to be in the 19th century. Because what you come out of the early period with is this idea that education is elite. It’s for the guys who can afford to sit around learning Latin and thinking great thoughts and traveling in Europe, whereas the real Americans were the ones behind a horse plowing the earth and working with their hands, being mechanics or selling things and they didn’t need a college education. And yet it was also very clear at the same time that money was moving upward and concentrating among the educated or among that elite class. And so you start to get a push in the late 1840s to try and create higher education for average Americans, for men, of course, for the most part, but who were farmers or who were not able to get an education because their fathers didn’t have money.

That is going to translate into the Land-Grant College Act, especially the moral acts of 1862 and then of 1890. The Land Grant College Act of 1862 comes at a really interesting time. If you think about the Republicans during the Civil War, many of them did not come from elite backgrounds. They were really people whose parents had not been able to send them to school. People like Abraham Lincoln, people like William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, people like Thaddeus Stevens who ends up being from Pennsylvania. But when that group gets into power during the Civil War and starts to democratize the American government, they also push through funding for the land-grant colleges.

The way the land-grant colleges worked was that each state got 30,000 acres of federal land, of course, which was indigenous land for the most part, but a federal land for each congressional member that they could then go ahead and sell and use that money as a fund for establishing a college that took people at very low tuition rates with the condition that they got not only agricultural education, but also military education. We get eventually 69 colleges that come from that Act. And it’s a really big deal because what it’s saying is that it matters that our people are educated.

Joanne Freeman:

It matters that our people are educated and it’s also broadly defining now what educated means.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Defining what educated means is also adding practical things into that education. It’s also really saying that you don’t have to be the son of a rich man to participate in, especially our economy is what they’re most concerned about. They’re looking for practical educations at those state universities. Not entirely, but for the most part. But they’re also saying that if you’re an Abraham Lincoln or the son of an average farmer, we’re going to make sure that the state, as in the government, gives you opportunities to rise. They’re also in that same session of Congress is going to create the Department of Agriculture to make sure you get seeds rather than having to have them handed down from your father who has this giant farm. You can actually get decent seeds and decent agricultural educations.

So it’s this sense that we need to invest in our people, and our people are then going to make the country prosperous and create better citizens. And that not only takes off among largely white men in the 1860s. By the 1870s, Justin Smith Morrill is beginning to call for a similar land-grant system for the creation of Black colleges. He says in 1876, “Having emancipated a whole race, shall it be said that there our duty ends, leaving the race as of the ground, to live or to wit and perish as the case may be? They are members of the American family, and their advancement concerns us all. While swiftly forgetting all they ever knew as slaves, shall they have no opportunity to learn anything as free men?”

And in 1890, a new Morrill Act re-upped that initial funding of the 1862 Act and provided for the funding for Black colleges in 16 states in the south. The act granted money instead of land and gave us a number of our historically Black universities and colleges, including Alabama A&M, Prairie View A&M University, and Tuskegee. And in that same wave we’re going to see the explosion of women’s colleges as well. Again, the idea that everybody in America should be educated, although the women’s colleges are going primarily to be private colleges.

Will Bunch:

I feel like this pendulum just swings back and forth in American history in terms of college being for making better citizens and for civic good. Because I know when you get into the roaring ’20s and the ’30s, the knock on college was, again, it swung back the other way and that it was more about career training, professionalism. There wasn’t enough emphasis on liberal education.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What you just said really made me think about this though because one of the reasons I was always fascinated by women’s colleges is because there is from them this incredible flowering of women’s literature and of women’s art and of women making connections. And the same, of course, is exactly true of the Black community as well.In the late 19th century, there’s many series of books about women’s colleges and what that means and what it means to educate women in not only practical matters, but also in the classics if you will. So for example, Jean Webster’s book Daddy Long Legs, which became a movie that was all about dancing which had nothing to do with the book itself, really as an examination of what it means to be an educated woman. And Louisa May Alcott’s later books are really all about that. Many of them are set in that college that the Bhaers set up. And they’re always talking about women and women taking a position of authority in American society.

Joanne Freeman:

They’re being welcomed in with women’s colleges. And then as ever, classrooms and the products of what comes out of classrooms are defining or exploring. Some of the literature you’re talking about is offering suggestions about who women should be and what role they should be playing or what roles can they play or not play.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, let me throw this one back to Will though. If that’s the case, is some of this on this pendulum and the idea of creating a practical education an attempt to make sure that women and people of color who have begun to take part in sort of a prosperous America with their educations no longer have access to that. Is that too much of a stretch?

Will Bunch:

Yeah. I was going to ask you if you had insights into whether you saw the kind of backlash. Because in my book I focus on the backlash of the 1960s and ’70s that was spearheaded by Ronald Reagan against liberal education. I wonder if there was some of the same rollback towards African Americans that ended up with the Red Summer and some of the things that happened in the late teens and early ’20s, and the Tulsa riot which basically eliminated this prosperous, successful African American community. I wonder if people connected it to education at that time the way that they would connect it to education after the 1960s.

Joanne Freeman:

Education as a conveyor of power. And what happens when you convey that power to people who haven’t had it before? The word that you use backlash is perfect for that. There’s a great book about early America, about women’s education and women’s place in society in early in America, and the title is Revolutionary Backlash.

Will Bunch:

Huh. There we go.

Joanne Freeman:

So there was all of this discussion of how women needed to be educated. Board of the revolution, right? Because now we have a republic and in a republic, citizens are important. It gets back to the civic dimension of education, right? You need to have young people growing up to understand what it means to be a good citizen. And who will give them those lessons? Well, sometimes it’s women. So women suddenly have this importance as people bestowing educations on people and often their sons so that they can go on to be good citizens. That idea of women having an important role lasts for a while. And then just as you’re suggesting with you use the word backlash, and now both you and Heather have talked about that pendulum, this is part of the same pattern.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I will say that in 1873, a man named Edward Clarke wrote a book called Sex in Education or, A Fair Chance for the Girls. He worried that educating girls the same way as you educated boys could run the risk of making them like a sexless class of termites. And that identical education of the two sexes is a crime before God and humanity that physiology protests against and that experience weeps over.

I do know that the women’s colleges made a huge effort to make sure that the women who came to them spent a great deal of time in physical education classes because the understanding at the time was that if you educated a woman’s mind too much, her body would fall apart. So you had to make sure you weren’t educating her out of her womanly sphere.

Joanne Freeman:

They called higher education a masculine education in early America. They were horrified if a woman received too much education, she was defined as being masculine because she had received a masculine education. She had been dewomanized.

Will Bunch:

I feel like the response to the… What was it? Sexless termites of 1873, was the rise of college football, right? I mean, you had Teddy Roosevelt cleaning up college football, but making it in other activities for young men a thing to promote their manliness. And you have to wonder how much of that is these perceived threats. Just like today I was writing my column for the Inquirer about the Proud Boys. Today’s group that is obsessed with masculinity has seen the rise of women’s rights as an empowerment, as a threat. And again, it’s the pendulum, right?

Heather Cox Richardson:

That is exactly the era when they took on so many Native American names for sports teams with the idea that she would recreate some sort of, what was in their minds, savagery on the football field or something. The sports in that period I find fascinating because they almost got rid of American football because they were literally killing people.

Will Bunch:

Yes. Yeah. No, no, Teddy Roosevelt got involved in that, right? To stop the killing so they could keep the sport going, right?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Just say that again. To stop the killing. But let’s jump forward now to your period, Will. Your work was so interesting about, first of all, what the dream of American education looked like after World War II and why, and then how that breaks down. I found it enormously instructive simply because we all sort of have a vague sense that something went wrong, but we don’t, at least I don’t, quite understand what.

Will Bunch:

I think a lot of the explanation is a lot more political and then people want to acknowledge. But clearly the 19th century, early 20th century, you did see more and more people going to college, that the Industrial Revolution demanded managers and other kinds of professionals. And so you did see this increase. But by and large, you look at the start of World War II, most Americans still didn’t finish high school. So I think only 5% of adults had that college degree around the start of World War II.

The GI Bill, which is just the fascinating piece of legislation, really created in response to the horrible way America had botched the return of veterans from World War I, the bonus army and everything else that happened. So they wanted to get it right in World War II and they decided, “Well, instead of promising people money,” which was what they had done in World War I that went off the rails, they said, “How can we benefit these young, mostly men, coming home from the war?”

So they talked about job training. There was a big home buying mortgage component to the GI Bill. And then you had the college benefit. They just really didn’t think it was going to be utilized as much as it was. They really didn’t think most Americans were college material to put it frankly. It was kind of fascinating, the reaction from the heads of some of these elite universities who were going to have to accept these recipients of the GI Bill were kicking and screaming about it. The president of the University of Chicago famously said that what was going to result from this was what he called “hobo jungles.” That they were going to have to house and feed these kind of young brute who just weren’t ready for the classroom.

And what happened was the exact opposite. Within a couple years of the program, I mean, not only was it overutilized that there was this real demand from Americans who wanted this opportunity for higher education, but they turned out to be because they wanted this opportunity so much, they were great students. That college administrators and professors said, “These GIs are the best students we’ve ever had. They listened to their teachers, they show respect.”

Joanne Freeman:

They have a purpose, they understand why they’re there and they appreciate it and are working towards it.

Will Bunch:

Seriously, if you look at the lives of these people, that purpose stayed with them, many of them for their whole lives. That they went back to their communities and became active and doing things like founding little leagues in their hometowns or things like that. They were just very community-oriented people because the government had given them an opportunity. And they really had this sense of the need to give something back. It was a beautiful thing and it makes you think about what we’ve lost by not doing that so much in recent years.

But a quick overview, you had this golden age of college in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. You had the baby boom was on the way in these schools that had expanded their facilities to handle the GIs just kind of kept going and expanding and hiring more professors and building new dorms and opening new public university campuses to deal with this flood of young people, especially in an era of the ’50s where you had a much more affluent middle class. This is when college became the American dream, right? The American dream generally had always been to do better than your parents and be a little bit more prosperous. And college became wrapped up in people’s minds as really the vehicle for doing that for most families. It was also kind of a golden era of the idea of liberal education, the idea that college is for critical thinking and taking a wide range of subjects and it’s not just rote career training.

Joanne Freeman:

The humanities.

Will Bunch:

Yeah, the humanities. And so the young people, the 1960s, took this to heart and they became critical thinkers and they became fighters for democracy. They really believed in the civic experiment. But what happened is, I guess you might call this blow back, right? In that the hypocrisy they saw was coming from our own United States. They started honing in on what was going on with racial segregation in the south. People were electrified by the lunch counter sit-ins in 1960. I mean, the spark for this movement was our HBCUs, but a lot of white kids on other campuses up north got excited by this. You had the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 about the rights of students to basically be adults and not children, to take part in political activity. They used that right to protest the Vietnam War which really became in the latter half of the ’60s, the focus.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Will, walk us through the Free Speech Movement a little bit. I think you do a fabulous job with that. And a lot of people probably just think it means talking, but what’s happening on the campuses in ’64 in California?

Will Bunch:

The Free Speech Movement actually grew out of the civil rights movement in a way because some of the most forceful advocates, including the famous leader of the movement, Mario Savio, who was just a hero of mine, it was a pleasure getting to write about him in the book and talked to his widow as well. He had gone to Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, where college students, both Black and white, worked together in rural Mississippi trying to register voters in this really violent, harsh environment where famously three of the civil rights workers were murdered and buried in an earthen dam. Mario Savio lived through that and he got beaten up once or twice, but he lived to tell about it.

And when he came back to Berkeley in 1964, the campus was becoming more politicized in general and the administration was starting to freak out a little bit. It turned out they found that the place where students had been setting up tables to lobby for different political causes, which they thought was on the sidewalk and First Amendment protected public speech, they found out, “Well, no, this is actually university property.” And so they barred students from setting up these tables. Everybody was outraged, not just civil rights advocates. The young Republicans joined this protest. It was really a moment where you had liberals and conservative students on the same side. And if have all of their activities regulated or are they adults with the ability to speak their minds, Mario Savio gave his famous wheels upon the Freedom Speech.

Mario Savio (archival):

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you are free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Will Bunch:

People stood on top of a police car one night giving speeches for 18 hours. It galvanized the campus. And they won. They won the right for free speech. It really was the first widespread and widely publicized campus protest of the 1960s. To a lot of older people, it was a horrifying moment, that we were giving these young people, they were education and they were using it to reject our society, to oppose the Vietnam War, to oppose the government, to try and reorder society around things like race. And then as the movement went on, then gender, then sexuality, then other issues like the environment. You saw all kinds of pushback.

This idea of, “Are we educating too many people?” I’m sure you can appreciate finding the great quote like a month after you’ve turned in your manuscript.

Joanne Freeman:

Always.

Will Bunch:

I know. So the great quote that’s not in the hardcover version of the book is by this guy named Roger Freeman who was a advisor to both Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, particularly on academic issues. He was interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1970 and he said, “An educated proletariat? We can’t have that. That would be dynamite!” Basically, not everybody should go to college is what this guy Freeman said. I mean, it was the ultimate say in the quiet part out loud, right?

Joanne Freeman:

Yes.

Will Bunch:

And he wasn’t alone. People who read Nancy MacLean’s fantastic book, Democracy and Chains, are now familiar with this kind of one obscure economist, James Buchanan, right? Not the president, James Buchanan. The other James Buchanan. He wrote a book also in 1970 because that’s when these concerns were really peaking, the year of Kent state, right? He wrote a book called Academia and Anarchy. He really laid out the case for kids who are going to school and not paying tuition are incentivized to be revolutionaries basically. And if we start charging them higher tuition, they’ll have some skin in the game of capitalism.

So this chapter in my book, which I think is the most important chapters, is titled How the Kent State Massacre raised Your Tuition. I hope that doesn’t sound too flip, but you can really draw a line, which I didn’t really realize until I started researching this book. You can really draw a line between the backlash to campus protest, which we all lived through it as young people, it was a huge deal at the time. There was a huge backlash to kids today and what was going on on college campuses, and that there was a straight line to that and the idea that maybe college shouldn’t be a free ride for young people, that maybe not everybody should go to college, that maybe it needs to be a little bit more expensive and people need to see it more as an investment. Reagan’s famous line in 1967, which I think defines everything that’s happened ever since was he said, “I don’t think taxpayers should be funding the intellectual curiosity of young people.” And that’s become our philosophy.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s crying out now to connect with the present. You just described this moment when these young people are protesting for free speech, and the response to that says a lot about how some people feel who should have power and who shouldn’t have power and what society should look like and what education is for and who should have it. So here we are now at this moment. And given the trail you just traced, what’s your sense now at this given moment of the conversation and the different threads in it about how people are talking about the relevance of higher education?

Will Bunch:

I think one thing I find interesting, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this too, but I mean to me, the privatization of college in America and higher education kind of happened in kind of a frog in boiling water kind of way. That we didn’t have this great public debate. It’s not like say Obamacare, where in 2010 we had this debate that everybody was covering in the news and people were going to vote “Yes or no, are we going to privatize education in America?” Instead, it’s just something that happened gradually.

Pennsylvania is maybe worse than some other states, but it’s my home state where I live. Here, taxpayers funded 75% of the state university system as recently as the late 20th century. And today that number’s dropped all the way down to 25%. When you have that big a drop in government funding, you can do two things. You can shut down universities and cut services, which we all know college administrators are desperately trying not to do or you can raise tuition. And tuition kept going up.

The thing is, it’s a little immune from the so-called free market of economics because everybody’s been told that if you don’t get this credential, this college diploma, the job recruiters aren’t going to give you the time of day. The calculation that people had to make was, “I can either not get this credential and know that I’m going to be kind of, at least in the job front, be a loser in life” or that’s what they were told anyway, right? Or, “I can get to the credential, but the only way to do that is to borrow money, but they’re telling me it’s going to work out. It’s unfortunate that I have to pay back all this money once I’ve done it, but hopefully this gamble will work.”

As we talked about earlier, the rules of the loan game are complicated and people end up getting more and more interest charges every year and not paying down their balance. It’s a gamble that just for a lot of reasons didn’t work out for millions of people the way they thought it was going to work out.

College enrollment has not bounced back since the pandemic. It’s dropped 9% and people thought, “Well, the pandemic appears to be pretty much over. People are going to start flooding back” and they didn’t start flooding back. Instead, people are either entering the job market. I mean, as it happens, the job market is pretty good, unemployment is low, so there’s more opportunities to do that. But also people are looking at, “Well, are there programs where I can study for a year, something like IT or some subject like that and get a certificate?” And companies like Google and Apple are promoting this idea, that you can get certificates instead of this expensive four-year college degree where, heaven forbid, you might have to take a course in philosophy or something you don’t even want to take.

I think there’s pros and cons. I mean, I think it’s good to give people other options besides settling themselves with debts that they can’t pay back. One hand, on the other hand, I do worry that you lose the critical thinking benefits of higher education if you focus too much on getting certificates.

Joanne Freeman:

At a moment when how could it be more important than at this moment for people to have critical skills in evaluating, for example, evidence and analyzing what’s happening in front of them.

Will Bunch:

Oh yeah, Joanne, absolutely. I make that point in my book. The things that we’re living through right now that are so important both in our politics, that January 6th and millions of people believing in QAnon, which is this bat guano crazy conspiracy theory. Much of my book is about the political divisions that have been caused by the lack of access to college, the resentments between non-college educated people and people with college diplomas that have arisen from the flaws in this privatized system and other things too. I mean, look at climate change denial, which we have much more of in the United States than you have in other places. And look at the way that Americans reacted to the public health crisis of COVID and all the misinformation about vaccines. You look at all of these things and you say, “Could a better educated public have handled this better?” And I think the answer has to be yes.

Joanne Freeman:

Whatever kind of education you have, if it’s a more trade-oriented, if it’s a liberal arts college or wherever it is, you’re going to school, you join some kind of a community when you go there.e and you have a sense of community when you’re there. And depending on what you’re learning, there’s some kind of an intellectual or professional community that you feel linked to. I end up talking about the We factor all the time, and I hope that people understand what the heck I’m talking about, but I feel that we’re in a huge crisis of We right now and certainly linked with it is this fact that we’re questioning the need for certain kinds of education, that we’re privatizing it. And so it really becomes an individual thing, we shouldn’t be paying for other people’s education, people which should be going to school, just to get a certain kind of professional skill, and that the civic dimension of higher education not on the drawing board right now.

Will Bunch:

I mean, the overriding argument in my book is again talking about the swinging pendulums, right? How do we swing the pendulum that swung in the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s towards making higher education a public good? How can we swing that back? I do think it’s starting to swing back a little because I think President Biden’s decision to cancel student debt at such a high level for so many people was one acknowledgement, right? So I think that was a start.

But I think that if it got to a point where Google and Apple and these companies were the ones underwriting higher education, that the civic virtue of education would be lost, that it would be just so focused on the career aspects. The only way you’re going to get that civic aspect is if we all feel that we’re part of this together. Some politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have talked about different ways you could possibly do that. It’s probably more than money. I devote a whole chapter in the book to the idea that the government should fund a universal gap year for 18 year olds. You’re giving them a chance to do different things and find out what they want to do and who they are by working on environmental projects or working in disadvantaged communities for the greater good. Here you would be bringing people together from red states and blue states who don’t interact normally and from different social classes and backgrounds hopefully to work together on these projects.

Joanne Freeman:

That there’s some kind of a joint endeavor. So that’s part of your answer to the question of how do we move forward?

Will Bunch:

Because look how unhappy everybody was. And you guys experienced it firsthand during that year when college went remote during COVID. It’s easy to understand why, because you were just cutting the guts out of what college was supposed to be by not having that community for that year. That suddenly when you’re just showing up on a computer screen and just doing the class, the knowledge you’re getting from that class is valuable. I don’t mean to denigrate it, but you’re losing so much of the rest. If heaven forbid, your family is paying full freight $75,000 to go to college, just what you get out of a Zoom class, even with brilliant professors like you and Heather, it’s not the full experience that college should be.

I think we can all agree that if you look at so many different metrics, America is doing a terrible job with our young people after they turn 18. I don’t think you can talk about the college problem without talking about the problems of young people who aren’t going to college. And so I talk about that a lot in the book, including deaths of despair from opioids or from suicide, from young people who feel the system has told them that this is a meritocracy and the system is telling me that I must not have merit and not that I’m worthless. And we’ve got to fix that.