Quick, name the top 10 universities in the world. If you started out with Harvard, you’re not alone. Likewise, if you named Columbia, Princeton, MIT, and the University of Chicago, you’d be on the right track according to the 2006 “Academic Ranking of World Universities,” published annually in China by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

As a quasi-official Chinese government project, the ranking is noteworthy not so much for the individual colleges and universities on the list, but for the one characteristic most of the listed institutions share — they’re private. In fact, apparently oblivious to the irony, the Chinese communist government-sponsored list says nine of the top 10 universities in the world are private. Moreover, eight of the top 10 are in the United States and seven of those are private.

The Chinese rankings correspond roughly with the findings published in the latest rankings by U.S. News & World Report. Used by millions of high-school students and their parents to evaluate colleges, the U.S. News rankings have Princeton, Harvard, and Yale as the nation’s best universities and rank Williams College, Amherst College, and Swarthmore College as the top three liberal arts colleges in the nation. As with the Chinese rankings, the best of the best are private institutions. And they are not alone — the top tiers of the U.S. News rankings are filled with private colleges. The top five universities and the top five colleges in the Midwest, for instance, are private. This trend holds across the rankings. Everywhere you look in the U.S. News report, the top rankings go to private colleges and universities despite the fact that they are outnumbered by lavishly funded state-run institutions.

The performance of private institutions of higher education calls into question the efficacy of government power. If the best outcomes are achieved only through the application of government control and regulation to a particular task, then public institutions of higher learning should be far superior to their privately run counterparts. Clearly, as both general perception and the rankings from both the Chinese government and U.S. News show, this is not the case. The performance of private institutions of higher education is an embarrassment to their public counterparts and to the idea of government supervision in general. But that does not stop government from wanting to extend its control over private colleges and universities. The best way to do that is to slap federal education requirements on higher education. And that is just what’s in store for the nation’s system of higher education as the federal Department of Education moves to impose standards for accreditation and testing on the nation’s colleges and universities.

Expanding the Federal Role

Not long ago, the Department of Education was an embattled agency. For years the Republicans promised to get rid of it. In fact, only 11 years ago, in 1996, the Republican Party platform called for the department to be abolished: “The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place,” said the GOP. “This is why we will abolish the Department of Education.”

Much has changed since 1996. The department still lacks constitutional authority, but under the Bush administration it has grown into a regulatory behemoth while federal spending on education under Bush has skyrocketed. According to the historical tables accompanying the official 2008 budget documents, federal spending for the Department of Education totaled just shy of $33.5 billion in 2000 under President Clinton. Reversing decades of Republican opposition to federal education spending, the Bush administration has presided over the rapid expansion of the Education Department budget. Under Bush, in 2006 federal spending on the department reached a staggering $93.4 billion — nearly a 180 percent increase over Clinton-era spending. During the same period, federal higher-education spending ballooned from $10.1 billion under Clinton in 2000 to $50.5 billion under Bush in 2006.

It’s axiomatic that what the government funds it also seeks to control. Despite being on the receiving end of the federal money spigot, America’s colleges and universities have managed to retain some semblance of control over their educational programs. But, as the Boston Globe reported in April, that may be about to change. According to the Globe’s Linda K. Wertheimer, “Now the federal government is pushing to require all colleges to regularly assess students’ progress — and reveal the results to the public.”

The plan is growing out of work by a federal Education Department panel called the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Chaired by Charles Miller, a banker and former official with the University of Texas system of public universities, the panel was convened by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. Among the panel’s recommendations is that standardized testing should be forced on colleges and universities. The panel’s 2006 report, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education, recommends: “Higher education institutions should measure student learning using quality assessment data from instruments such as, for example, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which measures the growth of student learning taking place in colleges, and the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress, which is designed to assess general education outcomes for undergraduates in order to improve the quality of instruction and learning.”

The results of the standardized tests, as well as other bits of data about the nation’s colleges and universities, would then be dumped into a database administered by the Department of Education, where the information would then be made available to prospective students. The database would also allow federal officials to study college performance and would put Education Department officials in a position to be able to micromanage the nation’s colleges in much the same way government currently aspires to manipulate and manage the K-12 system.

In theory, participation in the Department of Education scheme would be voluntary. That doesn’t mean, however, that colleges won’t come under federal pressure to comply. Maverick liberal arts colleges that might not want federal control over their curricula and who choose on that basis not to participate in the new federal program would be threatened with having their funding revoked. “‘The government,’ Miller said, ‘may eventually decide to deny federal funds for research or student aid to a college, even Harvard, if it refused to measure how well its students are doing and reveal results,’” the Globe’s Wertheimer writes.

Undermining Education

Apart from the dubious constitutional aspects of reporting school performance to the Department of Education, federal “quality standards” and standardized testing for college students would be just as bad for higher education as they have proven to be at the K-12 level. Standardized tests take substantial curriculum development out of the hands of teachers, requiring them to “teach to the test.” In its analysis of the effects of federally mandated standardized testing at the primary and secondary levels four years after the adoption of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing noted that the “NCLB’s test-and-punish approach to school reform relies on extremely limited, one-size-fits-all tools that often reduce education to little more than test prep.” That’s what’s in store for colleges and universities under the new Department of Education plan for higher education according to the plan’s critics.

“Should everybody be learning the same thing? Should students at MIT be able to learn the same things as students at Williams, at UMass?” asked Jack Wilson, president of the University of Massachusetts System. “Diversity is one of the great things about higher education. I say, ‘Vive la difference.’” Arthur Kleinman, a Harvard professor of medical anthropology, is another critic of the plan. “We live increasingly in an audit world, in a regulatory world,” Kleinman told the Globe’s Wertheimer. “Once you start this, there’s no stopping it. It’s going to become a part of the culture of higher education.”

Also opposing the federal plan for greater regulation of higher education is the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU), an organization representing “private colleges and universities on policy issues with the federal government.” In a white paper on the federal proposals to require accrediting agencies to require colleges and universities to meet federally imposed standards, the organization called the plans “unprecedented.” According to the NAICU, the Department of Education proposals “would give the government unprecedented control over accrediting agencies and institutions of higher education. We believe their plans would compromise the ability of colleges and universities to set and pursue their educational missions and would impose new federal mandates related to core academic matters.”

That’s a belief shared by others. “We are taking a system of quality review driven by cooperation and replacing it with a parent-child relationship,” with the accreditor as parent “controlled by the federal government,” Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation told the journal Inside Higher Ed. “When the accreditor stipulates the level of the performance indicators and the performance expectations, the institution has lost the opportunity to set its own direction, and that’s where the problem is.... We should say yes to accountability and to the goals of accountability, but no to this way.”

Liberty and the Liberal Arts

The end result of the Department of Education plan would be the establishment of a nationwide curriculum determined by federal bureaucrats. “These recommendations are about making institutions the same,” warned Matt Owens, the director of federal relations for the Association of American Universities. “That is just not acceptable.” In fact, the greatest danger posed by the plan comes from the fact that it would ultimately give federal officials a substantially increased role in directing and controlling course work at the nation’s colleges and universities. That is a chilling possibility, given that a free and independent nation depends on a vigorous and independent cohort of liberal arts institutions.

In an essay entitled “Liberty in the Liberal Arts,” Professor and longtime Taylor University President Milo A. Rediger explored the idea that the central purpose of the liberal arts institution is to help students understand liberty. The AB degree is the proper symbol of a liberal education, Rediger said in his 1963 essay. “The term ‘liberal’ is often misunderstood and misused. A liberal education is a process of liberation toward the liberty which is the true nature and climate of the properly developed soul.” What does that mean? “To adults and maturing students,” Rediger continued, “I would say it this way: the very élan vital of human personality is this urge toward liberty, the struggle to be free. To the college freshman I say, ‘If you discover your real self at all, you will find a curiosity, a desire for knowing, a great and noble urge to be free from restrictive ignorance, limiting unskilledness, narrow prejudices, and from the subjection of the spirit to the things of time and sense.’”

Indeed, the highest purpose of the private liberal arts college is to keep alive the flame of liberty, especially during times when the ideas of liberty trade at a low value in society at large. According to the late Henry M. Wriston, past president of both Lawrence and Brown Universities, the liberal arts college is a safety mechanism, like a “cyclone cellar” for society, that is of most value in times of trouble. In this sense, Wriston wrote in his book The Nature of a Liberal College, “the liberal arts college exists to maintain values which its environment holds too cheaply. It represents the ideal of freedom — freedom of mind and spirit, freedom from fear, prejudice, and all inhibiting emotions.” A danger to this central purpose of the liberal arts college, says Wriston, comes when collectivism threatens to overwhelm society. “If ever the doctrines of discipline and authority, if ever the faith in collective planning and action, if ever the totalitarian theory of the state triumph over the ideal of an adventurous life, the environment will overcome the institution,” he warned in 1937.

By proposing what is an essentially centralized, collectivist plan to control the nation’s nominally private colleges and universities, the federal government, through the unconstitutional Education Department, now represents the threat identified by Wriston. If the Department of Education succeeds, it could very will mean the end of liberal arts education in America and the destruction of one of the fundamental elements of a free people.