The various “political correctness” scandals on college campuses, such as a group at Stanford recommending against the use of the words “American” and “immigrant,” get a lot of headlines. But there are more gradual, less visible changes that also contribute to the declining status of the U.S. system of higher education.
One issue is the increased emphasis, in terms of both student majors and faculty slots, toward computer science and engineering. That is an entirely appropriate development, motivated by changing labor markets, and institutions of higher education are right to make this shift.
That said, it is unlikely that these fields can bring as much status to universities as the social sciences and humanities have. Notable achievements in fields such as artificial intelligence tend to be associated with the private sector, even when universities do some of the underlying research. The neural net innovator Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto, for example, despite being extremely important, is not a public figure or recognizable in the same way as, say, Paul Krugman.
