My Number One Issue
The anti-intellectual turn in higher education
“What’s the one thing that keeps you up at night?”
This was the opening question from a speaker/facilitator at an event I recently attended. The small audience consisted primarily of people who work at Jewish-oriented non-profits. Those of you who know about my prejudice against non-profits can appreciate that I felt uncomfortable and out of place the whole time.
The answer that came to me was “college campuses.” In context, the speaker heard that as concern with anti-Israel demonstrations. I said that this was only a small subset of my worries, but I did not have time to go into my broader and deeper issues with higher education.
I can pinpoint the exact moment when I started to lose sleep over higher education in America. This was in the Spring of 2012, at my daughter’s graduation ceremony at Brandeis University. The main graduation speaker was in the midst of a not-memorable talk when she said “and I read this morning in the New York Times that America will be more than 50 percent non-white by 2050.”
To me, this would have been a straightforward observation, neither good news nor bad news. But the students greeted it as if they had just heard that their favorite sports team had won a championship or their favorite political party had won an election. They whooped and hollered and cheered for several minutes. It was by far the biggest applause line of her entire speech.
That outburst made me want to ask for a tuition refund. I realized that the students had been taught to be reflexively anti-white. At an institution where young people are supposed to learn critical thinking and careful perspective-taking, they instead had acquired a simple-minded way to view the world: minorities good, white people bad.
I have come to see this as the end result of the over-expansion of higher education, in terms of the number of students, the number of faculty and, above all, the number of administrators. As America involved more people in higher education, we reached lower down into the pool of intellectual ability. That would have been great if the result had been to teach more people to think deeply and carefully. But instead of raising mediocre students to excellence, our institutions of higher education have become saturated with mediocrity.
The intellectual mediocrity of today’s educated class is made worse by a lack of self-awareness. If they recognized that they are lightweights, they would exhibit less class snobbery. But it is the opposite. They feel that their college credentials entitle them to lord it over everyone else. They see their luxury beliefs as setting them apart and above everyone else in America, either in the present or in the past.
Nothing that has happened since 2012 has surprised me. When you replace thinking with crude identity prejudice, you end up describing as a “patriarchy” a society in which men are experiencing increasing economic distress. You end up supporting the rights of transsexual athletes to ruin women’s sports. You end up joining “Queers for Palestine.”
I understand that social phenomena are complex. Many people blame our current political atmosphere on social media. Some blame foreign influence. But my number one issue is the over-expansion of higher education. I take the view that the colleges and universities are beyond salvation.
To preserve our civilization, we need new social institutions for people aged 16-22. I have suggested network-based higher education. But other ideas belong in the mix.
For some people, it is a cliche that America’s system of higher education is outstanding, and that it supports our greatness. This may have been true 50 years ago. But the current state of higher education is what makes me lose sleep.
I have two theories on this.
1. You get more of what you subsidize, and when governments subsidize colleges with research grants and student loans, it draws in more and more marginal students and researchers, people who would be be better off doing anything else. Since they can't hack STEM or traditional humanities, colleges and researchers invent new marginal fields, or new ways to dumb down existing fields. Of course, all the regulations and Title nonsense require new administrators, and where better to get them than all those new marginal graduates? And since all those marginal students and researchers and administrators know how marginal they are and how little of importance they actually do, they rise o the top; everyone else has better things to do.
2. There is something perverse about expecting kids to stay in school until age 22, learning stuff they will never use or remember, and then shift practically overnight to the boring world of working and raising a family. What would happen if governments had no say in education -- no funding, no regulation, no truancy, no nothing?
For one, prices would drop like a rock. The most important thing to learn is the three Rs, readin' writin' and 'rithmetic. With those, you can teach yourself anything at any time. I imagine day care schools where kids learn the three Rs, play, and go to work with their parents, family, neighbors, and friends out of curiosity, not to learn jobs, but to learn about the wide world of possible jobs and the reality of what adults do at jobs. At some point, kids would get old enough to actually get paid for part time work, whether it's stocking shelves and sweeping floors or fetching tools for mechanics. An hour or two a day, whatever they and their parents and job mentors feel is appropriate for them. Maybe they want to spend five hours a day reading histories or poetry. Maybe they mow lawns or deliver groceries. They and their parents choose, not governments.
They would learn independence and how to explore the world of knowledge. Especially now with the Internet, the world of knowledge has a zillion possibilities that don't involve dulling their brains with gender fluidentity studies. I don't think very many kids or adults would give two cents for all that woke nonsense if they had a choice, free or not. Kids are too naturally curious to accept such nonsense as gospel.
They would shift from day care play to part time school to part time work to full time adults, and then, only then, once they've started working for themselves and raising a family, would they dive into history of the Gauls or whatever floats their boat.
Some fields do require a lot of study. But it's an odd coincidence that almost all college degrees in the US require exactly four years of study. Building bridges, studying the stars, programming computers and gender fluidentity, all four years? How odd. Yes, all that would go away too. You'd learn what employers wanted; maybe work half time, study half time. If you wanted to teach advanced math or design pharmaceuticals or be a surgeon, yes, you'd spend lot of time just studying. But it would be up to you and employers, not governments.
I'm not convinced that it's a result of anti-intellectualism as opposed to the continued and expanding infantilization of our young adults. I think the anti-intellectuallism is simply the byproduct of turning universities into high schools, teens into children, and twenty year olds into tweens. I think this a significant root cause here and one that nobody is really talking about.