Higher ed as a threat rather than an opportunity

Higher Ed Has Become a Threat to America

Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge from censorship and crime to antisemitism.

John Ellis

Wall Street Journal

Dec. 4, 2023

America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism.

Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radical political activists.

Children’s test scores have plummeted because college education departments train teachers to prioritize “social justice” over education. Censorship started with one-party campuses shutting down conservative voices. The coddling of criminals originated with academia’s devotion to Michel Foucault’s idea that criminals are victims, not victimizers. The drive to separate children from their parents begins in longstanding campus contempt for the suburban home and nuclear family. Radicalized college journalism departments promote far-left advocacy. Open borders reflect pro-globalism and anti-nation state sentiment among radical professors. DEI started as a campus ruse to justify racial quotas. Campus antisemitism grew out of ideologies like “anticolonialism,” “anticapitalism” and “intersectionality.”

My thoughts (via gmail)

Read it before dawn. While I can’t disagree with his observations, I am skeptical as to his solutions.

At its heart, I don’t see evidence to support this massive, radical shift in the mission of universities, public or private, and I fear for the loss in constructive educational outcomes — and the woeful portfolio of skills, knowledge and values of graduates of these woke schools — from the colleges just as with the learning losses from Covid policies.

The nearby article about how the rich got richer and the poor got poorer under Covid policies says a lot about the disconnect between the self-anointed bureaucrats and Main Street. That plus the recent news about Yale’s grade distributions, especially in the gender and African American studies departments and the idiocy at Columbia only reinforces my concerns noted in the previous paragraph. The kids are NOT alright. And the college administrators are feckless, spineless. And these graduates are not going to know how to value things and ideas, make things, fix things, and do the things needed to have the world prosper in peace.

*****

We've devolved from common values and checks and balances across the branches to pendulums swinging between elections, where when one party takes over from the other they try to reverse the extreme swings of the preceding party. Throw in the expansion of the use of executive orders, the politicization of the Supreme Court, and the proliferation of administrative tyranny, and we have a massive problem. It all goes back to the melting pot being replaced by multicultural tribalism, the end of common, basic, values, replaced now by the philosophy or credo of the decade, e.g., DEI.