My model of college is dying before my eyes

After fifty years in higher education, the "ideal" image of the college experience and education remains pretty firmly -- if fading -- in my mind, which makes witnessing colleges today all the more irritating, disappointing, frustrating and maddening, as they have given up on their educational mission -- having realized that their economic value has been severely eroded by their actions -- for one of social engineering, assuming their role is to re-educate students as to the evils of capitalism, the Constitution, "whines," and American history. And given the sad state of secondary education, the incoming freshmen are ripe for introduction. What little they know has little practical value nor does it prepare them to think critically about all the faux 'critical thinking' discourse echoing from their administrators, professors, syllabi, and curriculum. Without a foundation in basic English, math, and history, way-too-many of today's students come to college first with the expectation that they are special, second that they are entitled, third that they are there for the 'experience' (rather than the education, and fourth that they are ready to be re-engineered to serve today's media and tech driven political atmosphere of influencers and social media in general

Today's "journalists" are unlike those of my generation. Today they come from the ranks of the elite, assuming a wholly unfounded position of intellectual superiority. Rather than having blue-collar or working class background, they come from elite schools and high-income families, willing to absorb years of miserable pay in the hope of becoming a social media star, earning millions for tweets. Twitter has replaced headlines, just as editorializing has replaced objectivity, and Americans by the hundreds of millions shun traditional "evening news" programs that once garnered tens and tens of millions for a single CBS broadcast. Today, CBS would be happy to garner eight million viewers -- about two percent of the US population -- for their evening broadcast. The "news" has shifted from loss leader public service, to a low form of reality entertainment, with celebrity "anchors" (in the UK, they know well enough to call them "news readers") paid millions of dollars for their ability to attract people to their broadcast. They are personalities, pundits and performers, and not journalists by any traditional definition of the word.

In my next post I will dwell at more length about the college education and experience that I remember, unfettered by PCs, social media, the internet and influencers, the halcyon days of my undergraduate and grade years, 1969-1978, along with my early years as a professor and dean.