Infected

American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes another masterpiece.

...even after the damage of the 1960s, there remained still in the early 1970s vestiges of why the university had once won public confidence, and was seen as essential to the upward mobility of the postwar baby boom.

..What went wrong? The former students of the 1970s came into power and gradually began to reject the very code of conduct and training of those who taught them. And in turn they taught a new generation who for the first time had little first-hand knowledge of the great campus scholars and icons of the past.

Politics increasingly infected courses as competence eroded—logical for faculty and students since the former required far less of the latter. Across the curriculum, race, class, and gender studies found their way into art, music, literature, philosophy and history classes. Deduction now replaced the old empiricism. Grades inflated; the therapeutic triumphed over the tragic as how students felt was almost as important as what they learned and knew.

...New progressive doctrines insisted that because the traditional elements of American society and culture—the family, church, community, and government—were biased, the university was needed as a counterweight to these nefarious conservative forces. Thus, the university could and should itself become prejudicial and openly propagandistic—a legitimate way of offering “balance” to the various institutional forces that brainwashed young Americans with conservative doctrines.

The Costs
In sum, the damage that the modern university has wrought has now outweighed its once-positive role.

Let us count the ways higher education had done its part to nearly harm the United States. A new generation owes $1.5 trillion in student debt—a sum that an increasing majority of debtors either cannot pay back or simply will not.

One’s 20s are now redefined as the lost decade, as marriage, child-rearing, and home buying are put off, to the extent they still occur, into one’s 30s.

Bitterness abounds when graduates gradually learn that their liberal anti-capitalist professors and administrators were part of a profit-rigged system by which peasant students became financial cannon fodder. For all the hipster left-wing campus atmospherics, the university operated more or less as a Madoff/Ponzi scheme: for each newly admitted class of students, the fed backed another round of usurious loans that could never be paid back by those of little means, and the university upped its prices.

The result was reduced teaching, a bonanza of release time, administrative bloat, Club Med dorms, gyms, and student unions, and epidemics of highly paid but non-teaching careerist advisors, and counselors.

The university was now in loco parentis, a sort of granny that babysat men and women of arrested development and encouraged the idea that they were helpless. The more students were considered “adults” in matters of loud and boisterous protests, obscene speech, binge drinking, common drug use, and hook-up sex, the more they wished to be treated as Victorian children. Suddenly kids were shocked that the inebriated acted dangerously and boorishly, upset that the targets of their attack did not like them, and furious that sexual congress without commitment and love was often manipulative and embedded within male callousness and deceit.

...There were and are ways to save the university, but in classical Livian style, the medicine is felt worse than the disease.

The Prescription
Mandatory exit standardized tests could calibrate whether students learned anything after spending or borrowing $250,000 for a degree. If a certain minimum SAT or ACT score is considered necessary for admittance (to calibrate the relative merit of various high school grade point averages), why would not such a similar exit exam be necessary for a bachelor’s degree? The university double-checks the competency of high-school degrees, but not its own?

Universities should be held responsible for repaying a large percentage of the loans they issued and yet in advance knew well could not and would not be repaid. The government should get out of the campus loan insurance business.

...The chance of reform? Zero.

Indebted students, many with largely worthless degrees, and few employment opportunities sufficient to repay their loans, have become a loyal progressive constituency. How odd that an entire generation, in psychologically and financially suspended animation, is seen as useful by the very politicos who created this labyrinth of exploitation in the first place.

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