Colleges and universities are having to cut back in these hard times. Tuitions that have gone up at twice the rate of inflation for decade--and now exceed $50,000 a year in the Ivy League--are beginning to meet market resistance from parents (remember them?). Eric Gibson in the "de Gustibus" column of The Wall Street Journal ("Pleading Poverty: Colleges Want Parents to Foot the Bill for Their Largess," December 5, 2008) takes a welcome cynical view of collegiate administrations' arrogance and presumption.
Anyone who has escorted a 17 year old on a college tour knows what it is like to see the world class new athletic facilities that are better than anything the parent has available to him, the superb library with the cushy chairs, the Lucullan dining facilities, the free high tech support, etc. It turns out that the bill-paying parents have been covering the increases, the students are oblivious and the school endowments have just kept growing as alumni are festooned with laurels by very professional university flatterers.
But now parents are beginning to hoard their resources. A few have figured out at last that the big college diploma is not necessarily the ticket to big success any more and that the family might like to do something else with a quarter million per kid. Alumni are having trouble with their stock portfolios, too..... and so, by the way, is old Slippery Rock U. itself.
Meanwhile, as Victor David Hanson describes, the original ideal of higher education--the liberal education of future leaders--has fallen by the wayside.
Harvard, founded almost four centuries ago by Puritans as a seminary for pastors, is so provincially smug and so vehemently secular that the faculty kills potential courses on religion as injurious to the university's reputation. (Harvard has no concept of what Veritas means anymore, of course.) The University of Virginia, founded by Mr. Jefferson as an example of how a free republic should raise up leaders capable of governing, is in thrall to rank careerism. The Progressives of a hundred years ago presented the University of Wisconsin as an advertisement for the "laboratory of the states." Madison today is synonymous with stultifying conformism.
Who needs these places? They are killing our culture, not advancing it. They are anti-scientific now--following dogma instead of evidence--and they are definitely anti-humanities. Forget going to college to learn philosophy, it's dead. Ditto poetry. Ditto the Great Books and English, unless you long to study "theory" and become a professor yourself. Are you interested in politics and public life? Then don't bother with the so-called Political Science Department. It is not about politics or science or anything real. And it is withering anyhow.
One does not go to a university any more to experience disinterested research and practical ideas. For those one goes to independent think tanks. One does not go to college to enjoy free speech, unless the free speech he seeks is on the Left. Universities are now the least free of intellectual environments.
It is doubtful that the reader's alma mater is any different. During the past 40 years the Left has marched through nearly all of the schools of higher education, including ones that still try to fool alumni givers into thinking that they are genuine groves of academic inquiry. The exceptions are maybe a literal handful of evangelical schools and a like number of traditional Catholic schools.
So show some backbone as the year ends. Stand up to the cagy development officers, the scholarship students they pay to call you and especially to your deluded former classmates. Save your money for somewhere that deserves it.
