Universities Breed Anger, Ignorance, and Ingratitude
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
<https://www.nationalreview.co
In turning out woke and broke graduates, they have a lot to answer for.
What do widely diverse crises such as declining demography, increasing
indebtedness, Generation Z's indifference to religion and patriotism, static
rates of home ownership, and a national epidemic of ignorance about American
history and traditions all have in common?
In a word, 21st-century higher education.
A pernicious cycle begins even before a student enrolls. A typical
college-admission application is loaded with questions to the high-school
applicant about gender, equality, and bias rather than about math, language,
or science achievements. How have you suffered rather than what you know and
wish to learn seems more important for admission. The therapeutic mindset
preps the student to consider himself a victim of cosmic forces, past and
present, despite belonging to the richest, most leisured, and most
technologically advanced generation in history. Without a shred of
gratitude, the young student learns to blame his ancestors for what he is
told is wrong in his life, without noticing how the dead made sure that
almost everything around him would be an improvement over 2,500 years of
Western history.
Once admitted, students take classes from faculty who, polls reveal, are
roughly 90 percent liberal. According to one recent survey, Democrat
professors on average outnumber Republican faculty by a 12-to-1 ratio on the
nation's supposedly diverse campuses. But such political asymmetries are
magnified by a certain progressive messianic self-righteousness that turns
the lectern into the pulpit, the captive class into a congregation. The rare
conservative professor is more resigned to the tragedy of the universe and,
in live-and-let-live fashion, vacates the campus arena to the left-wing
gladiators who wish to slay any perceived heterodoxy.
Campus activism has replaced the old university creed of disinterested
inquiry. Students are starting to resemble military recruits in boot camp,
prepping to become hardened social-justice warriors on the frontlines of
America's new wars over climate change, gun control, abortion, and identity
politics. In Camp Yale or Duke Social Warrior Base, they learn just enough
about purported historical oppression to make them dangerous, as they topple
statues, demand the renaming of streets and buildings, and swarm professors
deemed politically incorrect.
No wonder that certain issues - abortion, global warming, illegal
immigration - are mostly off-limits to campus disagreement. Safe spaces,
racial theme houses, and censorship have replaced the 1960s ideals of
unfettered free speech and racial and ethnic integration and assimilation.
Today's students often combine the worst traits of bullying and cowardice.
They are quite ready as a mob to dish it out against unorthodox individuals,
and yet they're suddenly quite vulnerable and childlike when warned to
lighten up about Halloween costumes or a passage in Huckleberry Finn. The
19-year-old student is suddenly sexually mature, a Bohemian, a cosmopolitês
when appetites call - only to revert to Victorian prudery and furor upon
discovering that callousness, hurt, and rejection are tragically integral to
crude promiscuity and sexual congress without love.
The curricula in the social sciences and humanities are largely politicized.
Culture, history, and literature are often taught through the binary lenses
of victims and victimizers, as a deductive zero-sum melodrama. There is
little allowance for tragedy, irony, and paradox or simply the complexities
of the human experience. That preexisting slavery, imperialism, and atrocity
were as common in the New World, Asia, and Africa as in Europe is rarely
mentioned in the boilerplate campus indictment of the West. The reason that
the Aztecs were in Mexico and Central America rather than Madrid was not
that they were morally superior. Nor was it that they lacked imperial
impulse. Rather, they lacked ocean-going technology, sophisticated maritime
navigation, gunpowder, horses, steel, and a military tradition dating back
to Rome. So they confined their genocidal sacrifices and imperial conquests
to their neighbors on the Mexican peninsula.
Stranger still, the actual structure of the university is as reactionary as
its governing ideology is radical.
In a society where almost no one has lifetime job security, professors take
for granted archaic ideas of tenure as a modern career birthright. Yet they
seem reluctant to extend such costly indulgences to other part-time
instructors who are less fortunate.
The dirty little secret on campuses is that a legion of exploited, temporary
lecturers, usually without multiyear contracts, are paid far less than
tenured professors - often to teach the same classes. In short, an entire
caste of low-paid faculty who lack the perks and benefits of their liberal
permanent superiors subsidize thousands of colleges and their supposedly
liberal agendas. The academic mentality is to feel angst about the distant
plight of the would-be illegal immigrant waiting to cross the border; the
angst is a sort of medieval penance for ignoring the exploited lecturer
under one's nose who indirectly supports the perks of the tenured.
Progressive college administrators, in the abstract, love unions and
collective bargainers as long as they stay off campus and far away from
their own exploited teachers. Tenure was originally designed to protect the
sometimes unorthodox and even heretical views of the faculty. Today,
however, professors who preach "diversity" in lockstep do not want to hear
diverse ideas and values, among either students or faculty. Tenure has
become not protection for against-the-grain expression but a merit badge for
the party faithful coming up through the ranks. Try giving a public lecture
on campus about the ill effects of abortion, the inconsistencies of
global-warming advocacy, respect for the Second Amendment, or skepticism
over identity politics. The result would be a student version of the Jacobin
Reign of Terror.
The federal government guarantees student loans to pay skyrocketing tuition
and room and board. That guarantee has empowered crony-capitalist
universities to hike their annual costs far above the rate of inflation -
without much worry over what happens to their customers when and if they
graduate.
Elsewhere in the real world, buyers receive guarantees when they pay for
services. Consumers are appraised of the risks of taking out high-risk
loans. But most colleges and universities are exempt from such oversight. At
first, students don't seem to object - at least when they are in school and
still mesmerized by luxury apartments, latte bars, Club Med fitness centers,
and dreams of six-figure salaries upon graduation as payback for their
progressive fides. Apparently, campuses have adopted the logic of car
dealers who jack up the prices of their autos at buying time with all sorts
of hip, extra accessories that hypnotize consumers into taking out multiyear
loans to purchase luxury models beyond their means.
Eighteen-year-olds entering college are seldom warned by campus financial
officers exactly how long their debt obligations will last - or which majors
are likely to lead to better salaries after graduation. None are given
itemized bills that are broken down to show where their money is going. Many
who will remain in debt for years might have wished to know how much they
paid for the vast swamp of non-teaching facilitators and high-paid
administrators.
Colleges today can never assure students that after graduation they will at
least test higher on the standardized tests than when they entered. If
colleges could do that, they'd long ago have required exit examinations to
boast of their success. Instead, the higher-education industry insists that
almost any baccalaureate degree is a good deal, without worrying about how
much it costs or whether their brand certifies any real knowledge. Again,
the logic is that of consumer branding - as we see with Coca-Cola, Nike, and
Google - in which status rather than cost-benefit efficacy is purchased.
Does anyone believe that a graduating senior of tony Harvard, Yale, or
Stanford knows more than a counterpart at Hillsdale or St. John's?
The net result is a current generation that owes $1.6 trillion in college
loans to the federal government. And that debt is now affecting the entire
country, including those who never went to college, who as taxpayers
eventually may be asked to forgive some if not all the debt. An entire
generation of Americans has costly degrees; many cannot use them to find
well-paying jobs, and they increasingly forgo or delay marriage,
child-rearing, and buying a car or home until their mid-twenties or
thirties. All that pretty much sums up the profile of Antifa, Black Lives
Matter, and Occupy Wall Street adherents - or the environmental-studies
major who is shocked that a skilled electrician makes three times more than
he does.
Colleges are turning out woke and broke graduates. They are not up to
ensuring the country that they will pass on to the next generation an
America that's as prosperous, secure, and ethical as what they inherited and
have so often faulted.
Ignorance, arrogance, and ingratitude are now the brands of the
undergraduate experience. No wonder a once duly honored institution, higher
education, is now either the butt of jokes or cynically seen as a
credentialing factory.
NRO contributor VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
<https://www.nationalreview.co
and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author,
most recently, of The Case for Trump. @vdhanson
<https://www.twitter.com/vdhan
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