“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”–Adam Smith, 1777.
I thought about this quote and its context this week as I watched our privileged youth hit the streets and campuses in a demonstration of the nihilistic rot that has in too many cases overtaken elite institutions of higher education in our country. We have finally come to a confrontation with the culmination of the half century “march through the institutions” inspired and led by Marxists Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Gramsci. The response will be to fire a bunch of university presidents and issue a lot of assurances, but firing presidents will not be enough. There needs to be a complete overhaul of admissions and human resources that reaches to the core of the mission, which should be to seek the truth, not “social justice”. Ending DEI programs in admissions, hiring, and promotion is a good start, but the purge needs to reach every corner in pursuit of attacking the ruin that has been allowed to permeate many once-great institutions.
Jim,
There is little that can be added to your assessment. It is fortunate that men like Christopher Rufo have pursued this with vigor and revealed the stark decline.
Repopulating the colleges and universities with persons of integrity will be a major undertaking as the supply of those with a regard for truth is not great after this many years of decay.
The system is an absolute disgrace. Academia is a corrupt monopoly with academics and administrators making incredible salaries while adjuncts working as near slave laborers provide much of the actual instruction. It has promoted student loans to remove itself from market forces. It has created a situation where young adults can’t afford to start families or buy their first house due to student debt. It is an out of control monopoly that must be opened to competition.
How can competition be introduced? What if legislators required State Universities to provide equivalent class credits via examinations. The instruction needed to pass these examinations would be provided by the free market. Students receiving these credits would receive the same degree as those who sat through the courses, and could mix actual classes with credits via exams to attain their degrees.
Detailed course content requirements already exist allowing community college students to transfer credits. Content requirements could be created for higher level courses. Students could get an education provided by competitive free market providers and get the same degree as if they sat through the courses.
Given the cost of higher ed, this would create an explosion of free market providers of educational services and end the current abused monopoly status of academia.
There are long time examples of competitive private education successfully teaching very complex subjects. Pilots most often get their training from private competitive providers. Passing the various levels of FAA exams has provided all the pilots who operate in the US, and holding a US Pilot Certificate is a world recognized accomplishment. The technology that this industry has developed to teach very complex subjects is amazing. The same thing can happen to other subject areas if a way to allow competition is created.
As I look back on my experience at a state university I can’t think of a single course where understanding the material could not be determined by testing.
By God’s grace there is a remnant. Grand-daughter who availed herself of the Thomas Jefferson Center at UT Austin, finished Plan II with honors, is graduating from Baylor Law School tomorrow, finishing in the top 10% nationally on the ethics part of the bar exam which is administered before the rest of the bar in July, & has accepted the law school’s job offer to be their legal writer this coming year.
Congratulations, Ann. Fortunately, there are islands of excellence like the TJC, just not nearly enough of them.
Amen!!
Notice that all of these anti-Israeli/anti-Jewish demonstrations are taking place at the country’s leading universities which are located in liberal mostly large population areas of the country. All conducive to zealous media coverage. That makes it pretty obvious these are not spontaneous localized demonstrations organized and funded by students and a few faculty. Nothing happening in Lubbock, College Station, Waco, Baton Rouge, Norman or even Houston. Follow the money to those behind this disgrace to American ideals.
Keep it simple. Stop all DEI and woke studies and curricula. Then layoff all of the rot from the top down. Cut off all government funding in the form of grants for DEI program research.
Stop feeding the beast through bloated traditional 4-year federal loan and scholarship programs. Shift focus and funding both, public and private, to Vocational Arts, Science and Technology (VAST) programs that create career ready jobs for productive taxpayer citizens.
Any job/profession that can be codified, quantitatively measured, and automated based upon the laws of physics and mathematical algorithms are already evaporating whilst the pace of change is hyperbolic. The marvel and the danger of AI is that it can’t be “un-ivented”.
Lastly, we all better start speaking the truth loudly and firmly in love. It is not “anti-semitic pro-palestinian rhetoric”. It’s bald-faced Jew hatred.