Ground zero of 'woke'
Universities are making themselves not just disliked and disreputable but ultimately irrelevant and replaceable
Higher education is failing its constituents: The graduates, the employers who hire them and the U.S. economy. A Bachelor’s degree is next to worthless and the high costs create an elitist snobbery among people in every segment of the system. (Photo: Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Endowments at U.S. institutions of higher education have reached epoch proportions. During the COVID outbreak and pandemic, corporate and well-heeled individual contributions to major colleges and universities have totaled in the trillions of dollars.
Just a few examples are Harvard, which has reached $40 billion in endowments, while principle rival Yale stands at $30 billion. Another prestigious university, Princeton, has piled up over $25 billion.
The result is these universities have established budgets that are not only out of touch with the reality experienced by the average America, but are also disconnected from market influence. That has translated to these schools raising the cost of education and a rate that outstrips inflation. The outcome from that is that student debt has risen precipitously as these institutions have conflated riches with effectiveness and importance.
Instead, they are losing their lofty place in society’s estimation of their value. This also has far-reaching ramifications, causing a deterioration in the most trusted halls of government: The military, our federal law enforcement services and intelligent agencies. The universities themselves fail us by offering a pseudo-education that is nothing more than an ideological brain-washing of our students.
Long ago, American higher education abandoned the humanities for STEM programs. While science, technology, engineering and mathematics are vitally important to the success of our nation, arts and humanities are equally important.
Those studies are more ethereal, stretching the mind and imagination and providing the individual a chance to ground themselves in a broad spectrum of education that not only assists them in their chosen field of endeavor but also makes them a stronger, better prepared citizen of our nation.
Humanitarian and social concepts are not formed in STEM classes. They develop by learning what else is possible in the world by learning about art, literature, history, culture and geography, all sadly missing or grossly under-emphasized at all levels of higher education, from community colleges to the Ivy League schools.
These courses are no longer encouraged in our colleges and universities. All are given short shrift even in our state schools of higher education. Instead, those studies have been replaced with indoctrination in white rage, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and The New York Times’ 1619 Project.
Those are now being taught even at the primary and secondary education levels, and parents are becoming fed up with it, fighting it at every turn. The American reputation of global academic superiority has been always rested on the sciences: Mathematics, physics, technology, medicine, and engineering — in other words, not because of the humanities and social sciences, but despite them.
An arts and humanities curriculum in association with STEM programs is vital to a well-rounded education from today’s institutions of higher education. Unfortunately, there is little to no emphasis on traditional arts and humanities today. (Photo: Franciscan University of Steubenville) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The humanities have become too often anti-humanistic. And the social sciences are deductively anti-scientific. Both quasi-religious woke disciplines have eroded confidence in colleges and universities, infected even the STEM disciplines and professional schools, and torn apart the civic unity of the United States. Indeed, much of the current Jacobin revolution was birthed and fueled by American universities, despite their manifest hypocrisies and derelictions.
The elitist attitude and the fraudulent, racist curricula, together with the self-importance those huge endowments foster, creates arrogant, aggressive attitudes among college and university administrators and faculty members that preclude them abandoning their woke agenda. They have deluded themselves into believing this collection of lies, falsely rewritten history and “black racism” is what is best for society.
They are dead wrong.
Just as importantly, spending per pupil is rarely calibrated to whether graduating students leave better educated than when they arrived — the ostensible purpose of universities. There are certainly no “exit tests” for certification of the B.A. degree, in the manner of, say, a bar exam, that might set a minimum national standard for any acquisition of knowledge.
Such standardized reassurance would rescue the B.A. degree from the growing general public perception that the campus has become politically warped, fraudulently therapeutic, a poor measure of real knowledge, and is now largely a cattle brand of a sort that qualifies its holder for some sort of non-physical labor.
The result over the last few years of this relatively new higher-education marriage of big money and radical ideas is a strange disconnect. On the one hand, never have elite ― though often indebted) ― college students been so demanding of apartment-style dorm living, latte bars, and rock-climbing walls, while virtue-signaling their compensatory proletariat bona fides: Rich privileged students, regardless of color, socioeconomic background or pedigree all pretending to be poor and not only self-aware ― they are no such thing ― as well as world-aware, which they also lack.
Universities are, for the first time in history, in the unique ― some would say enviable ― position to subsidize the traditional student loan themselves. But they don’t. They outsource that responsibility to a financially strapped federal government that guarantees the student loan programs without making any serious effort to hold delinquent borrowers accountable. The result of that moral hazard of never being forced to pay for rampant inflationary spikes in tuition, room, and board costs, is that universities over the last 30 years spent like drunken sailors on non-essentials: “Diversity czars,” in loco parentis therapeutic “centers” and Club Med accommodations — even as at the core test scores dived, grade inflation soared, and graduates increasingly did not impress employers.
Student debt is at an all-tme high. The aggregate $1.7 trillion owed by students nationwide is slowing their marriage plans, having a family, buying a house in their 20s or even their 30s and more easily slide into extended adolescent. (Photo Illustration: America’s Conservative Voice) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
So, universities themselves are largely responsible for the current $1.7 trillion in aggregate studentloan debt. Such a staggering encumbrance is not just the concern of higher education, but affects the entire country in manifest ways, well aside from emboldening our global rivals and enemies. Even communist China is spending far more of their higher education budgets on the sciences, math, and liberal arts than mental health services, social justice crusades, and diversity, equity, and inclusion audits.
Students with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan obligations are likely to marry later, delay child rearing, be unable to purchase a home in their 20s or even 30s, and more easily slide into prolonged adolescence. The country itself is experiencing a glut of the overly- but not necessarily well-educated: History’s menu for radicalized and angry youth who feel they are properly credentialed with various letters after their names but suspect they lack the training and skills to enter the workforce, be productive, and earn commensurate good pay.
There is also something terribly wrong about well-compensated, tenured professors of the social sciences and humanities — whose own lives are conventionally materialist and bourgeoise — spooning out the usual radical race/class boilerplate to indebted students who in a sense have borrowed heavily to pay a large percentage of faculty salaries.
Few of today’s woke 20-somethings will graduate with rigorous instruction in language, logic, and the inductive methods with a shared knowledge of literature, history, science, and math. At far less cost, they would likely find better online classes in those now ossified subjects than in the courses that they went into hock in order to finance at a pretensive institution that still considers itself ― with no evidence whatsoever ― to be prestigious.
Never has higher education been so at odds with not just the general pulse of America, but with its major traditions, institutions, and very Constitution. Most recently, Americans have been urged by university law schools and political science departments to eliminate the 233-year-old Electoral College, to pack the Supreme Court after 150 years of a nine-justice bench, to end the 180-year filibuster, to admit two new states to gain four progressive senators, and to question the constitutional cornerstone of two senators per state.
It is chiefly the university that scolds Americans that their customs, traditions, and laws have little moral weight, that they are merely constructs reflecting “white supremacy,” detached from either a natural law common to all humans or customs carefully cross-examined and honed after decades and even centuries of use in the public square.
Far from being a valid social ideology, “wokeness” as taught on college campuses is undermining a generation of students. Rather than providing solutions, It fosters resentment among its adherents, becoming in many ways a new theology. (Photo: John Gomez/Shutterstock.com) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Once abstract campus theorizing about open borders, hiring and admissions based on race, zero bail even for repeat felons, critical-legal-theory district attorneys, and Green New Deal energy policies have now all seeped out to warp the daily lives of Americans. Yet unlike free speech movements of the 1960s, in 2021 it is the university that now wars on the First Amendment, castigating unwelcome expression as “hate speech” if found inconvenient for its agendas.
It is the university where the relevant amendments to the Constitution governing due process and confronting one’s accusers is jettisoned when the accused is of the wrong gender or race or both, particularly in cases of sexual assault accusations. It is the university that has renounced the legacy of the civil rights movement of the 1960s that once championed open housing, desegregation, and racially blind criteria.
Instead, many colleges now allow some students ― those self-identified as “marginalized” ― to pick their dormitory roommates on the basis of race, to declare certain areas of campus racially segregated “safe spaces,” and to discriminate in student admissions and faculty hiring. If Martin Luther King, Jr. were to return to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford and to repeat verbatim the speech he gave in 1965 at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, about equality, shared humanity, and the need to excel at whatever task one takes on, regardless of his station (“Be the best of whatever you are”), he would likely be jeered and derided as an integrationist and assimilationist.
One final irony? From the university we hear calls to either end or reform radically our major institutions and cultural referents: Recalibrate the First and Second Amendments, scrap the border, tear down that statue, rename this plaza, do away with existing classes of gender pronouns, heckle speakers, and destroy the lives of unwoke faculty. And yet from such critical faculty scolds, there is oddly zero self-criticism or indeed any self-reflection of their own shortcomings.
Do academics ponder over why the reputations of their universities are eroding in the public mind? What exactly is the campus responsibility for graduating students with bleak job possibilities and unsustainable debt? Why is the clueless 21-year-old graduate now the stock joke of popular culture and comedy? How did the enlightened institutionalize a two-tier system of privileged tenured grandees resting on the backs of exploited contingent and part-time faculty? Why are critics of a supposedly non-transparent American society so secretive about their own admissions, hiring, and budgetary policies? Most importantly, how did the locus of cheap anti-corporate boilerplate become so deeply reliant on siphoning mega-corporate cash?
The racialized civil strife of 2020-21, and indeed the entire woke and cancel-culture revolutions, originated ultimately from campus fixtures who never suffer the real-life consequences of their abstractions. Meanwhile, China, the greatest threat that the United States has faced in 30 years, smiles at our universities’ importation of most of the bankrupt and suicidal ideas abroad, from Frankfurt School Fascism and Foucauldian postmodern relativism to Soviet sclerosis and Maoist cultural revolutionary suicide.
Unless the university itself is rebooted, its rejection of meritocracy, its partisan venom, its tribalism, its war with free speech and due process, and its inability to provide indebted students with competitive educations will all ensure that it is not just disliked and disreputable but ultimately irrelevant and certainly replaceable.
Mike Nichols is an advocate of the counterrevolution with a four-step plan to defeat Fascism: We Organize. We Stand. We Resist. We Fight. He is a regular contributor at the GenZConservative news website and has a regular blog at Facebook presence at Americas Conservative Voice-Facebook.