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.
Diversity by conformity. Libertarian socialists. What could go wrong? Last time I checked over a hundred million.
No worries, not a tragedy, just a statistic. Josef would be proud.
When I went to university in 1970 only something like 8 or maybe 10 out of 120 in my graduating class did the same. My graduating class of 120 had likely pared down from 180 in elementary school. University was the domain of the few. It is absolutely embarrassing to see the total lack of ability in spelling, grammar, and punctuation today. I think stupid people are in charge of the education system and the reason spelling, grammar, and punctuation are irrelevant is that today’s educators have no effing idea what the rules are.
I was an undergrad a bit later than you. I was unpleasantly surprised by how quickly things changed when I returned to university for grad studies a few years after I got my B. Sc. That’s when the rot in the system began to take hold and it’s mutated ever since.
It happens to every great civilization. The internal discipline that allows them to prosper fades. The prosperity allows people to avoid consequences. If you look you can see it all around the US. I think it’s human nature. People can’t stand prosperity.
People can’t stand prosperity.
Not quite. People can’t stand prosperity or, for that matter, any kind of success that they themselves can’t have.
I noticed that while I was teaching. I encountered a lot of people, both colleagues as well as staff, who resented that I had a degree, let alone the two I had when I started. By the time I finished my doctorate, that resentment was openly, and shamelessly, displayed.
Rather than being proud and pleased that the institution had people with that much education, and I was by no mean the only one there, I often found myself ridiculed, if not persecuted, for it.
So much for all that team-building malarkey we were expected to swallow whole by the administration.
VDH is an American Treasure.
What a brilliantly written and salient article about college today. I had no idea VDH received his undergraduate degree at UC Santa Cruz. That UC campus seems “below him”, unworthy of a man of VDH’s intellect. I am so glad that VDH is speaking and writing so profusely these days. His academically refined voice of wisdom and reason is so urgently needed in our decaying society
His solutions are spot on and sorely needed … but as he concludes in a resigned tone, none of his proposed solutions will ever come to pass. No, I fear the “solution” will become FREE* college for everyone! thus further diluting the academic pool and rendering a bachelors degree as far more worthless than journeyman carpenters education.
* of course, to the Un-woke (we conservatives) … nothing is “free” … somebody PAYS the bill.
Thanks for finding this article Kate. I can’t get enough of VDH
It’s free as long as conservatives agree to be chumps and suckers, and keep paying for it. As soon as conservatives en masse tell their governments to go and pound sand, and beging moving to a secure BTC type set up, and start refusing to pay any more taxes en masse, what the f88k are they going to do? The only thing the government fears is people refusing to play their game.
If you are conservative, and pay ever increasing taxes, and work ever harder to support people who rob and hate you, then you are a f#c#ing chump, and I have zero sympathy for you.
The solution is staring you in the face. If Poland, of all places, could pull it off in the 1980s at the height of the Cold War, while sharing a land border with the Soviet Union, then coddled, well-to-do conservatives can do a far more powerful thing with far less material risk to life and limb.
All it takes is a boycott-and-refusenik movement of your own. I will stand with anyone who is ready to bankrupt an out of control government.
The movement must NOT take to the streets. It must be mass civil disobedience. Run the census-takers out of dodge, by ALL agreeing to tell them to pound sand. Refuse to pay taxes. How? Quit your job. En masse. Resign.
Bank coming to take your house? They won’t be taking anything on your block because you are ALL defaulting on your mortgages simultaneously. See how it works?
The trouble with conservatives is that they love to whine, but they really can’t fathom giving up their worthless savings for a real chance at freedom. And hence they don’t care about winning.
Indeed, Hanson is a marvel. Prolific but nonetheless fresh. He carries about him a rare spirit of humility which is reflected in his prose style. Bret Stephens, George Will, and the other self-preening never- Trumpers should take note that you can support Trump without feeling that your own character is threatened. Hanson joins Conrad Black, David Solway, and Rex Murphy on my short list of must-reads.
I’m reading VDH’s “The Case for Trump” and just finished the equally brilliantly insightful “Right Here Right Now,” by PMSH.
If you want to truly understand the polarization, intolerance and projection of the left and why they blame the serfs for their failures to get elected, the nepotism in media and the lengths they’ll go to for power, I highly recommend these works.
We truly are fortress North America on a free enterprise island of individualism and will have to work hard to keep it that way.
Don’t blame gen x …we followed the rules and are now wondering why the “betters” have sold out our culture. now we are competing with gen y and millennial’s. These morons can’t even understand the trades and basic math.I have hope for Gen z however, they frown upon the excesses of previous generations, and have no time for the P.C. crap of the idiot millennial
It’s a racket but no one is forcing students and their parents to spend thousands of dollars on a university education. Eventually people will figure it out. Wokeness destroys everything it touches. I give existing universities low odds of returning to their former glory as places of rigorous higher education, too much momentum and religious like fervor.
It’ll be interesting to see what follows. Will new universities be created that return to classical education? Will STEM and medicine flee the sinking ship and form exclusively technology and applied science universities? Will non-STEM shift to low cost online universities that feature only the best of the best professors and rid themselves of all but essential non teaching office staff? What will happen to college sports?
I think tech and applied science education (certificate, degree and diploma) will ascend as liberal arts colleges decline. The backlash to the flaky and frivolous Woke nonsense will be a generation that desires practical, meaningful education. Guys are already abandoning universities. Lots of examples in history of 180 degree changes in culture in a short time period.
I sent my three kids to college, but I did it the same way I did in the mid 1970’s and the same way VDH did it … my kids were taught to treat their college years as a “vow of poverty”. They were students, they weren’t on vacation for 4-years. So I sent them to college “on the cheap”. They went to two years of Community College (which cost next to nothing) and after EASILY getting top grades (CC was much easier than their rigorous HS) they transferred to UCLA and CAL POLY – they all got into TOP colleges. Then, I only had to pay for two years of (relatively cheap) State University tuition. However, when my youngest son attended UCLA 5-years after my daughter … his tuition was much higher AND it kept increasing EVERY SINGLE SEMESTER over the he 2-years he was there. Four increases! The colleges became “empowered” by Obama’s takeover of the student loan system to jack up the cost of college. Obama gave the hardcore LEFTIST colleges a massive ($1.5 Trillion) gift courtesy of the taxpayers.
We were able to pay for most of our kids college education out of pocket. We did take out small student loans (in our kids names) because they carried very small interest rates, and we paid them off, which was a start of my kids excellent credit rating. Our kids left college owing no $$ to anybody. This was my GIFT to my kids. But they had to WORK (summers) to provide their “fun” spending money. We paid; room & board, food, tuition, books, and incidentals. My kids were responsible for their own “movie” and “concert” funding.
I wanted my kids to have the college degree, because it is a required admission ticket for many jobs. However! If any of my kids had wanted to go into the trades after college … I would have fully supported that choice. I just wanted them to have … a … degree, and to have received a well rounded education as a platform for their adult life. However, I never “chose” a future for them. Their choice of a career? It was up to them.
Hanson is rare, but not unique. Jordan Peterson is another example. They and their like could be founding new on-line schools. Sooner or later some of them will, because it is necessary, but I think it will be a while and many more young lives wasted before it happens.
While my son was studying MATH at UCLA … he regularly used The Khan Academy online … for extremely advanced math subjects. He said their video instructionals were massively helpful. Far more helpful than his professor or TA’s. Yeah … online self-directed college is the future. All I paid for was a piece of paper … he got most of his education on his own.
// This week, I read a book about the crisis of political correctness on the university campus. Professors, it argues, are overwhelmingly left-wing and teach mainly books that promote collectivist ideas; courses are openly hostile to religious values; students are censorious and hold extreme views; the university enforces a relativism in which any minority view, however damaging to society, must be accepted.
The book is God and Man at Yale, the 1951 bestseller by William F. Buckley, Jr., //
The real campus crisis? The shoddy work of those who cry crisis
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/opinion/article-the-real-campus-crisis-the-shoddy-work-of-those-who-cry-crisis/
Many of the universities of today are not institutes of learning, they are indoctrination camps. Why do you think the democratic party in the US support the idea of free university, its the place to put the final polish on the next generation of revolutionary socialist ground troops. The best thing that we should do to save our future is to cut off all government funding to universities then tax them on the value of their property, make them responsible for backing up their student debt. I suspect you’d see big changes fast.
// I suspect you’d see big changes fast. //
Or at least by the next time you wanted a doctor.
Pro-Beijing officials say a Hong Kong school course that teaches critical thinking has created a generation of rebels.
https://twitter.com/photojournalism/status/1168374673316483073
&
People who claim that liberal-arts educations are “indoctrinating” a generation with ideas of social justice are generally the same people, whether they’re in Toronto, Washington or Beijing
https://twitter.com/DougSaunders/status/1168528892610711553
We see the product and it is less than encouraging.
When I emigrated to the U.S. in my early teens, I went to a nondescript parochial school. It was mostly working class white with a few better off, with a Hispanic minority. The class before mine had one black. We elected him student body president. I believe the school had three Asians, my cousin (who was born here), my brother, and me.
What impressed me most, coming from a socially more stratified society, was every single kid owned a broken down jalopy, which they bought with their summer earnings. Even the rich kids were too proud to get a better car with daddy’s money. They spent all weekend working on the car to keep it running, and it was their pride and joy.
Most of those kids were not going to college. They graduated from high school, went into a trade, and got married. But they taught themselves to be hard working, and mechanically very knowledgeable. I thought they were the backbone of the U.S. They made the difference between the U.S. and the effete decaying old societies in Europe. They were why the U.S. won the Second World War for Europe and Asia. Unfortunately, most of them were duped into believing the Democratic party was the party of the working man.
When I became more politically aware, I knew that the truth was exactly the opposite. And that was what the Reagan Democrats were all about. Reagan saw that there were the people who kept the trough and people who fed at the trough on one side, and all the hard working people who only want to provide for their families on the other. And he convinced those hard working men that their future was with the Republican party.
Unfortunately, the Bushies were part of the “elite”, and betrayed the Reagan revolution. The globalists who took control of the Republican party had no love for the working man at all, they wanted cheap unskilled labor. The working men saw this and went back to their Democratic roots. Until Trump fermented the second revolution.
Having said all of that, I must confess that by temperament and preference, I hardly fit the image of that working man. Not that I didn’t try. I bought a VW bug because that was the one car I could work on. My father had been a professor of literature in China, but became very handy, mostly out of necessity, here, and I learned from him. When I was younger, I tried to do as much around the house as possible, but honestly that is not my forte. I am an academic by nature, and would have been deliriously happy to do research in physics. But I wasn’t good enough, either because I wasn’t really smart enough, or single minded enough. So I found my niche. My forte was solving engineering problems of say a month to half a year duration. But in doing so I think I actually earned my keep more, and came to some realizations.
It is fine for a society to have some philosophers and dreamers. Ancient Greece had Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. But Greece had what a few million people, if that. Does the U.S. really need hundreds of them? Or realistically, more like hundreds of thousands of them. That is what our universities are turning into with all the non traditional majors.
We need a foundation of ethics, and thus philosophers. But what really advanced the first world was the creation of a society where almost everyone can have the “Life of Riley”. (It was a fifties TV series on the great life of an auto worker.) And that means science and technology, mostly technological advances. You can say a society advances with its technological advances.
But what the universities have devolved into is the haven of dreamers who do not create, but think society has an obligation to support them, royally, because they dream and create babble. (I think the reason is they cannot do STEM if their lives depended on it. But then I may be prejudiced.) They even think they have a right to dictate what society does.
As I said, it’s been the two ends squeezing the middle for a long time. But the two ends have both bloated. Too many “highly educated” people who contribute nothing to society, but who think of themselves as the elite, and too many people willing to just feed at the trough.
We do not have a better society a priori if more people went to college, if those people do not learn anything useful there. Better we go back to the society we had in the fifties, where most people didn’t go to college, and found trades where they could really contribute, and live “the life of Riley.” Instead of creating more and more people who think of themselves as “highly educated,” but in reality has learned nothing useful, and feel discontent because they are not well rewarded for their non contribution.