Universities sowing the seeds of their own obsolescence
By Victor Davis Hanson, July 4, 2020
When mobs tore down a statue of U.S. Grant & defaced a
monument to African American veterans of the Civil War,
many people wondered whether the protesters had ever learned
anything in high school or college. Did any of these
iconoclasts know the difference between Grant & Robert E. Lee?
Could they recognize the name “Gettysburg”? Could they even
identify the decade in which the Civil War was fought?
Universities are certainly teaching our youth to be confident,
loud & self-righteous. But the media blitz during these past
several weeks of protests, riots & looting also revealed a
generation that is poorly educated & yet petulant & self-
assured without justification. Many of the young people on
the televised front lines of the protests are in their 20s.
But most appear juvenile, at least in comparison to their
grandparents — survivors of the Great Depression & WWII.
How can so many so sheltered & prolonged adolescents claim
to be all-knowing? Ask questions like these, & the answers
ultimately lead back to the university.
Millions of those who graduate from college or drop out
do so in arrears. There is some $1.5 trillion in aggregate
student debt in the U.S. Such burdens sometimes delay marriage.
They discourage child-rearing. They make home ownership hard
— along with all the other experiences we associate with
the transition to adulthood.
The universities, some with multibillion-dollar endowments,
will accept no moral responsibility. They aren't overly
worried that many of their indebted graduates discover their
majors don’t translate into well-paid jobs or guarantee
employers that grads can write, speak or think cogently.
One unintended consequence of the chaotic response to the
COVID-19 epidemic & the violence that followed the police
killing of George Floyd is a growing re-examination of
the circumstances that birthed the mass protests.
There would be far less college debt if higher education,
rather than the federal government, guaranteed its own
students’ loans. If universities backed loans with their
endowments and infrastructure, college presidents could be
slashing costs. They would ensure that graduates were more
likely to get good-paying jobs thanks to rigorous coursework
and faculty accountability.
Taxpayers who are hectored about their supposed racism,
homophobia & sexism don’t enjoy such finger-wagging from
loud, sheltered, 20-something moralists. Perhaps taxpayers
will no longer have to subsidize the abuse if higher education
is deemed to be a politicized institution and thus its
endowment income ruled to be fully taxable.
If socialism has become a campus creed, maybe Ivy League
schools can be hit with an annual “wealth tax” on their
massive endowments in order to redistribute revenue to
poorer colleges.
It's hard to square the circle of angry graduates having
no jobs with their unaccountable professors who so poorly
trained students while enjoying lifelong tenure. Why does
academia guarantee lifetime employment to those who can't
guarantee that a graduate gets a decent job?
The epidemic & lockdown required distance learning, but at
full price. The idea that universities can still charge
regular rates when students are forced to stay home isn't
just an unsustainable practice, but veritable suicide.
If one can supposedly learn well enough from downloads,
Zoom talks & Skype lectures, then why pay $50,000 or more
for that service from your basement?
Universities are renaming buildings & encouraging statue
removal & cancel culture. But they assume they'll always
have a red line to the frenzied trajectory of the mob they
helped birth. If the slaveholder & the robber baron from
the distant past deserve no statue, no eponymous hallway or
plaza, then why should the names Yale & Stanford be exempt
from the frenzied name-changing & iconoclasm? Are they seen
as billion-dollar brands, akin to Windex or Coke, that
stamp their investor students as elite “winners”?
The current chaos has posed existential questions of fairness
& transparency that the university can't answer because to
do so would reveal utter hypocrisy. Instead, the university’s
defense has been to virtue-signal left-wing social activism
to hide or protect its traditional self-interested mode of
profitable business for everyone — staff, faculty, admini-
stration, contractors — except the students who borrow to
pay for a lot of it.
How strange that higher education’s monotonous embrace of
virtue signaling, political proselytizing & loud social
justice activism is now sowing the seeds of its own
obsolescence and replacement. If being “woke” means that
the broke & unemployed are graduating to ignorantly smashing
statues, denying free speech to others & institutionalizing
cancel culture, then the public would rather pass on what
spawned all of that in the first place.
Taxpayers do not yet know what to replace the university
with — wholly online courses and lectures, apolitical new
campuses or broad-based vocational education — only that a
once hallowed institution is becoming McCarthyite, malignant
and, in the end, just a bad deal.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-davis-hanson/victor-davis-hanson-universities-sowing-the-seeds-of-their-own-obsolescence-2067860/
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