Somebody thinks there’s hope for American universities
American universities today are pretty much what you’d expect them to have been if the Soviets had won the Cold War (except more expensive). Yet, the Soviets lost the war and the Soviet Union lost not only its vassal states but, in fact, itself, as it has been replaced by the geographically downsized Russia.
So what explains the Letf’s continuing stranglehold on American universities, and is there any hope it can be broken? Well, James Piereson thinks we’re seeing it happen right now, as the bizarre, alternative-reality ideologies of Marxism, “diversity” and “multiculturalism” have proven cruelly and conclusively wrong. The fundamentalist anti-Americanism and anti-Capitalism of American universitites have started to alarm some business leaders and other civic-minded individuals:
Perhaps the most promising development on campus in recent years has been the creation of various centers and programs dedicated to the study of political liberty and the history of free institutions–for example, the James Madison Program on American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton, the Gerst Program at Duke, the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College, the Political Theory Project at Brown, and the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization at Colgate. Such programs have grown out of a collaboration between a handful of donors, often alumni concerned about left-wing trends at their institutions, and conservative and moderate professors concerned that students are learning a great deal about racial and gender identity, but little about the intellectual foundations of their civilization.
The problem for American universities isn’t just that they’re heading down an increasingly irrelevant academic track, but, and perhaps more importantly, that they’re losing ground to competing foreign universities. American universities are overpriced and underperforming, so devoid of intellectual life that they hardly offer their students more than the opportunity to get high and to get it on. Such a lifestyle can easily be supplied at far more attractive locations and at much cheaper rates.
I personally doubt that American universities will be able to reform. They have too much institutional power. Wealthy individual and donors will continue to pour money into into the universities’ coffers, if for no other reason than to buy a spot in the networks of other wealthy and influential donors. The universities will have their clocks cleaned by overseas competition, albeit slowly and over time. Indian, and, especially, Chinese universities will collect ever growing proportions of the Nobel Prizes and other prestigous awards as the decades pass, as increasing n numbers of researchers will find that they can enjoy a greater academic freedom in other countries than they can in P.C.-infested American colleges. Middle-class families will send their kids to lower-cost schools in sun-kissed countries across the globe. American schools will become the choice of prestige-buying members of the upper classes, academic second-raters who’ll expect little more than a nice diploma.
Update: I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation for why the words “hunting terroritsts are offensive”, probably something along the lines of “one person’s terrorists is another person’s benign server of milk and cookies.” Like I said, American universities are what you would have expect them to be had the Soviets won.
Update 2: Swarthmore’s president Alfred Bloom apparently found it necessary to validate my point. Bloom is a college president? Well, yes, of course he is.
