So
much has gone wrong with the modern university that one scarcely knows where to
begin. Innumerable books have been written on the subject, from
Hilda Neatby's 1953 So
Little for the Mind to Michael Rectenwald's 2018 Springtime
for Snowflakes. Articles abound in the
thousands. As a former laborer in the educational vineyards, I have
attempted a modest contribution to the literature, consisting of three books
and dozens of essays and articles, to no particular avail. The
academic outlook continues to degenerate, following an agenda that seems to be
unstoppable, as if programmed by some ideological Doomsday Machine.
The
reasons for the precipitous decline in academic rigor, standards, and outcomes
are many and have been thoroughly canvassed. It may be worth
bulleting some of them here to suggest the scope of the problem:
- the emergence of a therapeutic culture absolving the
individual from the demanding and sacrificial pursuit of excellence,
valorizing feeling over thought and leading to an observable dumbing down
of student capacity and performance. As Philip Rieff wrote in
his magisterial The
Triumph of the Therapeutic, "the cry of 'one feels' [has
become] the caveat of the therapeutic."
- political factionalism accentuated by the rise of the
postmodern left more interested in indoctrination than scholarship.
- the scandal of affirmative action based on criteria of
race and sex coupled with quotas placed on qualified white male and Asian
students – a numerus
clausus rationalized by an ethos of guilt reparation.
- equity hiring protocols, the professional counterpart
of affirmative action, favoring women, blacks, and indigenous candidates
regardless of discipline-specific competence. In Rectenwald's
words, such "blatant tokenism in hiring and promotion jeopardizes the
integrity of higher education."
- the incursion of gender politics and the social justice
movement into the academic "space" where it has no business
being.
- the curtailing of academic freedom, which, as Frank
Furedi writes in What's
Happened to the University?, has been "devalued through the
sanctification of other values" – coercive regulation of conduct,
speech codes, politically correct decrees against giving offense, sexual
policing, etc.
- opening the gates to a vast and intellectually
unprepared student clientele in part for reasons of subprime
pseudo-justice – everyone deserves a university education irrespective of
native ability – and in part for crass monetary purposes – prohibitive
tuition fees and per student government grants. This latter
goes hand in hand with the industrialization of the university as a corporate
enterprise seeking profit rather than truth.
- the transformation of a reading culture into a visual
and digital culture, rendering students progressively incapable of
mastering the nuances, complexities, and semantic rules of written
language as well as the habit of, like, coherent, like,
conversation. Like, I kid you not, dude!
I have
just been perusing a towering stack of student essays that my wife, a
university prof, has been grading over the last week. The spectacle
of ineptitude, ignorance, and tactical evasion of once standard commitment is
light-years beyond belief. According to my reckoning, perhaps four
fifths of the students registered in both her arts undergraduate courses and
graduate seminars exhibit one or several of the following deficiencies. To
put it in bullet form, they:
- lack interest in anything apart from their congenial
pursuits, a phenomenon demonstrably less evident in precursor generations.
- lack coping ability with real-world events, against
which they seek not engagement, but insulation – the infantile or
"snowflake" mentality that has grown so prominent.
- have little knowledge of
English grammar and concinnity.
- suffer from impoverished
vocabularies.
- cannot follow text or
topic directions.
- are given to outright plagiarism from online sources,
which, extrapolating from the submissions I am examining, is a tactic
adopted by approximately one fifth of the cohort in question.
- claim exemptions on grounds of disability where almost
anything, from exam anxiety to memory failings to agoraphobia to time
management issues, counts as a certified disability in the current
permissive and anti-scholarly climate.
- are incapable of reading
text with understanding or of discriminating among narrative planes – i.e.,
cannot tell the differences among the view of the author, the view of the
narrator, and the view of the characters in the novel under
discussion. The almost complete absence of hermeneutic
discernment is pervasive. Reading, as Furedi points out
in Power
of Reading: From Socrates to Twitter, connotes more than literacy,
"involv[ing] interpretation and imagination" in an effort to
"gain meaning." Of course, reading in Furedi's terms
depends upon literacy, so it is not surprising that these mature students
tend to function on a grade eight level.
Admittedly,
many of my wife's students are of foreign extraction and simply lack the
language skills necessary to perform passably. They would require
immersion and ESL courses, which the university in its greed for numbers and
mural irresponsibility has failed to provide. What is far more
distressing is the brute fact that the majority of native English-speakers are
equally challenged. It is dispiriting to reflect that they represent
the social, cultural, economic, and political leaders of tomorrow.
Some
may do well in the comparatively abstract disciplines such as math or
computer-related technologies, but they will inevitably make indifferent
citizens, simpleminded voters, historical illiterates, uninformed parents, and
poor readers of the world. Meanwhile, the university will continue
to deteriorate until, bloated with mediocre and unequipped students,
politically motivated professors, unqualified hires, morally lame
administrators, and an epicurean debauch of diversity-and-inclusion officers, it
must submit to institutional collapse. Despite our best intentions,
it is unlikely that the university can be reformed by a disparate collection of
legislative measures or the academic version of a market
correction. Boasting only emeritus status, it has long passed its
expiry date.
Academia
is by this time too radically compromised and too extensively diseased to be
revived. Clearly, this is not a happy scenario. Some few
exceptions to the general rout will survive – a Hillsdale College, for example, and
perhaps a university here and there will manage to halt or at least delay its
subsidence into irrelevance and desuetude. But the university system
as we know it has signed its death warrant. The sooner it disappears,
the sooner we can begin rebuilding from the foundations – assuming the culture
has not stagnated beyond salvage. Sometimes collapse is the only
remedy.