Why is it that incidents of bias, racial hatred and sexism always seem to cluster around the very institutions where racism and sexism are most vigorously and loudly condemned?
At the University of Missouri, four reported racial incidents — one of which can be confirmed — prompted a hunger strike, a threatened football strike and ultimately the resignation of an already-embattled university president.
At Yale, a lecturer dared question the wisdom of university officials issuing guidelines to adult students regarding potentially offensive Halloween costumes. As a result, some student activists are pushing to remove her.
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One possible explanation for perpetual campus outrage is that college campuses really are the most dangerous places in America, filled with the worst kind of people imaginable. As tempting as this sounds, there is a better explanation.
Most colleges are steeped in an intellectually corrupt, censorious left-wing culture that encourages students to assume the worst about their neighbors as a matter of ideoglogical dogma. This accounts not only for the disproportionate number of hate-crime hoaxes that are perpetrated on campuses each year, but also for the fact that campus communities are so credulous about the far-fetched idea that hate groups and hate ideologies secretly thrive in their ultra-politically-correct midst. (Consider the false rumors this week that the KKK made a surprise appearance at Mizzou.)
Considering the purpose of higher education, this latter explanation is even more damning than the former would be if true. Universities were first established to preserve and advance human knowledge, and to permit free-wheeling academic disputations that made even the civil and ecclesiastical authorities uncomfortable.
In 2015, the opposite is true. The dogmatists now control the campus. Free society anxiously witnesses from the outside their tyrannical purges of anyone failing to demonstrate sufficient enthusiasm for their preconceived ideas. Universities are now expected to be “safe spaces” for students to keep out “trigger words,” “microaggressions” and, heaven forbid, ideas with which they don’t already agree.
The iconic image of present-day student activism is that of a journalism professor encouraging student protestors to rough up a student journalist because he’s invading their “safe space” on his own school’s property by filming the protest. This is not exactly a formula for preparing students to live in a free society.
Each year, students are taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to have their intellectual curiosity extinguished and their souls harmed in such an environment. In this context, Marco Rubio’s slightly clumsy comment about welders and philosophers in Tuesday’s GOP presidential debate offers more insight than it might seem to at first. “For the life of me,” Rubio said, “I don’t know why we have stigmatized vocational education. Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.”
To be sure, a good philosophy education (which can still be obtained at a few schools) can be invaluable. But a person educated in a skilled trade — welding, auto repair, electrical work, plumbing, etc. — can out-earn his college-educated peers at least into his late 20s because he gets a head start. After his real-life experience innoculates him from bad campus ideas, perhaps he can even come back and get that philosophy degree.
The answer to Rubio’s question — why vocational education has been stigmatized — is that the government has placed an unwarranted premium on college education, creating corresponding economic incentives similar to those it once used to create the housing bubble. Those who will be hurt most by this are the students who end up leaving college with lots of debt and no degree.
It’s time for a change of attitude toward college. For many or even most of the people being herded onto the college track today by government-subsidized loans and misplaced cultural or familial expectations, American higher education is not worth the price to their wallets or their souls.
