https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/is_there_a_cure_for_the_modern_university.html
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!
