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1. 1 Comment by Thomas Miller on 20 July 2007:

   It is indeed a fraud and a waste, Dr. Wilson.

   Higher education is nothing more than a business these days, and often a racket at that. Witness the lucrative share of the profits colleges receive these days from the private student loan providers.

   Companies that hire young college graduates nowadays constantly bemoan how underskilled they are, how lacking they are in basic written and oral communciation ability, problem-solving skills and leadership potential. But thats not any concern of our higher education institutions. They’re only interested in churning out as many sheepskin recipients as they can, as quickly as possible, to make room for the next batch of suckers.

2. 2 Comment by Allen Wilson on 20 July 2007:

   In addition to what you have described, Dr Wilson, they are also turning young men into – for lack of a better but still polite word – non-men. The other day, I was looking on the net at pictures of the Boer soldiers of the second Anglo-Boer war, and thought how they looked like real men. They reminded me of men in pictures from the old South or the old West. They could show you what real fighting was all about. Unless they come from the boonies, most modern American ‘men’ in their twenties look like anything but real men, beacuse they’re not. So many of them speak with a higher pitch than their forefathers, with little or no baritone, in an adolescent manner. It was the schools and colleges that caused this change in the character of young men, and this change is very recent. When I was in high school in the late 80’s, this form of speech would have seemed strange to me and my schoolmates.

3. 3 Comment by Scott Anderson on 20 July 2007:

   I love blanket statements backed up with absolutely no evidence. Give me more.

4. 4 Comment by Oleg Bogdanovych on 20 July 2007:

   Oh, I wish I could disagree with you but it is very unfortunate that I cannot. That is the reason I dropped out of college: all I was getting there is just someone’s point of view pushed down on me and the primary skill that is taught is subordination. That really scared me. I was wondering if you personally know a good institution that is not a fraud and a waste and that would be able to provide me with a full-featured education that I so much crave. Thanks.

5. 5 Comment by G.S. on 20 July 2007:

   For the past several generations, many conservative and/or basically pious parents have discouraged their kids from things like philosophy and humanities, instead pushing them towards more “sensible” endeavors such as engineering and business.

   As a result, the Left was easily able to fill the void, and now defines culture both within the Academy and without.

   Now many of the same parents wring their hands and wonder why American culture has grown so abhorrent.

   Somehow for me the story of the Pied Piper comes to mind.

   Since Christian parents did not give arts & humanities support, the arts & humanities took revenge, and turned sinister — and carried off the parents’ children to an alien spiritual landscape.

6. 6 Comment by J.C.P. on 20 July 2007:

   As a recent graduate of a prominent so-called Catholic university in the north, I learned the hard way that institutions of higher education have slowly and effectively transformed themselves, from places for the cultivation of wisdom and knowledge, into machines for the creation of money.

   To give Mr. Anderson some evidence, my particular university–in putting its formerly Catholic mission into the hands of the members of the Board of Trustees–has slyly changed the wording of its mission, from being a “Catholic university” into a “…university in the Catholic tradition,” a nebulous and completely useless phrase that can be justified in just about any way. The Board, instead of being composed of Catholics in good standing, is in the main, composed of high-profile local businessmen whose likely goals have nothing to do with the faithful transmission of the Faith, but instead with the maximization of their own investments.

   In order to increase revenues, it is important to increase in the “national rankings.” National rankings, of course, take into account such baromoters of excellence as GLBT programs, diversity enrollment, and national science grants. The deck is stacked against any university which desires a comprehensive liberal arts education, forcing its arts faculty to introduce novelty disciplines, while directing funding toward the “hard sciences.”

   Sadly, what Mr. Allen Wilson states is absolutely true; and our higher education system has become quite proficient at producing what C.S. Lewis would call “men without chests.”

7. 7 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 20 July 2007:

   I can forgive the Money Honey on CNBC’s “Closing Bell” for pronouncing the capital of the Czech Republic to rhyme with “Craig” – forgive if for no other reason than my own typos and bloopers are infinitely worse. Forgivable also, for the chuckle it provides, is Wall Street’s denominating “fast food” as “the casual dining sector”. Such people are good at what they do; erudition and “the grace beyond the reach of art” were never their strong suits. But our current crop of academicians is not good at what it does, and it will take some serious penance before they merit absolution (Clyde, of course, excepted!).

   The ghost of Mencken prompts me: Perhaps it has almost always been so in the land of the Yankee Yahoo. Our first such place, Harvard, founded as soon as the Sons of Cromwell jumped off the boats (stake, matches, and lighter fluid in hand), was not a place for the pondering, but for the slaughtering of ideas. Mencken himself listed the number of academic frauds drafted into Woodrow the Worst’s Creel Bureau to tell lies about Germany and Austria.

   The ghost of Christopher Lasch prompts me also: The twenty-years between 1945 and 1965 were the Golden Age of the American university, and Doctors Wilson, Fleming, Gottfried, and J. Michael Hill remember these days well. They offered, Lasch says, a comfortable place for scholars to pursue their special interests, without having to think much about the larger concerns of education and culture. The ghost of Allan Bloom prompts me to add that maybe it was just a Silver Age, for the late 60s Age of Iron soon followed. Bloom had the same experience as I, our professors saying “Oh, those bad German professors in the 30s – they just caved in!” But that would have meant death for them. With the Guns of Cornell it might have meant death by some accident. But if shots had actually been fired, the National Guard would have been sent in, order would have been restored, and that would have been the end of it. Instead, at Cornell and elsewhere, the Herren Professoren Doktoren were turned quickly by their Hallmarxist students into dancing bears. No one, C. Vann Woodward wrote somewhere, has adequately discussed the failure of the academic class in those years.

   If y’all have a wicked side to you, Paul Fussell provides the way to irritate a professor (or intellectual): call him an “educator”, with all its association with school superintendents and departments-of-education low life. “Oh, Dr. Sontag, I enjoyed your book on photography soooooooo much, and now I’m so glad to finally have the chance … to meet … such … a famous … educator!”

   To end on a note of uplift, lest we forget that this too shall pass, only twice in Western history has the university been THE center of High Culture: the Scholastic period and the 19th C German University. The rest of the time, the monastery, the salon, the café, the religious order, the court, and the generous hand of the nobility and Mr. Money Bags (dial M for Maecenas) have picked up the slack. Indeed Renaissance Humanism, except for Erasmus, was largely the work of that period’s equivalent to high school teachers, I’m proud to say. The men of the Enlightenment had better things to do than grade the essays of undergraduates and to grin like the village idiot in their tenure year. And for the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, the search committee turned down poor Dave Hume. None of the Impressionists sat a day in the Sorbonne. For most of our history, poets and dramatists weren’t the kept courtesans of English departments. And the culture richness of the Modernist 20s was midwifed and fostered in Paris by a little lady from Oakland who had only a BA from Radcliffe and who had dropped out of med school. So there’s hope.

   And Frank Baum is better than J. K. Rowling. Does that make me conservative?

8. 8 Comment by DM on 20 July 2007:

   I can testify to the fraud that is higher education as well, as I taught in the architecture school of a prominent university for a number of years. It’s no news that architectural education is utterly vapid and detached from its subject, but the fraud runs at an even more practical level. For example: The dean routinely produces fraudulent faculty minutes in order to bolster his agenda and/or fund raising; the accreditation board is deceived regarding student work; donors are deceived regarding donations; tenure-track faculty are bullied, and told that if they do not vote properly their chances at tenure are diminished; rules for quorum, etc., are constantly changed; abuse of power when assigning teaching loads is constant; administrative assistants (who work for the dean) are given voice in faculty meetings; receipts are fabricated; the wife of a director is on the payroll as a “student counselor”; committee decisions are routinely misrepresented; senior faculty steal student work for their own publications; etc. etc. etc.

   I could go on.

   It’s more than a cultural fraud, it’s criminal, and the peer review system that’s in place now is useless to straighten it out. The tens of thousands of dollars parents spend on each child are buying an empty credential for the student and a comfortable sinecure for a few professors and administrators.

9. 9 Comment by Lord Karth on 20 July 2007:

   To answer Dr. Wilson’s question, one must look to the pages of Huxley’s “Brave New World”. The American university is not a vehicle for transmitting ideas and heritage, it is a College of Emotional Engineering. Feelings and sensations are to be given higher priority than thinking.

   I attended college and law school in the 1980s, graduating somewhat before “political correctness” came into its full flower.
   There was still some room on the Syracuse University campus for non-Leftist thought. I recall getting into a few rather spirited editorial-page exchanges with some of the more outspoken leftists, although my editorial-writing career came to an abrupt end after I wrote a piece denouncing “homosexuals who spread AIDS” that drew several hundred negative responses and several death threats (this was in 1986). As a regular visitor to and observer of today’s campus, I can tell you that such a column would not be published, and would likely get its writer expelled for commission of a hate crime.

   I suspect that two of the main sources of this degeneration are the massive amounts of “student aid” money that have flowed into the system (courtesy of Your Federal Government) and the permeation of the modern mental environment by television. The first allows millions of people who simply do not possess the mental tools or background knowledge to do college work to be on campus. The second has, since roughly 1965, discouraged the typical young person from developing habits of rational thought, and thus making said youth more susceptible to the emotion-driven preachments of the modern professoriate.

   As for a solution, I see none, barring the collapse of the State-financed and -influenced college structure (from sheer financial pressure, if nothing else) and the passing of the largely mindless and mentally/socially sick Boomer generation of faculty from the scene. Economic pressure to produce more engineering and science graduates may also play a role as State funding dries up under pressure to redirect those funds towards other areas.

   It’s going to be an interesting, if somewhat rough, ride as the system begins to shake itself apart. Break out the popcorn, sit back and watch the fun……

   Your servant,

   Lord Karth

10. 10 Comment by Steve Berg on 20 July 2007:

    One of the main reasons so many semi-educable people go into hock for a college degree, and for the changing of higher education into a sort of trade school is the goal of equality of opportunity. Personnel law and regulations supposedly prohibit the use of any overt criteria other than competence in order to avoid the dreaded sin of discrimination. What employers have had to do is to go to a combination of hopefully earned credentials, such as college or university degrees and a 6 month probationary period where a turkey can be fired without cause. So, if you want to be hired, you get the degree you need. Even testing is not enough of a defense against charges of discrimination. The FBI spent many millions of dollars on a test system that actually did a good job of predicting job performance. It was scrapped because too many dark complected applicants flunked it. Better to have incompetent agents than to commit the dreaded mortal sin of racism. So, if equality of opportunity is not enough, then we need to put in place a system that guarantees outcomes regardless of ability or initiative. This has become the purpose of most of our higher education institutions.

11. 11 Comment by G.S. on 20 July 2007:

    To follow on Mr. Berg’s comment — the purpose of the modern degree/credential system is to level the playing field so that the talented do not have an unfair advantage over the mediocre.

    I.e., no matter how dim-witted and unoriginal your professor may be, (s)he “earned” his/her status for having paid the appropriate dues and for having put in the requisite amount of time prostrate before the gods of Mt. Academia.

    If one wants an academic career, then one had better be willing to play the game and jump through the hoops.

    Knowledge, intelligence, competence, etc. have nothing to do with it.

    To paraphrase Smedley Butler, “Education is a racket.”

12. 12 Comment by Rob on 20 July 2007:

    If this is the case, Dr. Wilson, then why did you stay so long working in higher ed ? With all due respect to the late George Rogers and a handful of others, some still in Columbia, it is not as if the department you worked for was composed of simpatico thinkers or even that many people you would want as friends or neigbors.

13. 13 Comment by Frank on 21 July 2007:

    Decline of the “hard” sciences cannot be far behind because scientific discovery rests upon the Western cultural inheritance of imagination and inquiry, much in the same way that creative entrepreneurial capitalism rests upon pre-capitalist virtues.

    If America doesn’t advance, another will replace it as the world power, which is I believe your point. I’m not sure man should really wish for further discoveries though I suppose there’s no way to prevent them.

    Knowledge is power, and it’s only a matter of time before a chimp pushes the big red button (and there’s more than one technology to skin mankind.) Normally it’s better not to trust strangers, but I think I’d trust traditional Japan more than multi(non)ethnic America with such power. And besides, the US government is hardly less of a stranger.

    Scientific breakthroughs will continue, but the social and religious fabric that binds and guides us has been all but torn to shreds. We’re now running on mere inertia and couldn’t restart our engines if snagged and slowly pulled towards the black hole.

    The greater danger is there’ll no longer be a tradition to ask “why not?” Modern man seems quite capable of “advancing” without a nationalist and religious core to guide him, though I could be wrong. Obsess about the periphery, and concerns of the center fade away.
    

    Somehow for me the story of the Pied Piper comes to mind.

    Since Christian parents did not give arts & humanities support, the arts & humanities took revenge, and turned sinister — and carried off the parents’ children to an alien spiritual landscape.

    That’s an excellent analogy.

    Besides establishing alternative schools, another tactic for restoring American culture is the establishment of cultural nexuses in the form of restaurants. Maybe I’m talking fool, but I’d love to see an article on such an idea. I haven’t heard my beloved paleos say much on restaurants. I’ve commented on it some at another site, but I’ll refrain from advertising or getting too off topic

14. 14 Comment by Frank on 21 July 2007:

    Two recent worthwhile articles on education:

    Snakes, Snails, and Puppy-Dog Tails
    By Fred Reed
    Published in the July 2, 2007 Issue of American Conservative
    Unavailable online, and by an author who isn’t of Chronicles calibre.

    The Academy: Reform or Secession?
    F. Roger Devlin
    Published in the Vol. 6 No. 4 – Winter 2006-2007 Issue of The Occidental Quarterly
    Unavailable online, but by an author of Chronicles calibre.

    ===

    If I have time I’ll post the parts of each that I enjoyed, though I lent the TOQ journal out. I know little of educating, but I have ridden the propaganda conveyor belt through the Marxist factory.

15. 15 Comment by Brock Townsend on 21 July 2007:

    Oleg Bogdanovych:

    If SMI ever gets off the ground, it may well fulfill your needs.

    Southern Military Institute

    http://tinyurl.com/2a5dyr

16. 16 Comment by Monte Poitevint on 21 July 2007:

    My own experience at a state university was disappointing and distasteful. I expected an experience like what I had read in books written prior to the 20th century. Silly me! I got the physics equation without wasting time on the derivation. Science, mathematics – indeed, rational thought in general – is contingent upon certain philosophical presuppositions that can’t be proven. My education discarded these interesting aspects of the riddle and taught it all as though it were indisputable FACT. Thus, the entire experience was reduced to dogma, a certain ideology. For the enormous expense that it cost me, I feel cheated. I believe there are schools that still ‘educate’, but not the one I attended.

17. 17 Comment by Bob Sale on 21 July 2007:

    Albert Jay Nock wrote about this or related ideas. Here is the beginning (with a link to the whole) of his essay, The Disadvantages of Being Educated:

    “My interest in education had been comfortably asleep since my late youth, when circumstances waked it up again about six years ago. I then discovered that in the meantime our educational system had changed its aim. It was no longer driving at the same thing as formerly, and no longer contemplated the same kind of product. When I examined it I was as far “out” on what I expected to find as if I had gone back to one of the sawmills familiar to my boyhood in Michigan, and found it turning out boots and shoes.

    “The difference seemed to be that while education was still spoken of as a “preparation for life,” the preparation was of a kind which bore less directly on intellect and character than in former times, and more directly on proficiency. It aimed at what we used to call training rather than education; and it not only did very little with education, but seemed to assume that training was education, thus overriding a distinction that formerly was quite clear. Forty years ago a man trained to proficiency in anything was respected accordingly, but was not regarded as an educated man, or “just as good,” on the strength of it. A trained mechanic, banker, dentist or man of business got all due credit for his proficiency, but his education, if he had any, lay behind that and was not confused with it. His training, in a word, bore directly upon what he could do or get, while his education bore directly on neither; it bore upon what he could become and be.

    “Curiosity led me to look into the matter a little more closely, and my observations confirmed the impression that the distinction between training and education was practically wiped out. I noticed, too, that there was a good deal of complaint about this: even professional educators, many of them, were dissatisfied with it. Their complaints, when boiled down, seemed to be that education is too little regarded as an end in itself, and that most of the country’s student-population take a too strictly vocational view of what they are doing, while the remainder look at it as a social experience, encouraged largely in order to keep the cubs from being underfoot at home, and reciprocally appreciated mostly because it puts off the evil day when they must go to work; and that our institutions show too much complacency in accommodating themselves to these views … ”

    http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/nock-albert-jay_on-education.html

18. 18 Comment by GJ Tryon on 21 July 2007:

    “Decline of the “hard” sciences cannot be far behind” Alas, if imagination is what you want, Mr. Wilson, the sciences are where to go. Just think of all the bogus and contrived “research” that’s been published over the last fifteen to twenty years. New Scientific Method: get a thesis, ideally one the media likes, and build up a lot of lying data to “prove” it. Someday soon “science” will be joining “reality” in scare-quote default mode.

19. 19 Comment by robert m. peters on 21 July 2007:

    Dr. Wilson,

    Your introductory paragraph infra:

    “What is it that the multi-billion-dollar American higher education industry is supposed to be doing? (Set aside scientific and vocational education for the moment.) Its justification would seem to be in a mission to raise the civilizational level of the young by passing on our cultural inheritance and training minds in independent thinking.”

    I could approach the truth embedded in your quote given supra with several different comments. My best attempt is summed up in the term the “New Left.”

    My understanding of the New Left is that they represent cultural Marxism as opposed to economic Marxism, i.e. the Old Left, which has proved to be such a failure – Soviet Union, Cuba, China, etc.

    The New Left draws its intellectual strength from Marx and Freud. Their intellectual legacy has been distilled by Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci as well as through minds such as that of Max Weber. Lukacs declared that the enemy of the New Left was Western Civilization itself.

    It would seem that one, Felix Weill, a Frankfurt millionaire funded the Frankfurt School. That school would take the raw material of cultural Marxism and the intellectual inclinations of Lukacs and Gramsci to forge a weapon of cultural deconstruction, namely “New Criticism,” which has proved to be most effective. This weapon would emerge from the cauldron nurtured, tendered and stirred by the notions of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Eric Fromm, Max Horkheimer and Jürgen Habermas.

    From among those, Herbert Marcuse would become the persona of the movement in America. His particular version of New Criticism he labeled “polymorphous perversity,” i.e. destroy Western Civilization by blurring the lines about sexual behavior. It is said that he is the one who coined the phrase, “Make love, not war!” He became the intellectual mentor of Angela Davis. The disciples of “these people” as a certain general dear to my heart would have likely called them as his enemies are now ensconced in the departments of history, English, psychology, foreign languages, gender studies and ethnic studies – these last two being direct bastard offspring of the movement.

    However, the success of the New Left, a success which had its nascent beginnings in the 1960’s in its American context, is predicated on the moral and intellectual vacuum which preceded it; for had there been, within the universities, a viable moral and intellectual counterpart to the New Left in the 1960’s, the New Left could not have been as “wildly” successful as it has been. Thus, for me, the real failure was not passing on a viable moral and intellectual legacy. In intuit but cannot prove that the breakdown of that system of replication – a memetic failure at replicating culture and civilization – began in the post-WWI era, if not before. I believe that to this failure is where we need to go if we are to find the genesis of the problem.

    Might there be some discussion on that?

20. 20 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 21 July 2007:

    Mr. Tryon, Right you are. And a vast amount of useless and redundant “research” has been carried out for no other reason than there were federal grant funds available for it.
    Mr. Peters, I agree entirely that the triumph of the New Left was only possible because of the moral vacuum that preceded it. I believe that the Southern Agrarians and Richard Weaver correctly diagnosed that vacuum, beginning on the 1930s. Also, that World War II added to the wreckage of family, community, and civilized values. The vapid America of the 1950s was living on borrowed capital and the debt came due in the 1960s.

21. 21 Comment by Ronald Kyser on 21 July 2007:

    A distorted worldview is not the only problem. College has become high school. High school has become kindergarten-with-sex.

    In regard to Mr Cundiff’s recall of a “Golden Age”, it’s sounds incredible today, but Harvard’s, Cornell’s and Michigan’s counties rejected FDR every time. Yale’s went the other way, no doubt with the help of masses of immigrants, but it was still close there. Iowa’s and Illinois’s split. (Wisconsin’s, though, was hopeless.)

    So the professoriate, and their neighbors, were still apparently sane. Students, of course, would have voted in their home districts in those days– as soon as they turned 21.

22. 22 Comment by Daniel Davis on 21 July 2007:

    I’m afraid the”decline of the hard sciences” is upon us. Witness the thorough politicisation of everything from the global warming (non) debate to the blackout of any dissent to the prevailing orthodoxies on cancer research, AIDS research, the whole heart disease/dietary fat/cholesterol industry–all funded and thus perverted by the Feds and their allies in academia and the pharmaceutical industry. (There will always be more money in the search for a cancer cure than in actually finding one). And this is just the short list.

23. 23 Comment by Des Miltonrho on 21 July 2007:

    I agree with the second comment, which is now borne out by scientific research. Sadly the sexes are converging. Women are the new he-men and men are the new she-women.

    Young men nowadays have larger chests, poutier lips, rounder bottoms and speak in much squeakier voices. They also obsess about their hair and clothes in a way that real men from even a few years ago never did.

    By tinkering with hormones and genetic engineering we have created a third sex who at the drop of a hat dress up in frilly frocks and cavort around on high heels. Many young men I know are almost indistinguishable from girls.

    It’s got to the point where we frankly need a third type of toilet for this new sex, marked ‘Mangirls’. I am a broadminded liberal but feel increasingly uncomfortable sharing toilet facilities with young males who wear makeup and bras and dresses. I also object to the way toilets have been redesigned for the modern age. Why is it gents toilets so rarely have urinals these days?

24. 24 Comment by robert m. peters on 21 July 2007:

    Dr. Wilson,

    Indeed, there is little vestige of Richard Weaver’s “social bond individualism” that he as a North Carolinian teaching English at the University of Chicago counterposed against the “anarchic individualism” which he encountered in the North. We have, so it seems in my experience, utterly lost his notion of “disciplined freedom” which is the outgrowth of his social bond individualism coupled with individual liberty, duty and social responsibility. Yet, what I would later learn to associate with Weaver intellectually was taught to me in the context of Christian stewardship. God was the owner of all; nevertheless, He entrusted to me property in stewardship with the purpose of that trust being to show Charity as His discretion and guidance, not at that of the state or some ideological group. When I was about ten, my father found some way to engage me in a conversation about stewards and wards. He told me that we were all the stewards of something or someone, having in that capacity an uncompromising obligation, and that we were all the wards of someone in some respect. Noting that I owned no land and had no siblings younger than I was, I wanted to know of what I might be the steward. My father said, “The dogs!” We used Catahoula Leopards to hunt, round up and capture feral hogs. Thus, I became aware early on in life of the obligation for and to property – to keep and defend it and to use it wisely in Charity as so lead by the Ultimate Owner. I suppose that the anarchic individual which Weaver experienced in the North makes no recognition of the Ultimate Owner and thus has no sense of obligation to property and its use.

25. 25 Comment by Frank on 21 July 2007:

    Des Miltonrho,

    Metrosexual is the word you’re looking for.

    They might not wear bras and dresses yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a touch of makeup becomes fashionable in some of the larger cities.

    “Bisexuals” (perverts really) seem to be increasingly common as well.

26. 26 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 22 July 2007:

    I do not entirely blame the educational system, vile as it is, for the feminization of young men that has been noted. With suburbanization after WW II, there was the constant absence of fathers, effortless affluence, artificially protected environment in which boys had no real work or challenge such as had been normal in both country and city. George W. Bush is a museum quality specimen of the spoiled brat who never did a day’s real work in his life and never had to suffer the consequences of his mistakes and sins. We are now well into the second generation of such life.

27. 27 Comment by JC on 22 July 2007:

    The proper charge against elite liberal academia is murder, not fraud. There’s no fraud involved. They get right in your face and tell you they mean to destroy you, they don’t hide the fact. Harvard Professor Noel Ignatiev was only being a little more forthright than most when he laid out the agenda in plain words: “Make no mistake about it, we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed–not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.” The only fraud involved in the situation is from “conservatives” who pretend not to understand the agenda.

28. 28 Comment by Craig Kincaid on 22 July 2007:

    Along with Allen Wilson’s comment I have wondered for years where the annoying habit of raising the pitch or upping the lilt at the end of a sentence as if it were a question even though the content is obviously declaratory. I first noticed this in California in the mid 80’s where I had relocated from the rural lower midwest. After about 15 years in the southwest I relocated to the upper South where I again noticed this practice amongst young folks, though not as prevalent. Can anyone tell me where this came from ? Is it somehow related to A.Wilson’s comment?

29. 29 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 22 July 2007:

    The upward lilt reflects a kind of timid tentativeness, doesn’t it?

30. 30 Comment by Michael on 22 July 2007:

    So much has been said here already with which I agree that I can contribute only a small addendum, as to the “hard sciences.” It is worthwhile to remember that they were not formally part of the university curriculum until the mid-nineteenth century. Cavendish, Lavoisier, Priestley, Davy and Faraday were none of them university men. I believe that regular laboratory instruction in science at the university level dates only from the time of Justus von Liebig, appointed professor at the university of Giessen in 1825. Certainly the independent researcher-inventor continued to dominate the sciences in America until much later than that, e.g. Lammot du Pont, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, etc. Even today it is probably the case that as much good research in the sciences takes place in industry as does in the academy. It’s probably to such alternatives or substitutes for the university that we must look for the preservation of learning.

31. 31 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 22 July 2007:

    Michael sounds correct. I wonder, How much research in the humanities and “social sciences” is now done not even in grad schools but in think-tanks, public and private? And in the natural sciences, post doc in places like the Max-Planck- Institut? Or for academicians in general only during a once-a-decade sabbatical semester? Is the university’s Golden Age now a distant memory in all disciplines? By the way, are Sociology and Political “Science” now going the way of Geography, a subject once with a Lehrstuhl in the university?

32. 32 Comment by Monte Poitevint on 22 July 2007:

    Unless I misunderstand Michael, I believe he is stating the root of the present problem is that the institutions at fault are all publicly funded and overseen by agencies that are also publicly funded. I wonder though would Richard Weaver or the Agrarians have done their monumental work if it had been privately funded. Also, private funding is more often done with a future profit in mind. Psychological research to increase sales via the mass media is held in check by ethical considerations. But what if these ethical considerations are discarded? We live in an age when morality and ethics seem to be vanishing. It’s hard to visualize profit margin restoring them. Or did I missed the whole point?

33. 33 Comment by C. Moore on 22 July 2007:

    The following is from “The Academy: Reform or Secession?” by
    F. Roger Devlin in The Occidental Quarterly, which Frank mentioned above:
    The twenty years following World War Two saw enormous upheavals in the world of higher education. Great sums of tax money were made available for research. Far more men took advantage of the GI bill than its sponsors had foreseen. The Truman Commission Report, issued in 1947 when these changes were already underway, expressed well the new thinking: it called for a massive expansion of “access” to college, lavish financial aid programs for students, the institution of community colleges charging low tuition, and Federal aid to the states for higher education. The country had embarked on a program of reckless expansion of its educational institutions.
    The boosters of academic “growthmanship” (as it was sometimes called) failed to distinguish between education and schooling. Schooling can be measured: in years or courses or credit hours. Education, by contrast, is probably unquantifiable in principle; it refers to a qualitative change in persons. It is this confusion which leads to the notion of the student as a customer purchasing services from his institution. In fact, a student may buy schooling, such as place in a class, but his education is what he makes of the class. He is the product of his education, not its purchaser.
    The same confusion is behind the emphasis on “access” as the central problem of educational policy. An IQ of 115 is often considered the minimum natural endowment for profitably receiving college instruction. But, of course, no such natural limit exists on physical access to campuses and classrooms. The many people in our society uneasy about recognizing different natural aptitudes for education (often because of its racial aspect) prefer to steer discussion toward the question of access to schools and classes.
    In any case, the proponents of growthmanship wrote as if there could be no such thing as too much schooling: it encounters no law of diminishing returns. If a thing is good, they reasoned, more of it must be better; everyone must want it, and no one should be excluded from it.
    Of course, the grand design could not be carried out until great numbers of young men and women were persuaded to enter college. As Truman Commission Chairman George Zook winsomely phrased it: “we have a product to sell to the people.” Now, advanced learning is a special calling, and distasteful to many persons highly capable in other areas. How were “the people” sold on near universal college attendance? In two ways, chiefly: the fallacious college-as-investment argument (“graduates earn more”) and the financial sleight of hand known as the GI bill.
    Let us consider the first. Before the Second World War, about 10% of America’s young men went to college to prepare for leadership roles in society. These men did go on, in most cases, to earn above average salaries. It does not follow that college attendance was the cause of their higher earnings: that is a textbook example of the post hoc fallacy. Rather, high intelligence and ambition are the cause of success in both college and later employment. An unintelligent, lazy person cannot expect to find a prestigious job with a great salary waiting for him simply by putting in four years at a college and obtaining a degree.
    The GI bill was a subsidy, and had the results all subsidies have: to increase artificially the demand for the thing subsidized. The same goes for its many successors: Pell and FSEOG Grants, Stafford, Perkins and PLUS Loans, etc. They encourage persons who set little store by education to remain in school far past the point of diminishing returns.

34. 34 Comment by Monte Poitevint on 22 July 2007:

    What Mr. Moore says makes perfect sense (and places the fault at the doorstep of the government). But, since most of what has been said here pertains to public colleges, what of the private colleges? One would think that they would better represent the private donors and organizations that sponsor them.

35. 35 Comment by Robert Bruce on 22 July 2007:

    THe higher education fraud can be seen with the absolutely dumbed down curriculum in a lot of elective classes offered by major universites, even “elite” institutions like Univ of Michigan, Stanford, etc. As a senior at Eastern Michigan, I remember hearing how down the road at U of M they were having classes about sex/porn, where one of the projects was making a soft porn tape. Classes about the history of comic books, etc also have come about due to this transformation of the American University from an institution of higher learning to pure money making machine. College athletics is another easy example of the colleges turning into money machines. This is most obvious as inferior people allowed to attend college for the sole reason that they can dunk a basketball or run a 4.3 40 yard dash in order to make the university millions of dollars to fill the stands and keep the alumni dollars coming in. I don’t see it getting any better anytime soon. The Feds want dumbed down folks that they can control and the corporations are just after profits and worker drones/consumers with no real critical thinking skills.

36. 36 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 23 July 2007:

    These are all excellent points, Gentlemen. What strikes me most is the change in academic culture in the 60s. It relates to the $$ poured into education beginning then and is thus only a phase of the Great Society. But what has happened on the ground is that professorial jobs have been created for a vast herd of mediocrities who have no real vocation for their or teaching—people who would have been low-level white collar employees if there had not been a large increased demand for graduate degrees to fill up expanded faculties. These are the people who now predominate and will continue to create and perpetuate clones of themselves. An American campus is now the LAST place to look for any intellectual stimulation, debate, or creativity.
    Not to suggest that there was utopia before the 60s, but a certain plodding integrity was widespread in the professoriat before that.

37. 37 Comment by Michael on 23 July 2007:

    To Monte Poitevint’s remark about private vs. public funding, while it is true that much privately funded research is directed to the purpose of making a profit, publicly (i.e., governmentally) funded research is also directed towards purposes other than the cultivation of pure knowledge.

    I believe that the institutionalization of the physical sciences and their associated technologies really began in earnest with the onset of World War I, when Britain and the United States were cut off of their supplies of strategic “high-tech” products of the era, such as synthetic organic chemicals and optical goods, in which Germany dominated the market. Substitutes for these articles were urgently needed, while technologies such as heavier-than-air flying machines and wireless telegraphy, which had previously been the province of tinkerers and hobbyists, suddenly had wartime applications. WWI was the first occasion for large-scale government expenditures on the applied sciences, and these spelt the rise of institutional research, headquartered in the universities, while independent researcher-inventors (who might also be entrepreneurs, as Edison or the Wright brothers were) diminished in their importance.

    Private-sector, profit-oriented research also became institutionalized; du Pont and the former Bell Laboratories are particularly notable in this respect. Even so many valuable contributions to pure science have come from such research. The pursuit of profit per se is probably not so inimical to it as is a concentration on short-term results, which has become sadly typical of big business. It is hard to justify activity which may bear fruit in ten years, if at all, when stock analysts and financial managers are obsessed with what will be the next quarter’s earnings.

38. 38 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 23 July 2007:

    It is worth pointing out that much “private sector” research is government-sponsored.

39. 39 Comment by C Bowen on 23 July 2007:

    Higher Ed serves the state and the parasitic groups by masking what can be identified as mass unemployment and by all means, the high schools are in on the game. Real institutional education can only be offered to a certain group of people (I am not one of them in the sense that I come from a long line of merchants, agrarians, and middle managers, btw) who have strict limits to their interest in ‘easy’ money and status.

    The rest of us went to college to meet people who could help us in this life in a sort of ad hoc eugenics program (I married a classmate and found after many years and employers, a job through the husband of another classmate.)

40. 40 Comment by Hucbald on 23 July 2007:

    Wow. What an amazing site. I can’t believe I didn’t find it earlier. Lot of brilliant commenters here. Anyhoo…

    ****

    I went to a music school for my undergraduate BM degree – a jazz oriented one, not a classical conservatory (Berklee College of Music in Boston) – and, the place was predictably filled with flakes who were political morons, but I’m a flake (Most musicians are, truth be told), and was a political moron at the time, so the experience was excellent. Absolutely first rate. I learned a ton.

    After a few years as a professional musician, I fell in love with traditional contrapuntal music, and so I decided to return to school for an MM in trad theory and composition. I chose a State university with a small music department, the idea being I already had my agenda set, and I just needed some help facilitating my goals. Problem was, the comp teacher was one of those post-modern atonalist guys and hadn’t a thing to offer me: I had studied tons of books on my own by then, and understood trad theory about as well as he did. Fortunately, the organ/piano teacher was a Church organist, and I was able to study with him, sort of/kind of on the sly. I got the MM with not overly much drama.

    Going to a big university with a world famous music department in pursuit of a DMA was another story entirely. Since I don’t keep the fact that I’m as purist a libertarian as any follower of The Way can be and still be a Christian – and the whole Christianity “thing” seemed problematic to some profs – let’s just say I encountered some negative vibes. Then, there was the fact that I was composing string quartets and wind trios and stuff like that… in a style related to Bach’s. The horror! I was pretty much ordered to compose atonal garbage or quit.

    Bottom line, I learned that university art departments are cesspools of liberal PC group-think, and they continuously inbreed by selecting only new profs who tow the Koolaid-drinking line: No way were they going to award me a doctoral degree for folowing the path God chose for me.

41. 41 Comment by Michael on 23 July 2007:

    Prof. Wilson makes a valuable point about much private-sector scientific research being government-funded; that’s certainly the case with just about all of it that has been done by defense contractors, obviously including du Pont and the old Bell Labs previously mentioned, as well as Raytheon, Boeing, and many others – the “industrial” part of the military-industrial complex identified by Eisenhower.

    C. Bowen’s comment about high schools, as well as colleges, existing largely to mask mass unemployment is quite interesting. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was the usual opinion that a grammar-school education was sufficient for most ordinary citizens. An old comprehensive examination required to pass the eighth grade, I believe in Omaha or some other midwestern city, has been reprinted in a number of recent publications, and it asks questions in English literature and grammar, history, geography, and other subjects that many university undergraduates could not be expected to answer correctly today.

    High school was not then thought to be for everyone. Often, attending high school required youngsters from rural or small-town families to go to a city and board with relatives or accommodating strangers at their own or their parents’ expense. This deterred those lacking motivation. A commercial course was offered for those intending to seek white-collar employment, and taught such skills as shorthand and bookkeeping. Relatively few took the college preparatory course, which typically included three or even four years of Latin, and the higher mathematics.

    The effort to encourage all young people to finish high school dates from no earlier than the middle of the Great Depression. The decline of the high school diploma as signifying command of any sort of valuable knowledge has proceeded on its downward course even as the minimum school-leaving age has risen. It seems reasonable to assume that the warehousing in high schools of adolescents under the age of 18 (now the minimum school-leaving age in most of the U.S.) who have neither the ability nor the inclination to learn practical or abstract skills, has mainly to do with keeping them out of the labor market.

    Hucbald, I wish I could hear your string quartets and wind trios in the style of Bach. The demand of music schools for atonal compositions from their degree candidates parallels that of liberal arts departments for opaque jargon such as “deconstructionism” from theirs. Clarity is feared and despised. Anything that might be appreciated and even enjoyed by that rara avis, the educated layman, obviously has to be discouraged, lest such a person should actually be encouraged to compare it with, and judge other academic work that – in the case of state institutions – he is being taxed to subsidize. Can’t have that!

42. 42 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 23 July 2007:

    Michael, not only defense research but most medical research is federally funded and directed. I once knew a “Public Health” professor who raised and tortured dogs through several generations for redundant “blood” research because there was federal grant money available.

43. 43 Comment by Monte Poitevint on 24 July 2007:

    I see what you mean about private sector research. That is where most takes place, with the help of government funds. Military and NASA contracts would account for a good proportion of it. Excellent point and food for thought.

    In the 50’s, even a two year degree was all that was necessary for a white collar job and the middle class. I would be interested in learning what percentage today, with four year degrees, can’t even find work. I once met a man with a doctorial flipping hamburgers.

44. 44 Comment by Michael Hill on 24 July 2007:

    What we are witnessing in the academy (and the churches, as well) is what I like to call the “pussification” of the American male.

45. 45 Comment by MAKEDON on 27 July 2007:

    That is funny.

    I just graduated from University 10 years ago
    and this article resonates with me.

    Spot on 100%.

    I got my real education in history after I graduated from a Business Program.

    The Western World is doomed, and
    so are Westerners.

    The 5th Columnist NWO Globalist control freaks are responsible poisoning every aspect of our society.

46. 46 Trackback by Andrea Bowen on 30 October 2007:

    Andrea Bowen…

    Man i just love your blog, keep the cool posts comin…..