By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, July 02, 2020
When mobs tore down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant and
defaced a monument to African-American veterans of the Civil War, many people
wondered whether the protesters had ever learned anything in high school or
college.
Did any of these iconoclasts know the difference between
Grant and Robert E. Lee? Could they recognize the name “Gettysburg”? Could they
even identify the decade in which the Civil War was fought?
Universities are certainly teaching our youth to be
confident, loud, and self-righteous. But the media blitz during these last
several weeks of protests, riots, and looting also revealed a generation that
is poorly educated and yet petulant and self-assured without justification.
Many of the young people on the televised front lines of
the protests are in their 20s. But most appear juvenile, at least in comparison
to their grandparents — survivors of the Great Depression and World War II.
How can so many so sheltered and prolonged adolescents
claim to be all-knowing?
Ask questions like these, and the answers ultimately lead
back to the university.
Millions of those who graduate from college or drop out
do so in arrears. There is some $1.5 trillion in aggregate student debt in the
U.S. Such burdens sometimes delay marriage. They discourage child-rearing. They
make home ownership hard — along with all the other experiences we associate
with the transition to adulthood.
The universities, some with multibillion-dollar
endowments, will accept no moral responsibility. They are not overly worried
that many of their indebted graduates discover their majors don’t translate
into well-paid jobs or guarantee employers that grads can write, speak, or
think cogently.
One unintended consequence of the chaotic response to the
COVID-19 epidemic and the violence that followed the police killing of George
Floyd is a growing re-examination of the circumstances that birthed the mass
protests.
There would be far less college debt if higher education,
rather than the federal government, guaranteed its own students’ loans. If
universities backed loans with their endowments and infrastructure, college
presidents could be slashing costs. They would ensure that graduates were more
likely to get good-paying jobs thanks to rigorous coursework and faculty
accountability.
Taxpayers who are hectored about their supposed racism,
homophobia, and sexism don’t enjoy such finger-wagging from loud, sheltered,
20-something moralists. Perhaps taxpayers will no longer have to subsidize the
abuse if higher education is deemed to be a politicized institution and thus
its endowment income ruled to be fully taxable.
If socialism has become a campus creed, maybe Ivy League
schools can be hit with an annual “wealth tax” on their massive endowments in
order to redistribute revenue to poorer colleges.
It is hard to square the circle of angry graduates having
no jobs with their unaccountable professors who so poorly trained students
while enjoying lifelong tenure. Why does academia guarantee lifetime employment
to those who cannot guarantee that a graduate gets a decent job?
The epidemic and lockdown required distance learning, but
at full price. The idea that universities can still charge regular rates when
students are forced to stay home is not just an unsustainable practice, but
veritable suicide. If one can supposedly learn well enough from downloads, Zoom
talks, and Skype lectures, then why pay $50,000 or more for that service from
your basement?
Universities are renaming buildings and encouraging
statue removal and cancel culture. But they assume they will always have a red
line to the frenzied trajectory of the mob they helped birth. If the
slaveholder and the robber baron from the distant past deserve no statue, no
eponymous hallway or plaza, then why should the names Yale and Stanford be
exempt from the frenzied name-changing and iconoclasm? Are they seen as
billion-dollar brands, akin to Windex or Coke, that stamp their investor
students as elite “winners”?
The current chaos has posed existential questions of
fairness and transparency that the university cannot answer because to do so
would reveal utter hypocrisy.
Instead, the university’s defense has been to
virtue-signal left-wing social activism to hide or protect its traditional
self-interested mode of profitable business for everyone — staff, faculty,
administration, contractors — except the students who borrow to pay for a lot
of it.
How strange that higher education’s monotonous embrace of
virtue signaling, political proselytizing, and loud social-justice activism is
now sowing the seeds of its own obsolescence and replacement.
If being “woke” means that the broke and unemployed are graduating
to ignorantly smashing statues, denying free speech to others, and
institutionalizing cancel culture, then the public would rather pass on what
spawned all of that in the first place.
Taxpayers do not yet know what to replace the university with — wholly online courses and lectures, apolitical new campuses, or broad-based vocational education — only that a once hallowed institution is becoming McCarthyite, malignant, and, in the end, just a bad deal.
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