TAMPA — Other than professional training and disciplines like
math and the hard sciences — where there are real answers that can
be demonstrated — it’s a legitimate question in America and most
of the West whether college is worth the time, cost, aggravation,
and misdirection that come with it.
Several decades into an era when left indoctrination has
replaced education at most universities, students studying anything
other than math, physics, or the pre-med cycle emerge from four
years at Old Sywash not only not having learned much to help them
become intelligent, functioning adults, but having been convinced
of a lot of rot that isn’t true. Surely this has been documented
sufficiently that I needn’t cite chapter and verse.
True enough a bachelor’s degree is helpful in getting a job. Far
too many jobs in America require applicants to have a degree, even
though the work in said job has nothing to do with any knowledge or
skills the applicant picked up idling in college for four years. A
degree can function as a paper qualification, even when the degree
holder has learned next to nothing in “earning” that degree from a
dumbed-down, politicized contemporary university.
The sort of pillage that has laid intellectual waste to most
university campuses has made moot the question of whether it’s
worth spending four years attaining a “useless and impractical”
degree in the liberal arts. As a liberal arts major (history and
literature) from a time before the revolution, when most university
professors were merely dotty, I’m a believer. This is why I regret
that a liberal arts education is no longer available at most
universities.
I know, I know, current college catalogues have page after page
of descriptions of courses in anthropology, political science,
history, and English (want to have your hair curled? — read some
of the course descriptions in this once noble but now most
disfigured “discipline”). But look closely and you’ll see that in
too many cases Shakespeare has been replaced by comic books or soap
operas. Matthew Arnold, that hopeless old Mustache Pete of a dead,
white, European male, who deluded generations with such racist,
sexist, homophonic, phalocentric nonsense as “Culture is to know
the best that has been said and thought in the world,” has been
replaced by a procession of left savants. These hustlers retail the
latest victimology in the tripartite obsessions of the contemporary
humanities professor: race, class, and gender (the last being the
vague and fluid word academics now use as a replacement for the
clear and solid word “sex”).
Happily, not all colleges and universities are little more than
leftist playpens. There are small redoubts where a liberal arts
education is still available, and where the general education
requirements for pre-professionals are not simply seminars in ways
to hate your country, your religion, and every value your parents
ever taught you. Hillsdale College in southern Michigan is one of
these places.
In a symposium on the future of conservatism in the January
edition of Commentary, Hillsdale president Larry Arnn has
this to say: “Conservatism regards certain things as abiding. There
are laws of nature, and freedom, justice, and civilization depend
upon the recognition of those laws.” Exactly so, but how long has
it been since we’ve heard this in a faculty lounge without a sneer
attached to it?
Arnn goes on: “The politics of the left lead to friction along
racial and class lines. They raise up a new political class that
governs through privileged influence. This political class, for all
its pretensions of science and progress, does and will continue to
do what unaccountable rulers do: govern in its own interest.” Spot
on again, but say this in class and see how long it is before you
get tenure at Left-Wing State.
Arnn concludes: “If conservatism is to live, it must repudiate
absolutely this system of limitless government, of class and racial
privilege and discrimination, of the overturning of human nature,
of the vaunting of the ruling class.” This brings an “amen” from
this pew, but causes widespread hyperventilation in the humanities
faculty lounge.
It was my pleasure to meet Arnn last week when he made similar
points to these before an audience of 200+ at a Tampa hotel. He was
not afraid to say that it was a goal of his small liberal arts
college (just short of 1,500 students) that graduates leave with a
feel “for what it is to be a good man or woman.” (And how retro of
him to keep the choices to two.) He stressed that the purpose of
education at his college is not just to prepare graduates to find a
job, though alert employers could do worse than hiring his
graduates.
The liberal arts tradition is alive at Hillsdale, where, Arnn
says, students are taught how rather than what to think. Hillsdale
is not dumbed-down, and students seeking a degree there will have
to work to earn it. “It takes time and effort to know something,”
Arnn said.
Arnn pleased his clearly conservative audience of potential
donors, and, doubtless, parents of future Hillsdale students, by
validating other sentiments many had been yearning to hear from an
academic, including: “We’re in the character building business,
while we inform the mind. Both go together.” At Hillsdale, he said,
there is respect for absolute truth, as well as for liberty and the
consent of the governed. This makes a nice distinction between
Hillsdale and most of contemporary academe where “there is no
absolute truth and they just make it up as they go along.”
Arnn got no blowback from his observations on the current
political scene. He said while there is certainly a possibility of
a rebirth of the understanding of freedom in America, “The
situation now is urgent — we’re on a path to despotism, to a
racist and classist society.” Also: “Government is very big and
politicians are overwhelmed by it.” He also got a big hand for this
advice offered to the Sandra Flukes of the world, who are in a
quandary over how ever to sort out their sex lives unless the
government steps in to pay for their birth control: “Lord, woman,
you should get married.” (Any takers?)
Another eccentricity of Hillsdale, other than that it takes the
traditional view of living and learning, is that to maintain its
admirable independence, neither the college nor any of its students
accepts any subsidies from any level of government. This
strings-attached government money makes up a significant fraction
of the funding of most universities. This is a fact readers might
keep in mind when wondering if they should send a check to Old
Sywash or Left-Wing State because they went there before professors
were more like Pol Pot than like dowdy old Doctor Dudley in English
301. You can bet your Norton Anthology that there is more
conservative bang for the buck to be gotten elsewhere.
The satirist can’t turn an honest buck making fun of the modern
university. No matter how absurd a picture he paints, the reality
is even weirder and more destructive of the West’s fundamental
values. When I hear the term “higher education” these days I can’t
help but ask, “higher than what?” It’s a comfort to know there are
still a few places, like Hillsdale, where the work of the academic
angels is still being done.
