Anyone with a clear mind who has taught or studied at a university or whose children are currently enrolled in its troubled precincts knows that the academy has fallen on evil days. Preoccupied with “diversity,” “inclusiveness,” affirmative action, and equality of outcome regardless of input, universities have coddled students into a state of planular emotionalism — “you are loved” and “all your emotions are real,” goes the mantra at Virginia Tech — and rendered them incapable of grappling with anything that resembles an unfamiliar idea or an unanticipated event. Considering in addition the number of useless and cost-ineffective courses in the Humanities and Social Sciences (e.g., Gender Studies, Peace Studies, Fat Studies, Black Studies, Aboriginal Studies, Queer Studies, etc.), as well as the dilution of even the more respectable subjects in order to make them accessible to the unqualified, the future of the university looks increasingly bleak — a “strange Twilight Zone,” as Daniel Greenfield writes, where “none of the sane rules apply.”
In an exceptionally civil discourse on the need for civility in academia, Ashley Thorne, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, argues that the two animating principles of higher education are: (1) building student character in the interests of self-examination and growth, and (2) freedom to pursue truth in whatever direction it may lead. The university, however, has betrayed both its founding ideals. Thorne writes in the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory, which has teachers and administrators reeling with disbelief and students collapsing in paroxysms of despair, fear, anxiety, deep uncertainty, emotional trauma and cataclysmic grief, and in desperate need of “relaxing stations,” cry-ins, calming music, teddy bears, and coloring books. Students racked by electoral stress routinely wish to be exempted from taking their finals. A note saying “Suck it up,” posted by an intrepid student at Wisconsin’s Edgewood College, was deemed a hate crime by college authorities. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that an academy administered by a clade of invertebrates and thick with Pajama Boys and Julias does not elicit confidence in its future. Put one Hamas five-year-old in their midst and they’re goners.
The upshot is that practically the entire university culture is sick unto death: the vast majority of professors in lockstep leftism like an army of Star Trek Borgs marching toward an ever-receding progressivist Millennium, next to none with any real-world experience; hiring protocols based on gender credentials (i.e., women) rather than merit; systematic hostility to fair debate and the free exchange of ideas, however asunder the prevailing cultural consensus; Access Service personnel who regard the university as a field hospital or are simply unable to cope with the new and burgeoning category of disability claimants; and the students themselves, some “mismatched” (code for not possessing the academic wherewithal to succeed), others simply incapable of intellectual endeavor or serious application across the curricular spectrum, and, in short, a supine clientele intent on avoiding work, who consider the university as a daycare center when they are not turning it into a Jungle Gym.
