RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/re-envisioning-the-university/

A few weeks ago, a parent wrote to me asking if I could recommend at least a dozen non-woke and ideologically uncompromised schools for her son to attend in the United States. She, her husband, and her son had been researching for eighteen months. They found only three schools. I thought about her dilemma and began my own investigation.

After two weeks I told her, sadly, that I could not make any good-faith recommendations. Any school I might recommend today could and, in all likelihood, would go the corrupt route in a year’s time. I identified five schools I would have recommended enthusiastically two years ago. Predictably, they are as left-leaning, woke, and egregiously anti-American and anti-Western Civilization today as one could ever have imagined. The idea pathogens suffusing our culture and universities as of today have no fool-proof inoculants. I advised her to find a college whose faculty appeared to have consistently produced old-fashioned scholarly work over time. Look at the syllabi of professors in the discipline your son wants to pursue and keep your fingers crossed, I added. She thanked me, and then asked me if the universities were burning down that fast.

Yes, I responded. I’m afraid the institutions are burning at an unprecedented rate. The radical professoriate, the bloated and totalitarian bureaucratic administrators, and their ventriloquists—the student rebels—have already lit the fires. It is not a passionate creative fire that lights the way and inspires the soul to new and visionary heights; rather, it is a nihilistic and rageful fire that burns everything of value in its path because it is of value, and it is foundational and universal. That raging fire is selectively destructive.

And what is the goal of such intellectual arsonists? To annihilate the social goods, the values and the principles that make us virtuous, and human. The goal is not primarily the destruction of our republic or of Western civilization. It is the destruction of the humanity of each individual and the concomitant creation of the post-human or trans-human. Such creatures are existential antipodes to the concept of civilization (any civilization) as such. Civilization will not die apocalyptically, but it will be bled to death by thousands of tiny scratches via the death of each individual as his or her humanity is slowly eviscerated by the putrefaction, the rot, the corruption, the indoctrination, and the razed agency of those who will not think and dissent from received wisdom and codified orthodoxy.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/02/campus-idleness-has-bred-extremism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

This article appears as “Idle Minds” in the February 2024 print edition of National Review.

The political consequences of campus sloth

‘Don’t these people have something better to do?” It’s a question I’ve been asked repeatedly in recent years as students and faculty at prestigious colleges have beclowned themselves.

In the wake of Hamas’s barbaric assault on Israel, the moral turpitude on campus has gotten the lion’s share of attention. But there’s something that gets far less attention than it deserves: How do these people have the energy to carry out this insanity? Where do students at Stanford, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, MIT, and Yale find the time to tear down posters of kidnapping victims, bully fellow students, cheer calls for genocide, conduct sit-ins, and make all those pro-Hamas posterboard signs? Don’t they have classes to attend and work to do?

The surprise is that these students don’t have all that much work to do. Many are bored, and all that time on their hands may give them an appetite for mischief. Many are lonely. The surgeon general recently warned about an American “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” particularly among those ages 15 to 24. In that age group, time spent in person with friends has plunged by 70 percent since 2003, down to an average of 40 minutes a day in 2020. College-age youth are spending five or six hours a day online, surfing videos, gaming, and scrolling social media. And few have jobs. In the 1980s, 40 percent of America’s college students worked full-time (35 hours or more); by 2020, that figure had fallen to one in ten. There’s also been a substantial decline in students working part-time. In 1995–96, 42 percent of undergrads held part-time jobs (34 hours or less). By 2018, that number was down to 30 percent.

The restlessness is less pervasive at regional institutions and community colleges, where students are far more likely to attend part-time, live at home, be older, and have kids or jobs. Among community-college students, nearly a third work more than 30 hours a week and 15 percent have two or more jobs. Students are far less likely to hang out in dorms or on a manicured quad and are more focused on transportation, work schedules, and child care. At these institutions, the vibe is more about getting down to business than gearing up for trouble: Busy students just don’t have as much leisure for performative rebellion. Tellingly, the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators’ report on “Advancing Racial Justice on Campus” quoted an official at one “commuter school” who fretted that, absent “formal outlets set up for consultation, support, or awareness of what advocacy can be,” busy students will “just go home at the end of the day.”

The nation’s 200 or 300 elite colleges and universities constitute only a small slice of American higher education, but they have an outsized impact on the nation’s culture — and serve as the pipeline to America’s executive suites, law firms, and elected offices. At Harvard and similar schools, some 98 percent of undergraduates live on campus, basting in a progressive hothouse where there’s a patina of intense busyness but not much actual work. This is a recipe for alienated, aimless students to fuel the toxicity that has seeped out from colleges and into American institutions.