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| Hanson -- Fox News |
In a recent column, Victor Davis Hanson – classicist, military historian and conservative polemicist – makes the case against the postmodern university. He concludes: “Eventually, even elite schools will lose their current veneer of prestige. Their costly cattle brands will be synonymous with equality-of-result, overpriced indoctrination echo chambers, where therapy replaced singular rigor and their tarnished degrees become irrelevant.
“How ironic that universities are rushing to erode
meritocratic standards—history’s answer to the age-old, pre-civilizational bane
of tribal, racial, class, elite, and insider prejudices and bias that
eventually ensure poverty and ruin for all.”
That is a rather
foreboding prediction. Is it true?
As we say in the journalism business, “We’ll see.” As always
in journalism, accurate description trumps prophesy or, as prophesy used to be
called, divine revelation. Over the course of a few decades, we have seen the
divine flee academia at all education levels, replaced in the postmodern period
by non-academic college administrators and unenlightened, pedantic academics
who have never cracked open Cardinal John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University to find that the whole point of a
university is to identify and impart to students reliable universal knowledge, not
tribal prejudices or woke intuitions.
There is never any shortage of accurate description in
Hanson, who is yet to be purged from academia for having written a book titled The Case for Trump, the former President
whose place in presidential history has been extensively reviewed by polemical,
non-historian, left of center, political commentators and found wanting. But,
as we say in the journalism business, history trumps the first draft of
history.
Here is a sampling of Hanson on academia: “During the 1990’s
‘culture wars,’ universities were warned that their chronic tuition hikes above
the rate of inflation were unsustainable.
“Their growing manipulation of blanket federal student loan
guarantees and part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants always was
suicidal.
“Left-wing indoctrination; administrative bloat; obsessions
with racial preferences; arcane, jargon-filled research; and campus-wide
intolerance of diverse thought short-changed students, further alienated the
public, and often enraged alumni.”
Hanson mentions in passing the administrative bloat at Yale
University in New Haven, Connecticut where, “administrative positions have
soared over 150 percent in the past two decades. But the number of professors
increased by just 10 percent. In a new low/high, Stanford recently enrolled
16,937 undergraduate and graduate students but lists 15,750 administrative
staff—in [a] near one-to-one fashion.
“In the past, such costly praetorian bloat would have
sparked a faculty rebellion. Not now. The new six-figure salaried ‘diversity,
equity, and inclusion commissars’ are feared and exempt from criticism.”
These data points ring in Hanson’s column like pealing
liberty bells. He is simply telling people, most especially in stricken
universities, what they already know to be true. Bloating may lead to edema,
and edema to organ failure. In academia, as in the human body, one thing leads
to another.
Many universities already have shown meritocracy,
advancement by merit, the door, and the cultural assault on so called
privileged white males has been underway for decades. If no measurement of
merit is possible in universities, advancement will be powered by other
ambiguous considerations. Hanson notes, “At Cornell, students push for
pass/fail courses only and the abolition of all grades. At the New School in
New York, students demand that everyone receives ‘A’ grades. Dean’s lists and
class and school rankings are equally suspect as counterrevolutionary. Even as
courses are watered down, entitled students still assume that their admission
must automatically guarantee graduation—or else!”
It is very nearly impossible to satirize such a turn of
events. “Pass-through” education, a system of advancement well matured at every
stage of schooling in our egalitarian pedagogical Eden, simply assures the
advancement of mediocrity – and, in some cases, illiteracy -- until a student,
well out of college, is instructed by reality that a filtering system, nearly
abolished in academia, still holds full sway in what postmodern academics refer
to, disdainfully, as “the real world,” now as ever red in tooth and claw.
This writer, as disdainfully, once suggested years ago that credentialism has now replaced
education. That being the case, perhaps we might dispense with an increasingly
expensive education in favor of issuing diplomas at birth from universities of
choice.
Former Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell
found himself in an Asian port several years ago, where he was surprised by a
column disparaging a piece he had written that sought to explain in part the dip
in sales of newspapers in major U.S. cities. The papers no longer sold well in
large urban areas in the U.S., Powell had speculated, because literacy in urban
schools had reached a point of no return. High schools were passing-through
functional illiterates, some of them headed for college. The Asian paper was
inflamed with hot rebuttals.
Powell phoned the relevant editor, identified himself, and
asked whether he would permit the author of the offending piece in the U.S.
publication to rebut the rebutters.
No need of that, he was told.
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