Enter by this gateway and seek the way of honor, the light of truth, the will to work for men.
Edwin Anderson Alderman, inscription on the archway at the entrance to the medical college, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; reported in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
The university, in asociety ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. … But by consenting to play an active or “positive,” a participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society’s “problems.” Preoccupied with questions ofHealth,Sex,Race,War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes. … Any proposed reforms ofliberal education which might bring the university into conflict with the whole of theU.S.A. are unthinkable. Increasingly, the people “inside” are identical in their appetites and motives with the people “outside” the university.
By making social hierarchies and the reproduction of these hierarchies appear based upon the hierarchy of ‘gifts’, merits, or skill established and ratified by itssanctions, or, in a word, by convertingsocial hierarchies into academic hierarchies, the educational system fulfils a function of legitimation which is more and more necessary to the perpetuation of the ‘social order’ as the evolution of the power relationship between classes tends more completely to exclude the imposition of a hierarchy based upon the crude and ruthless affirmation of the power relationship.
Pierre Bourdieu,Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1973), p. 84
You send your kids off to college. They love you. You walk away with aCornell mom T-shirt. You are walking away going this is great, and comeThanksgiving, your kid tells you that you are animperialist and aracist and ahomophobe. That is not worth $120,000.
A penetrating observer of social problems has pointed out recently that whereas wealthy families once were the chief benefactors of the universities, now industry has taken over this role. Support ofeducation is something no one quarrels with-but this need not blind us to the fact that research supported by pesticide manufacturers is not likely to be directed at discovering facts indicating unfavorable effects of pesticides.
Rachel Carson Speech to the Women's National Press Club (December 5, 1962) In Rachel Carson: Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment
Changi became my university instead of myprison. … Among the inmates there were experts in all walks oflife — the high and the low roads.I studied and absorbed everything I could fromphysics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving.
Fellows of colleges in the universities are in one sense the recipients of alms, because they receive funds which originally were of aneleemosynary character.
John Duke Coleridge, C.J.,Harrison v. Carter (1876), L. R. 2 Com. PI. D. 36: Reported in James William Norton-Kyshe,The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 242.
...One of the ways in which all universities could contribute substantially to their home societies is by helping students obtain a better understanding of the development and interdependencies over time of our seemingly fragmented globe.
"I didn't get the point", said Pig. "That's because you've got four pounds of provolone where most people gotbrains!", Mark shouted, shaking his fist. "This is college, you dumb bastard. This is a place where you're supposed to argue and learn and get pissed off. You don't go around choking your buddies just because they don't happen to believe what you believe."
My interest inKipnis’s book was sparked initially by my own history. I was one of a small group of women who fought to bring in asexual harassment code at my college in the late1980s, and what I remember is how badly we felt it was needed, and how much resistance there was to the idea that clever people could also be in the habit of pinching bums, or worse. But I am also the product of a student-lecturer relationship: my brother and I, and two of our sisters, would not exist if my father had not twice married those that he taught. I’m sure my father’s behaviour was, knowing both him and the times (I am the eldest, and I was born in 1969), sometimes reprehensible. No doubt he would, and would be expected to, behave differently now.Nevertheless, it seems completely mad to me to try to outlaw relationships between what are, after all, consenting adults. Where else are people expected to meet, if not in the places where they spend most of their time? Imagine if it was decreed that theatre directors could not sleep with actors, that editors were forbidden from having affairs with writers, and that junior teachers were not allowed to fall in love with more senior staff. The very idea is absurd.
I should have all manner of tenderness for the right of the College; they are nurseries ofReligion andLearning, and therefore all donations for increase and augmentation of their revenue are to be liberally expounded.
William Cowper, 1st Earl Cowper, L.C.,Devit v. College of Dublin (1720). Gilbert Eq. Ca. 248: Reported in James William Norton-Kyshe,The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 242.
Our school systems are all nonsynergetic. We take the whole child and fractionate the scope of his or her comprehending... to become preoccupied with elements or isolated facts only... We may well ask how it happened that the entire scheme of advanced education is devoted exclusively to ever narrower specialization. We find that the historical beginnings of schools and tutoring were established, and economically supported by illiterate and vastly ambitious warlords who required a wide variety of brain slaves with which to logistically and ballistically overwhelm those who opposed their expansion of physical conquest...The warlord made all those about him differentiators and reserved the function of integration to himself. ~Buckminster Fuller
We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends ofspecialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsiblecommunication to be crisply brief. . . . In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensiveunderstanding... It has also resulted in the individual's leavingresponsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads towar.
Buckminster Fuller,Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)
If universities are determined to have faculty that are ideological monoliths, they can find students and private donors who are willing to indulge this indoctrination and pay for it themselves. These institutions are not entitled to a dime of taxpayer money, especially when they have displayed nothing but contempt for half of the American electorate. And taxpayers should be untroubled if these universities are unable to survive on their own. New universities will arise, and others that can meet the Sodom and Gomorrah test will reform themselves to offer an intellectually diverse and ideologically balanced education.
One of the characteristics of the university is that it is made up of professors who train professors, or professionals training professionals.Education was this no longer directed toward people who were to be educated with a view to become fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in other that they might learn how to train other specialists. This is the danger of “Scholasticism,” that philosophical tendency which began to be sketched at the end ofantiquity, developed in theMiddle Ages, and whose presence is still recognizable inphilosophy today.
Pierre Hadot,Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 270.
College-educatedelites, on behalf ofcorporations, carried out the savageneoliberal assault on theworking poor. Now they are being made to pay. Their duplicity—embodied inpoliticians such asBill andHillary Clinton andBarack Obama—succeeded for decades. These elites, many fromEast CoastIvy League schools, spoke the language of values—civility, inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle class—while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their corporate masters. This game has ended.
Chris Hedges, "The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism,"Truthdig,August 8, 2016
We were a small group of college friends who kept together after our course was over, and continued to share the same views and the same ideals. Not one of us thought of his future career or financial position. I should not praise this attitude in grown-up people, but I value it highly in a young man. Except where it is dried up by the corrupting influence of vulgar respectability, youth is everywhere unpractical, and is especially bound to be so in a young country which has many ideals and has realised few of them. Besides, the unpractical sphere is not always a fool's paradise: every aspiration for the figure involves some degree of imagination; and , but for unpractical people, practical life would never get beyond a tiresome repetition of the old routine.
Transforming hereditaryprivilege into ‘merit,’ the existing system of educational selection, with theBig Three [Harvard,Princeton, andYale] as its capstone, provides the appearance if not the substance of equality of opportunity. In so doing, it legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability over the prerogatives of birth. The problem with a ‘meritocracy,’ then, is not only that its ideals are routinely violated (though that is true), but also that it veils the power relations beneath it. For the definition of ‘merit,’ including the one that now prevails in America’s leading universities, always bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society. Those who are able to define ‘merit’ will almost invariably possess more of it, and those with greater resources—cultural, economic and social—will generally be able to ensure that the educational system will deem their children more meritorious.
Jerome Karabel,The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Houghton Mifflin: 2005), pp. 549-550
Two universities have been founded in this country, amply endowed and furnished with professors in the different sciences; and I should be sorry that those who have been educated at either of them should undervalue the benefits of such an education.
Lord Kenyon, C.J.,King v. The College of Physicians (1797), 7 T. R. 288: Reported in James William Norton-Kyshe,The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 242.
Being a student in the late sixties was a different experience than being one in the early sixties. For one thing, there was the draft. NeitherAbbie Hoffman norTom Hayden norMario Savio had been subjected to adraft—a draft that threatened to pull students into a war in which Americans werekilling anddying by the thousands. Perhaps more important, thewar itself, with its cruel and pointlessviolence, was seen ontelevision every night, and no matter how much they reviled it, these students were powerless to stop it. They could not evenvote if they were under the age of twenty-one, though they could be drafted at eighteen. Despite all these differences, one thing, unfortunately, had not changed—the university itself. If the American university has in recent years been thought of as a sanctuary for leftist thought and activism, that is a legacy of the late sixties graduates. In1968, universities were still veryconservative institutions.Academia had enthusiastically supportedWorld War II, moved seamlessly to full support of theCold War, and, though starting to squirm a bit, tended to support the war inVietnam. This was why the universities imagined their campuses to be suitable and desirable places for such activities as recruitment ofexecutives byDow Chemical, not to mention recruitment of officers by themilitary. And while universities were famous for their intellectuals likeHerbert Marcuse orC. Wright Mills, a more typical product wasHarvard'sHenry Kissinger. TheIvy League in particular was well known as a bastion of conservativenortheastelitism. Columbia University hadDwight Eisenhower as an emeritus member of its board of directors. Active members includedCBS founderWilliam S. Paley;Arthur H. Sulzberger, the septuagenarian publisher ofThe New York Times; his son Arthur O. Sulzberger, who would take over after his father's death later in the year;Manhattan district attorneyFrank S. Hogan;William A. M. Burden, director ofLockheed, a major Vietnam War weapons contractor;Walter Thayer of theWhitney Corporation, aRepublican fund-raiser who worked forNixon in 1968; aLawrence A. Wein, film producer, advisor toLyndon Johnson, and trustee ofConsolidated Edison. Later in the year students would produce a paper alleging connections between Columbia trustees and theCIA. Columbia and other Ivy League schools produced leaders inindustry,publishing, andfinance—the people behind politics, the people behind war, the very people C. Wright Mills identified in his book as "the power elite."
The question is frequently asked:why there is a school oftheology attached to every University? The answer is easy:It is, that the Universities may subsist, and that the instruction may not become corrupt. Originally, the Universities were only schools of theology, to which otherfaculties were joined, as subjects around theirQueen.
Joseph de Maistre,Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions (1809), XXXVIII
Consider what it means for an institution to designate all of its faculty members as “mandatory reporters of sexual assault.” The policy effectively demands that every faculty member disclose the details of any student account of asexual assault, whether it has been expressed in a course assignment, a classroom discussion, or a privateconversation. Faculty will be required to make the disclosure to campus officials, even if the student has expressly indicated a desire not to file an official complaint. These requirements will have a chilling effect on students’ willingness to talk about difficult experiences with anyone on campus, even those experiences that may have nothing to do with sexual violence.
To override a college student’s wishes in the matter of reporting suspectedsexual violence is especially problematic, since sexual violence can be a particularly insidious kind ofcoercion, undermining a victim’s sense of control over the most personal details of human experience. Colleges should not be in the business of further wresting a student’s control over those details. Moreover, since most victims of sexual violence are women we must reject any policy that makes us complicit in cultural institutions and practices that tend to discourage young women from speaking in their own voices.
No hardworking student should be stuck in the red. We’ve already reduced student loan payments to 10 percent of a borrower’s income. And that's good. But now, we’ve actually got to cut the cost of college. (Applause.) Providing two years ofcommunity college at no cost for every responsible student is one of the best ways to do that, and I’m going to keep fighting to get that started this year.
Barack ObamaState of the Union (Jan 12th 2016) as quotedWhitehouse.govState of the Union (Jan 12th 2016)
I think, as well (on what might be considered the leftish side), that the incremental remake of university administrations into analogues of privatecorporations is a mistake. I think that thescience of management is a pseudo-discipline. I believe thatgovernment can, sometimes, be a force for good, as well as the necessary arbiter of a small set of necessaryrules. Nonetheless, I do not understand why our society is providing public funding to institutions and educators whose stated, conscious, and explicit aim is the demolition of the culture that supports them. Such people have a perfect right to theiropinions and actions, if they remain lawful. But they have no reasonable claim to public funding. Ifradical right-wingers were receiving state funding for political operations disguised as university courses, asradical left-wingers clearly are, the uproar fromprogressives acrossNorth America would be deafening.
Most Americans are not aware how morally and intellectually destructive American colleges — and, increasingly, high schools and even elementary schools — have become. So, they spend tens of thousands after-tax dollars to send their sons and daughters to college.
Dennis Prager, PRAGER: Are You Sure You Want To Play Russian Roulette With Your Child's Values?, May 25 2019,The Daily Wire
But today, to send your child to college is to playRussian roulette with theirvalues. There is a good chance your child will return from college alienated from you, from America, from Western civilization and from whatever expression of anyBible-based religion in which you raised your child.
Dennis Prager, PRAGER: Are You Sure You Want To Play Russian Roulette With Your Child's Values?, May 25 2019,The Daily Wire
Colleges aren’t about training kids for the real world, or teaching them significant modes ofthinking, or examining timelesstruths. Universities aren’t about skill sets, either – at least in thehumanities. They’re about two things:credentialism and social connections.
Ben Shapiro, Famous Actresses Paid Bundles Of Money To Bribe Their Kids' Way Into College. Here's Why. March 12 2019,Daily Wire
In our society, there is an easy way to be perceived as intellectually meritorious: point to your degree. Those with a college degree all-too-often sneer at those without one, as though lack of a college degree were an indicator of innate ability or future lack of success. That simply isn’t true.
Ben Shapiro, Famous Actresses Paid Bundles Of Money To Bribe Their Kids' Way Into College. Here's Why. March 12 2019,Daily Wire
The university system in 2014, it's like theCatholic Church circa 1514... You have this priestly class of professors that doesn't do very much work; people are buying indulgences in the form of amassing enormousdebt for the sort of the secularsalvation that a diploma represents. And what I think is also similar to the 16th century is that theReformation will come largely from the outside.
Nothing is more certain than that whatever has to court public favor for its support will sooner or later be prostituted toutilitarian ends. The educational institutions of the United States afford a striking demonstration of this truth. Virtually without exception,liberal education, that is to say, education centered aboutideas andideals, has fared best in those institutions which draw their income from private sources. They have been able … to insist that education be not entirely a means for breadwinning. This means that they have been relatively free to promote pure knowledge and the training of the mind. … In state institutions, always at the mercy of elected bodies and of the public generally, and under obligation to show practical fruits for their expenditure of money, the movement towardspecialism and vocationalism has been irresistible. They have never been able to say that they will do what they will with their own because their own is not private. It seems fair to say that the opposite of the private is the prostitute.
Richard Weaver,Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), pp. 136-137.
It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it!
When we see a woman barteringbeauty forgold, we look upon such a one as no other than a commonprostitute; but she who rewards the passion of some worthy youth with it, gains at the same time our approbation and esteem. It is the very same with philosophy: he who sets it forth for public sale, to be disposed of to the highest bidder, is a sophist, a public prostitute.
Xenophon,Socrates inMemorabilia, 1.6.11, T. Stanley, trans., p. 535
To offer one’s beauty formoney to all comers is called prostitution. … So is it withwisdom. Those who offer it to all comers for money are known assophists, prostitutors of wisdom.
On too many campuses, a new attitude aboutdue process—and the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty—has taken hold, one that echoes the infamous logic ofEdwin Meese, who served inRonald Reagan’s administration as attorney general, in his argument against theMiranda warning. “The thing is,” Meese said, “you don’t have manysuspects who areinnocent of acrime. That’s contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.” There is nodoubt that until recently, many women’s claims of sexual assault were reflexively and widely disregarded—or that many still are in some quarters. (One need look no further than the many derogatory responses received by the women who came forward last year to accuse then-candidateDonald Trump of sexual violations.) Action to redress that problem was—and is—fully warranted. But many of the remedies that have been pushed oncampus in recent years areunjust tomen,infantilize women, and ultimately undermine thelegitimacy of thefight against sexualviolence. Severe restrictions were placed on theability of the accused toquestion the account of the accuser, in order to preventintimidation ortrauma. Eventually the administration praised a “single investigator” model, whereby the school appoints a staff member to act asdetective,prosecutor,judge, andjury. The letter defined sexual violence requiring university investigation broadly to include “rape, sexual assault, sexual battery, and sexual coercion,” with nodefinitions provided. It also characterized sexually harassing behavior as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including remarks. Schools were told to investigate any reports of possible sexual misconduct, including those that came from a third party and those in which the alleged victim refused tocooperate. (Paradoxically, they were also told to defer to alleged victims’wishes, creating no small amount ofconfusion among administrators.)
GEOFFREY STONE, a professor at theUniversity of Chicago Law School, and its former dean, told me he believes that theintegrity of the legal system requires rules designed to prevent innocent people from being punished, and that these same principles should apply on campus. But he is concerned that severe sanctions are being imposed without the necessary protections for the accused. As he wrote in HuffPost, “For a college or university to expel a student for sexual assault is a matter of grave consequence both for the institution and for the student. Such an expulsion will haunt the student for the rest of his days, especially in the world of theInternet. Indeed, it may well destroy his chosen career prospects.”
As Jeannie Suk Gersen and her husband andHarvard Law School colleague, Jacob Gersen, wrote last year in a California Law Review article, “The Sex Bureaucracy,” the “conduct classified asillegal” on college campuses “has grown substantially, and indeed, it plausibly covers almost allsexstudents are having today.”
Atroubling paradox within the activist community, and increasingly among administrators, is the belief that while women who make a complaint should be given the strong benefit of the doubt, women who deny they were assaulted should not necessarily be believed. The rules at many schools, created in response to federal directives, require employees (except those covered by confidentiality protections, such as health-care providers) to report to theTitle IX office any instance ofpossible sexual assault or harassment of which they become aware. One result is that offhand remarks,rumors, and the inferences drawn by observers of ambiguous interactions can trigger investigations; sometimes these are not halted even when the alleged victim denies that an assault occurred.
There are no national data that let us know the prevalence of third-party reports, but they appear to be a significant source of allegations. TheUniversity of Michigan’s most recent “Student Sexual Misconduct Annual Report” says that the school’s Office for Institutional Equity “often receives complaints about incidents from third parties.” Yale releases a semiannual report of all possible sexual-assault and harassment complaints. Its report for the latter half of 2015 included a new category: third-party reports in which the alleged victim, after being contacted by the Title IX office, refused to cooperate. These cases made up more than 30 percent of all undergraduate assault allegations.
And while some college administrators expressconcern about due process, that concern does not always appear to be top of mind, even though lawsuits are piling up. Some 170 suits about unfair treatment have been filed by accused students over the past several years. As K. C. Johnson, the co-author, with Stuart Taylor Jr., of the recent book The Campus Rape Frenzy, notes, at least 60 have so far resulted in findings favorable to them. The National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, one of the country’s largest higher-education law firms and consulting practices specializing inTitle IX, recently released a white paper, “Due Process and the Sex Police.” It noted that higher-education institutions are “losing case after case in federal court on what should be very basic due process protections. Never before have colleges been losing more cases than they are winning, but that is the trend as we write this.” The paper warned that at some colleges, “overzealousness to impose sexual correctness”—including the idea that anything less than “utopian” sex is punishable—“is causing a backlash that is going to set back the entireconsent movement.”
America’s top universities should abandon their long misadventure intopolitics, retrain their gaze on their core strengths and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning
