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The Troubling Plight of the Modern University
Townhall.com ^ | June 5, 2014 | Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on 06/05/2014 4:56:07 AM PDT by Kaslin

Employment rates for college graduates are dismal. Aggregate student debt is staggering. But university administrative salaries are soaring. The campus climate of tolerance has utterly disappeared. Only the hard sciences and graduate schools have salvaged American universities' international reputations.

For over two centuries, our superb system of American public and private higher education kept pace with radically changing times and so ensured our prosperity and reinforced democratic pluralism.

But a funny thing has happened on the way to the 21st century. Colleges that were once our most enlightened and tolerant institutions became America's dinosaurs.

Start with ossified institutions. Tenure may have been a good idea in the last century to ensure faculty members free expression. But such a spoils system now encourages the opposite result of protecting monotonies of thought.

(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: academia; biasineducation; colleges; collegesandunis; conservativeleaders; universities; vdh
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1 posted on 06/05/2014 4:56:07 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Deb; Sir Napsalot; Kaslin; neverdem; EXCH54FE; 2ndDivisionVet; Rummyfan; smoothsailing; Hojczyk; ...
VDH ping ...

Someday, similar to the advent of conservative talk radio, there will be growth in conservative universities to supplant the current overpriced medieval liberal ones.

2 posted on 06/05/2014 5:00:36 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross (the Truth will set you free)
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To: Servant of the Cross

“Someday, similar to the advent of conservative talk radio, there will be growth in conservative universities to supplant the current overpriced medieval liberal ones.”

I think soon probably. And there’ll be a bunch of white pony tailed commie profs retired, and young commie profs out of work.


3 posted on 06/05/2014 5:06:46 AM PDT by Blue Collar Christian (Vote Democrat. Once you're OK with killing babies the rest is easy. <BCC><)
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To: Kaslin
An aging campus generation that has nearly wrecked the university should bow out and let more open-minded and innovative minds repair the damage that the old generation has wrought.

Ha! Found this last line funny. It's not going to happen. The schools will go bankrupt before change is affected

4 posted on 06/05/2014 5:12:32 AM PDT by rbg81
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To: Kaslin

This has happened for one simple reason: liberalism. Every institution touched by this plague has been destroyed and for the same reasons. Liberals are incapable of advancing anything except for their increasingly bizarre fantasy enviornments.


5 posted on 06/05/2014 5:18:24 AM PDT by centurion316
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To: Kaslin

Once government money got involved with colleges and enrollment the law of supply and demand was quickly violated.

The progressive’s notion that every illiterate and scatter-brain in the country has a “right” to a college education has hit the brick wall of reality.


6 posted on 06/05/2014 5:25:23 AM PDT by Iron Munro (Black skin has morphed into Teflon.)
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To: rbg81

yes...they would rather let these universities crash and burn than let the ideology be shown a failure


7 posted on 06/05/2014 5:30:02 AM PDT by Ouderkirk (To the left, everything must evidence that this or that strand of leftist theory is true)
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To: rbg81

“The schools will go bankrupt before change is affected”

You are quite correct. To get and keep a university professor’s position, you have to establish a reputation for scholarship. To get that reputation, you have to conduct research and write papers that cite the prominent scholars of the past. You cannot dismiss the existing scholarship nor conflict with it unless you do so in tiny increments. Once a culture of thought is established in an academic discipline, it will not change easily or quickly. It is self-sustaining and not open to change.


8 posted on 06/05/2014 5:37:46 AM PDT by iacovatx (Conservatism is the political center--it is not "right" of center)
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To: iacovatx
If you aren't marching in lockstep, at least on the major points, you will never get a PhD, much less write papers which will survive peer review.

In this way, the left has not only controlled the discourse, they have controlled accreditation.

Being correct is not enough in this day and age, you have to have that PhD, too. Anything lessand your work tends to be dismissed (along with yourself) in the halls of academia, and shouted down as being somehow research of inferior quality, no matter how strong your case.

9 posted on 06/05/2014 5:44:16 AM PDT by Smokin' Joe (How often God must weep at humans' folly. Stand fast. God knows what He is doing.)
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To: Kaslin

Hero of the Republic Edward R. Morrow, whose king-breaking “See It Now” broadcast of March 9, 1954 brought down Sen Joseph McCarthy, took a much more serious action that had much to do with the fall of American education. It was Murrow who brought to this country, “The New Left’s” Herbert Marcuse of the heretical branch of Marxism, the Frankfurt School (cultural communism). Marcuse was architect of the radicalization of three generations of American college classrooms.

(Revelations from declassified Soviet intelligence archives and the Venona Transcripts now show that Joseph McCarthy was accurate in his assertions about communist infiltration of the American State Department, even in the numbers he cited.)


10 posted on 06/05/2014 5:56:38 AM PDT by CharlesOConnell (CharlesOConnell)
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To: Kaslin

Another slant. The University world of today is, all too often, the greatest financial scam in history. I think it makes Bernie Maddof look like a hick town beginner.
Countless thousands of youngsters and their families are thrust into virtually impossible debt to finance a four year indoctrination that is overwhelmingly usless in today’s world.
Each year the cry resonates across the land, “There are NO jobs for this year’s graduates.”
Is there any thought given to the fact that a tragic proportion of today’s grads have NOTHING to offer an employer. They have invested four precious years of their life “learning” nothing worth the effort.
Meanwhile, tuitions skyrocket, administration and faculty salaries soar, and the results are worse each year, and the year after.
Meantime, industry in the US is forced to search OTHER countries for prospective employees who CAN DO SOMETHING, and/or KNOW SOMETHING OF USE.


11 posted on 06/05/2014 5:58:15 AM PDT by CaptainAmiigaf (NY TIMES: We print the news as it fits our views.)
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To: Kaslin
Only the hard sciences and graduate schools have salvaged American universities' international reputations.

Indeed. Gender studies and ethnic studies are false academics. Yet these schools cost money, and require professors and administrators, and that money comes from students in real fields. And if the PC-nonsense ever spills over into the engineering and sciences, higher education will be finished.

12 posted on 06/05/2014 7:21:02 AM PDT by Rummyfan (Iraq: it's not about Iraq anymore, it's about the USA!)
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To: rbg81
The schools will go bankrupt before change is affected

I believe many of them will. Who is going to send their kid to some $50K-a-year liberals arts private school that doesn't even qualify them to be an elementary school teacher upon graduation?

13 posted on 06/05/2014 7:22:51 AM PDT by Rummyfan (Iraq: it's not about Iraq anymore, it's about the USA!)
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To: Rummyfan

I see in the near future, foreign universities starting to market towards American students.


14 posted on 06/05/2014 7:24:14 AM PDT by dfwgator
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To: Blue Collar Christian

I’m hoping new classical curriculum grammar and high schools start opening up. I’m in Northern Va. and even our lovely local Catholic grammar school has this dumbed-down mathematics. I have no real alternatives!


15 posted on 06/05/2014 8:13:29 AM PDT by clarissaexplainsitall
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To: Kaslin

bookmark


16 posted on 06/05/2014 9:58:14 AM PDT by GOP Poet
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bkmk


17 posted on 06/05/2014 10:18:27 AM PDT by AllAmericanGirl44
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To: rbg81
The schools will go bankrupt before change is affected

Schools each with billions of dollars of endowments aren't going bankrupt anytime soon.

If you have a billion dollars, it'd take a year to burn through it at the rate of over $2.7million a day.

Or near a thousand years at the rate of $3,000 a day. And that's just one billion, without any growth or interest.

18 posted on 06/05/2014 10:19:38 AM PDT by a fool in paradise (The new witchhunt: "Do you NOW, . . . or have you EVER , . . supported traditional marriage?")
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To: Rummyfan

It’s a lousy investment in a skilled trade what with Obama sending billions to India to build up their business infrastructure so that $100,000 a year jobs can be filled for $17,000 a year. IBM thought it would be marvey if Americans would be willing to emmigrate the US to India and work for less where their dollars would go farther.

Doesn’t matter if you have a tech degree, law degree, accounting, graphic design, it’s all on a global market with no inport duty on the offshored goods that are imported via the interwebs.


19 posted on 06/05/2014 10:22:40 AM PDT by a fool in paradise (The new witchhunt: "Do you NOW, . . . or have you EVER , . . supported traditional marriage?")
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To: a fool in paradise

Only a handful of schools have endowments of that magnitude. There are many, many schools that are in trouble—both public and private. In 10-15 years, I bet that there will be at least a 25% shakeout.


20 posted on 06/05/2014 1:58:16 PM PDT by rbg81
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