The Regrettable Decline of Higher Learning

Townhall.com ^ | February 4, 2016 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Kaslin]

What do campus microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, speech codes and censorship have to do with higher learning?

American universities want it both ways. They expect unquestioned subsidized support from the public, but also to operate in a way impossible for anyone else.

[KC_Conspirator]

In a just world, the DoJ civil rights divisions would be filing charges against universities.

[Fiji Hill]

declining since 1916? You can't be serious

Irving Babbitt, author of Democracy and Leadership (Boston: Houghton Miffiln, 1924) and other works would argue that the decline began even earlier.

[Forward the Light Brigade]

When history is shackled to propaganda—all suffer. PC and Multiculturalism have destroyed thinking in the west—the Hippies won but, rather than lead the universities in a new age of reason they have slipped into Communist group think. A new revolution is needed—a new age to pull the universities back from the edge. As an American, I believe that the following should be done:
1. A whole set of new private colleges set up coast to coast—inexpensive to educate the young—these could be class rooms without tenior—use older—professors to teach what they know—cheap.
2. Use all te tools we have for inexpensive books and teach real classes—not PC junk.
3. Expand classes to include the practile —likeways classes on how to get and keep a job, will out taxes, resume, and marriage.
4. Teach skills—like weilding, automove repare, Tech support, Medicine (Nursing) -—
5. Use volunteerism—to expand the classroom and make it better like work in Red Cross.

[Oratam]

This had me look up when Greek was abandoned by our top schools. Unbelievably, Harvard dropped Greek as a requirement in 1886! Yale abandoned its Latin requirement in 1931.

[CodeToad]

In 1900 there was 2% of the population with a college degree. Today there is 45%. We hand out college degrees as participation trophies.

[PIF]

Like I said declining for 100 years (or more). Glad y’all see the light as to how far the educational system has actually fallen - side note: I had Latin, advanced math, statistics, and so on at the private school I attended - and look were it got me - misspent youth ... maybe next time ...

[Kaslin]

I agree

[nuke_road_warrior]

As an engineer who graduated in the ‘70s, It scares me to think that the rot will eventually migrate from the “Liberal” Arts to the Hard Sciences. Do you really want to cross a bridge designed by an engineer that feels that Pi is an artificial construct of ancient white men and that it is OK to make up any convenient value.

How about a doctor who graduated Med School because he/she/other met a quota for special snowflakes but didn't meet the minimum academic or practical requirements?

[hoosierham]

I noted in reading through a few 1950s textbooks that the levels were consistently more advanced for every grade than more “modern” texts. But today’s students can produce slick presentation that a 1950s salesman would have drooled over.
Style has replaced substance.

[RipSawyer]

They hire college graduates for the kind of jobs that were often done by eighth grade dropouts in the fifties and sixties.

[Dick Vomer]

Thank you. That is exactly correct.

Ask a college student who John Locke was and you’ll get a blank stare.
Try to get someone to give a geometric proof and they’re lost.
It goes on and on.

I read my daughters anthropology text and it made reference to the movie armageddon . It was so juvenile and simplistic AND I paid over $75 for this pile of crap.