In case you’ve been asleep like Rip Van Winkle, our universities and colleges are failing America. Forget the extravagant costs—they’re obscenely high—and just consider the intellectual nonsense they’re pumping into the heads of naïve students. Higher education is no longer devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. It now delivers indoctrination served up by far-left tenured professorial ideologues who revel in their obsession to radicalize America. In the process, our universities and colleges are graduating dysfunctional people who are more suited to producing mass protests than the mass production of goods and services that fuels our economy. It’s time to reform higher education.
The Core Curriculum
I’m biased, having graduated from the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) where the first two years of my cadetship required a core curriculum that would undergird the last two years of my education. Regardless of one’s degree field, cadets would take English composition, chemistry or biology, a foreign language, US history, and other well-rounded courses. This was by design to ensure that whether you chose to be an engineer or an economist, historian, classicist, doctor, chemist, or physicist, you would have a fundamental knowledge of the world and how it was, is, and likely will be in the future. In other words, you would have a liberal arts foundation in your profession as well as be a citizen-soldier. That is consistent with what some of us would understand as a classical education.
To this date, my association with my classmates confirms that such an academic framework is very much to be desired and replicated in our universities across America, but not necessarily a military regimen. And that means this. As a condition of accreditation, every university in America must have a core curriculum for the first two years as a prerequisite for graduation. And with that, community organizing is “out.” So too sexual liberation studies. What’s “in” is what’s needed, not to tickle ideological fantasies, but rather what is necessary to help people be responsible and contributing citizens in America. Sound boring? Go to trade school. In fact, make that option Number 1 and begin early delivering something of value to society. But if you do go to college, understand that a degree without a meaningful foundation in literature, language, arts, and sciences is utterly shallow.
Jettison the NCAA
There are few abuses of college students that can compete with the amount of student money that goes to supporting huge college sports programs. News Flash: College is about learning, not massive college sports programs that suck up college money like a nuclear-powered vacuum cleaner. It is time to sever college athletics from college academics. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a racket. And it’s being made worse with plans to grant student athletes a check for playing on college teams. It’s time to declare that if a student wants to play sports in college, fine. Join a sports club unassociated with the college or university and pay out of your own pocket a fee to play football, baseball, basketball, or swimming, if that’s your avocation. Note, avocation. Don’t pass the cost of your illusive sports delusion to some kid in your dorm who wants to be a doctor or an accountant. College should be about your long-term vocation, not some fanciful notion that you will be among the 2 percent of college student-athletes who will enter professional sports at any level for any amount of time. News Flash 2: You won’t. Stop acting like Walter Mitty and more like Walter Reed. Besides, you’ll do much more for society if you create a lifesaving vaccine than slam-dunking a basketball. And spare me the drool over how “college sports” is the “salvation for minorities.” It’s a mythology that leads nowhere, and the sideshow barkers who say otherwise are frauds, indeed crackpots.
Dump DEI, Embrace DOT
By now most Americans have concluded that the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement is no more than a race-based wealth transfer scheme designed to reward those who haven’t produced anything by taking from those who have achieved success through hard work and risk-taking. As I’ve written in the past, DEI should DIE. It’s fundamentally un-American. Diversity is a good thing for social interaction, but it’s not a legal right. Equity may have a meaning for the amount of money you have invested in your home or business, but it’s not a guaranteed right for anyone to possess something they haven’t earned. And inclusion may make people feel good, but we all have the right to freedom of association under the US Constitution. It’s time to dump DEI and embrace diversity of thought (DOT). How? Require that at least 50 percent of professors be conservatives. That squealing you hear in the background is the crowd of liberal gatekeepers. Squeal on.
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