January 20, 2021
America’s higher education system is sick, and that sickness is spreading. Political rancor, cultural divisiveness, even violence shadow daily life, as civil unrest has turned to rioting across the country that has now even touched our Capitol. Depression and suicide amongst our young have increased, and it’s the ideologically driven curricula and repressive “cancel culture” most universities disseminate that are the source of this despair.
Critics have been sounding the alarm for decades, yet nothing has changed. Conservatives, especially, have been prolific in their laments. From William F. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale” to Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” to Alan Charles Kors’s essay “On the Sadness of Higher Education,” for more than a century there have been biting diagnoses accompanied by merely tinkering around the edges.