Farewell University

Why are America's institutions of higher learning so fearful? --John Stossel

Well, for lots of reasons.

Firstly universities long ago gave up a coherent independent vision of higher education in favor of a misguided form of social and institutional self “engagement”.

Put in other words, universities became social institutions not of learning but of self-perpetuation. In effect they work as a closed union or even guild.

When there's no one to watch the watchers—watch out!

Professors at the university are, ever more rarely, engaged in research for research's sake—they're either in it for the benefits, prestige, and, increasingly, as a place to hide from a society they either viscerally dislike or are wont to vehemently criticize—from a highly sheltered perspective of place of course.

It's become a country club for the federally funded inflation of unchecked ideas, faulty reasoning, passe-radicalism or chic posturing, the extravagant milking through brand-name flattery of the middle classes, and a pleasant combination of light chicanery and misdemeanor serving to titillate while deeply hoodwinking their young wards until it's time to throw them to the wolves—uninformed, untrained, and, perhaps what's worse, full of half-baked intellectual prejudices.

To be fair, no one person or group is to blame. However on the other hand a cogent historical argument could be made which implicated the federal government, university administrators, and the complacent, callous, and above all vain, capricious, and fatally insular middle classes representing a constellation of forces hollowing out the university of its traditional character, beliefs, and functions.

But the decline of the American university is alas all of one piece. It is a reflection of a nation, so inured to telling itself the truth about anything, so accustomed to spewing out platitudes and slogans rather than taking up the arduous paths of complex thinking that it will come as no surprise to either outside or future observers that the American university had become yet another monument to the mandarins—a closed window on the world hiding inadequacy, fear of discovery, and above all a fundamental disbelief in anything that is either good, beautiful, or sublime.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/11/10/im_politically_incorrect_107906.html