Universities
The Troubling Plight of the Modern University
Today’s campus is more reactionary than the objects of its frequent vituperation. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 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 …
Our Psychodramatic Campuses
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Dartmouth College students recently staged an overnight sit-in the office of their president Philip Hanlon. They had over seventy demands. Apparently, they grew out of their alleged suffering at the hands of “racist, classist, sexist, heterosexist, trans-homophobic, xenophobic, and ablest structures.” Translating into English, the students elaborated, “Our bodies are …
The New Inquisition
by Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Content Agency What if you believed that the planet might not have warmed up the last two decades, even though carbon emissions reached all-time highs? Or, if the earth did heat up, you thought that it was not caused by human activity? Or, if global warming were the fault …
The Outdated Business Model of Diversity, Inc.
In today’s divided society, universities would be wise to stress unity and academic rigor. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Diversity has become corporatized on American campuses, with scores of bureaucrats and administrators accentuating different pedigrees and ancestries. That’s odd, because diversity no longer means “variety” or “points of difference,” in the way it …
The Death of the Humanities
A liberal arts education was once a gateway to wisdom; now it can breed ignorance and arrogance. by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas The humanities are in their latest periodic crisis. Though the causes of the ongoing decline may be debated, everyone accepts the dismal news about eroding university enrollments, ever fewer new faculty positions, …
The Last Generation of the West and the Thin Strand of Civilization
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Had the Greeks lost at Salamis, Western civilization might easily have been strangled in its adolescence. Had Hitler not invaded the Soviet Union, the European democracies would have probably remained overwhelmed. And had the Japanese just sidestepped the Philippines and Pearl Harbor, as they gobbled up the orphaned Pacific …
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The Outlaw Campus
The university has become a rogue institution in need of root-and-branch reform. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Two factors have so far shielded the American university from the sort of criticism that it so freely levels against almost every other institution in American life. (1) For decades a college education has been considered …
The Decline of College
by Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services For the last 70 years, American higher education was assumed to be the pathway to upper-mobility and a rich shared-learning experience. Young Americans for four years took a common core of classes, learned to look at the world dispassionately, and gained the concrete knowledge to make informed arguments …