America’s many calamities can be traced back to the takeover of higher education by political ideologues, according to a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“The biggest threat to our future isn’t climate change, China or the national debt,” John Ellis, author of “The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done,” wrote Monday in The Wall Street Journal. “It is the tyrannical grip that a hopelessly corrupt higher education now has on our national life.”
Antisemitism, the drop in child test scores, college censorship, treating criminals as victims, irresponsibly open borders, and contempt for the family — all have roots in academia’s perverse priorities.
Even more, “never have college campuses exerted so great or so destructive an influence,” Ellis wrote.
Higher ed’s power as a malignant force is unprecedented in American history:
Once an indispensable support of our advanced society, academia has become a cancer metastasizing through its vital organs. The radical left is the cause, most obviously through the one-party campuses having graduated an entire generation of young Americans indoctrinated with their ideas.
And there are other ways. Academia has a monopoly on training for the most influential professions. The destructive influence of campus schools of education and journalism already noted is matched in the law, medicine, social work, etc. Academia’s suppression of the Constitution causes still more damage. Hostility to the Constitution leads to banana-republic shenanigans: suppression of antigovernment speech, the press’s acting as mouthpiece for government, law enforcement used to harass opponents of the government.
While “optimists see signs of hope in growing hostility to campus foolishness,” political radicals have already caused tremendous damage, Ellis wrote.
America must take back its institutions, and this can start by parents and students questioning whether most of today’s colleges are worth attending.
Read the full essay at The Wall Street Journal.
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