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Human Events
Colleges and
Universities Have Grown Bloated and Dysfunctional
Michael Barone
Friday May 29, 2015
American colleges and universities, long thought to be the glory of the
nation, are in more than a little trouble. I’ve written before of their
shameful practices — the racial quotas and preferences at selective
schools (Harvard is being sued by Asian-American organizations), the
kangaroo courts that try students accused of rape and sexual assault
without legal representation or presumption of innocence, and speech
codes that make campuses the least rather than the most free venues in
American society.
In following these policies, the burgeoning phalanxes of university and
college administrators must systematically lie, insisting against all
the evidence that they are racially nondiscriminatory, devoted to due
process and upholders of free speech. The resulting intellectual
corruption would have been understood by George Orwell.
Alas, even the great strengths of our colleges and universities are
threatening to become weaknesses. Sometimes you can get too much of a
good thing.
American colleges, dating back to Harvard’s founding in 1636, have been
modeled on the residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. The idea
is that students live on or near (sometimes breathtakingly beautiful)
campuses, where they can learn from and interact with inspired teachers.
American graduate universities, dating back to Johns Hopkins’ founding
in 1876, have been built on the German professional model. Students are
taught by scholars whose Ph.D. theses represent original scholarship,
expanding the frontiers of knowledge and learning.
That model still works very well in math and the hard sciences. In
these disciplines it’s rightly claimed that American universities are,
as The Economist recently put it in a cover story, “the gold standard”
of the world. But not so much in some of the mushier social sciences
and humanities. “Just as the American model is spreading around the
world,” The Economist goes on, “it is struggling at home.”
Consider the Oxford/Cambridge residential college model. Up through the
1960s, college administrators acted in loco parentis, with
responsibilities similar to those of parents...
Read the rest of the article at Human Events
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