Perhaps they should at least be given a few points for trying. A nod for admitting that there is a problem is probably in order as well.
Leftists aren't at all known for their introspection or ability to be self-critical, so it isn't surprising that their attempts at either would come up short. Most academics are, of course, left of left and have the added problem of existing in a bubble of snobbery that has a horribly skewed frame of reference. They look at the outside world like a kid looking at an ant farm. Real world people are a curiosity to them.
Having all of that in mind, I was surprised to see that Yale University had commissioned a study to try and figure out why so many Americans have soured on Academia. Ivory tower progressives were very low on my list of people most likely to ask the question, "Why do they hate us?" That it was being reported on in The New York Times really upped the hot mess potential.
Predictably, the Times had to whine about President Trump's "attacks" on higher education, as if no one was disgruntled with the system until he got into the White House. One of my favorite things about Trump is that he says things that other Republicans — or politicians in general — should have been saying for years. Things that the people are saying. I'm pretty sure that all NYT reporters have to have at least one Orange Man Bad tantrum in everything they write or their paychecks are withheld.
Here is how the Times framed the report:
The findings reflect misgivings that Americans have described across years of polling and interviews. But the report, from a 10-professor panel at one of the nation’s most renowned universities, amounts to a damning depiction of academia’s role in cultivating the political and cultural forces that are reshaping higher education’s place in American life.
Spoiler alert: it's not at all damning.
The report gets about halfway there on a couple of very real problems: the skyrocketing costs of a college education and "selective admissions." Regarding the latter, the report says that they can be "tilted in ways that benefit the already advantaged," which really isn't the problem that most people have with the admissions process. Oh, I'm sure that's a greater issue at Ivy League schools, and that's where the aforementioned limited frame of reference comes in.
When the report skirts the money issue, it really goes off the rails:
In its report, the Yale panel extolled the aims of higher education, but was unsparing in suggesting how schools, including Yale, had harmed public views of it.
For example, Yale and many other schools now rely on a model that regularly dilutes high tuition prices with generous aid packages. Although many students pay nowhere near sticker prices, the committee wrote that the approach had exacted “a disastrous impact on public trust.”
“By its nature, the system is complicated, unpredictable, secretive and highly variable,” the report said. “These factors tend to reduce trust rather than increase it.”
This is boilerplate lefty stuff. We see it from flailing Democratic political campaigns all the time. In their summations, it's never that what they're doing is wrong, it's just that they aren't explaining themselves well. The real problem is that university tuition has steadily risen for decades. As I wrote in a VIP column earlier this week, when I first went to college I was working full time to pay for it because we could back then. No Yale student is going to find a $90,000 a year job to pay for school. It is true that no one in Academia has been able to explain why costs keep going through the roof, but the report merely says that they've made the process too arcane. It's Ivory Tower condescension at its most annoying.
There is an allusion to the need to be better defenders of free speech, but no real elaboration on that in the Times article. That's a good jumping off point for the part where I state the obvious thing that the report missed.
There are myriad reasons why normal people have a low view of Academia, and the ones we discussed are certainly among them. The main problem is, as we all know, that college campuses have become hotbeds of radical leftist indoctrination. Disgruntled hippie academics (read my book on the subject) are still taking out their 1967 frustrations on malleable minds. Those old hippies made sure that younger academics fell in line with the indoctrination agenda.
College campuses today are teeming with raging youthful Marxists who are now branching out into antisemitism. These are the kinds of people who vote for a Zohran Mamdani. They've been taught by grownups at universities that socialism/communism is good. Ronald Reagan once famously said that liberals, "know so much that isn't so." The worst of the academics out there spend their entire careers teaching things that aren't so.
That's not in the report. Until it is, the revolution of educated idiots continues apace, especially in the Ivy League.
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