See Thru Edu is a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation
Thomas K. Lindsay, Ph.D., Editor in Chief and Director, Center for Higher Education, Texas Public Policy Foundation
The prosperous and stable Claremont Colleges are increasingly the exception, not the rule, in American higher education. Department of Education data confirm: enrollments in total in higher education have been in decline the last few years.
The law of unintended consequences is alive and well in a strange place: more Americans are going to college, which is a good thing, but it has reduced the quality of officers joining the military.
I have previously used this quote from Anthony Carnevale, “Higher education has become a powerful force for reinforcing advantage and passing it on through generations.” We need to take a hard look at this observation, and preferential admissions policies are a good place to start.
Imagine my surprise seeing how uninspired and unchallenged the minds of the American youths are to seek truth, question thoughts, build constructive arguments, and appreciate judgments, thanks to the dictatorship of relativism.
We hear again and again from college leaders that they want students to learn “critical thinking skills,” but evidence keeps mounting that the exact opposite is happening—that many students are learning how to make life miserable for those who dare to disagree with them.
Contrary to Vox, Martin Luther King, Jr., understood that the Declaration of Independence did not justify giving “more political power to America’s white male minority.” It condemned it.
The untenured faculty member can’t count on anyone reading student comments with the appropriate discernment and rightly fears being unpopular or even controversial for any reason. So he or she operates with the cynicism that accompanies the observation that virtue is not rewarded.
It isn’t just at Harvard, of course. I’m told by law professors I know that even at schools that aren’t known as being hotbeds of leftism, many of the faculty have succeeded in turning their PC enthusiasms into courses.
Recently I attended what was called the Western Civilization Summit in Austin, jointly sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the host of SeeThruEdu, and the Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Texas Tech University.
Relativism was supposed to make all tolerant of all opinions. Instead, it has provided intolerance a license to bully.
