THE COLUMN: Farewell to Grand Old Ivy

College: who needs it? As I pointed out in this recent column, the idea that possession of a college degree will ensure that you get a good job "is the global-warming version of self-refuting assertions. Provably false by the shortest possible historical glance, it is nevertheless a lie that has been told for at least half a century, retailed in large part by the professoriate and administrators at universities all over the land, many called into being or fulfillment by the sudden arrival of the Baby Boomers who hit the beaches in kindergarten, practically invented high schools, and then stormed the citadels of higher education and overwhelmed grad schools starting in the 1960s."

In that column, I noted that the sudden enormous expansion of higher education also coincided with the Vietnam War and, more important, with Selective Service, i.e. the military draft. In the 1960s, going to college was one surefire way to avoid getting drafted, and staying in college pursuing advanced degrees was a way to stay out of the Army for a long as possible, hopefully until the war ended and a boy's chances of killed for no apparent reason were thus greatly diminished. Amazingly, college enrollment soared.

But colleges couldn't sell themselves primarily as draft-dodging machines. There were always medical deferments (readily available from sympathetic anti-war doctors) and simple finagling, such as that indulged in by Bill Clinton, who deftly triangulated the situation and welshed on a promise to join the Reserve Officers' Training Corps at the University of Arkansas law school. In fact, every president since Clinton has managed to avoid the draft, including George W. Bush (various student deferments and time served as w weekend warrior in the Texas National Guard, which was never going to be called into active duty), Barack Obama (the draft had been abolished by the time he would have been eligible), Donald Trump (student and medical), and Joe Biden (student "star athlete" with a recovered memory of teenage asthma). There had to be something more alluring.

The answer was money. Employing one logical conclusion of the Gell-Mann Effect ("wet streets cause rain"), they sold the nation on more education by asserting that the reason college graduates made more money than those with merely a high school education was the degree itself, not the intellect, ambition, or aptitude of the individual. So college not only saved you from getting shot in Vietnam, it also set you on a path to riches.

Applications soared; so did tuition, ancillary costs, and the ranks of administrators. Lending institutions sniffed the air  and were quick to rush in with "student loans," later to be supplanted by Obama, who expropriated the student-loan racket as part of "Obamacare." The government itself was now in the act, preaching the gospel of irrational enthusiasm; extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds ensued in due course. Heavy debt and impoverishment past the point of bankruptcy followed, to the point at which  the Rutabaga President, Joe Biden, even granted "loan forgiveness" to his subjects, thus putting the American taxpayer on the hook for the follies of a relative few, partially defying a Supreme Court decision because he felt like it.

In its their wake came the advent of worthless degrees in faddish social enthusiasms, useless "scholarship" that made the hitherto baseline gut courses of basket-weaving and journalism look like rocket science. This was only to be expected, since the universities had been home to the Eternal Grad Student since the early '70s, "anti-war" leftists who openly despised America, praised Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, and transitioned seamlessly from student to administrator without ever once having had to experience real life or real jobs. With women showing little to no interest in the hard sciences, a thousand courses on the intersectional chanted poetry of 14th-century Peru blossomed. In short order, men became a minority on campuses, where they were often openly treated as rapists-in-waiting. 

And now here we are. Who'd have thought Britain's thoroughly rancid Henry VIII might have been on to something with his abolition of the monasteries? As the blogger "John Carter" -- obviously an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan -- writes on his blog, Postcards from Barsoom:

The English Dissolution of the Monasteries is particularly dramatic due to its scale, speed, and the systematic fashion in which it was carried out, but monastic closures were not confined to Britain. During the same period monasteries were being closed across Protestant Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, with kings, princes, and town councils confiscating their holdings in order to put them towards better secular use. While monasteries escaped closure in Catholic countries, they nevertheless steadily declined in influence over the centuries following the printing press. Once absolutely central to Europe’s cultural life, today only a relative handful of monasteries remain, as quaint spiritual retreats and tourist attractions.

Our own university system is on the cusp of a similar collapse. This may seem outrageous, given the size, wealth, and massive cultural importance of universities, but at the dawn of the 16^th century, the suggestion that monasteries would be dismantled across Europe within a generation would have struck everyone – even their opponents – as absurd.

The rot in academia is already proverbial. Scholarly careerism, declining curricular standards, the replication crisis, a demented ideological monoculture, administrative bloat ... a steady accumulation of chronic cultural entropy has built up inside the organizational tissue of the academy, rendering universities less effective, less trustworthy, less affordable, and less useful than ever before in history. We see a parallel here with the moral laxity of 16^th century monastic life, where religious vows were more theoretical than daily realities for many monks. Does anyone truly think that Harvard professors take Veritas at all seriously?

At the same time, universities have become engorged on tuition fees, research grants, and endowments, providing an easy and luxurious life for armies of well-paid and under-worked administrators, as well as for those professors who are able to play the social games necessary to climb the greased pole of academic promotion. Everyone knows that academia is in a bubble, and as with any bubble, correction is inevitable, and the longer correction is postponed by the thicket of interlocking entrenched interests that have dug themselves into the system, the uglier that correction was always going to be.

In short, colleges and universities are demographically and economically doomed, and everybody knows it. There's nothing but upside in the purging of the professoriate, the reduction and defeminization of most state colleges and universities (that declining birth rate is not going to fix itself with women spending some of their prime childbearing years studying feminist theory), the abolition of community colleges (which are really just glorified high schools), the end of credentialism, and the demotion of the Ivy League schools from incubators of future Supreme Court justices to something approaching their original functions, e.g. training Protestant pastors (Harvard) and educating American Indians (Dartmouth).

As Carter writes: "Professors will find themselves unemployed and, with very few exceptions outside of STEM, unemployable. There is no organic market demand for ‘researchers’ specializing in queering the depictions of gendered masculinities in third century Roman lyric poetry."

In the meantime, young men who -- correctly -- see little to no use for what currently passes as a "college education" should take Mike Rowe's advice.

"Learn a skill that's in demand." In other words, get a real job, you lazy bum. Who knew the answer was so simple, besides literally every single generation of men born before 1970? Meanwhile, as Rowe notes, "AI's coming for the coders." Good luck, laptop class. Enjoy the breadlines.