THE COLUMN: Make Universities Great Again

It is the global-warming version of self-refuting assertions: getting a college degree will ensure that you get a good job. 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, overwhelmed grad schools, practically invented high schools and then stormed the citadels of higher education starting in the 1960s.

As the economy boomed along with their entry into the work force and first successes, there emerged a back-formation hypothesis: that their earning power being greater than that of their non-college cohorts, it was the degree itself that created the extra value, not the kind of work they did nor their skill at it. So as colleges grew along with the Boomers, a strong selling point became that prospective attendees would make more money than the poor slobs now working as mechanics and plumbers and telephone lineman.

Soon enough, colleges were touting the earning power of a degree -- literally, any degree -- and tuitions rose accordingly. Even if correlative, such an argument still reversed cause and effect, as the late author Michael Crichton noted in his remarks on the Gell--Mann Effect, or as he put it, the theory that wet streets cause rain:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

It never seemed to occur to anybody that the sheer size of the Boomer cohort -- nearly 80 million people -- would call for some expansion of collegiate education, but as it turned out, Boomers went on to college at a far higher percentage than earlier generations, almost 30 percent. Their numbers also swelled because of the influx of women into universities, which eventually destroyed the old single-sex models embodied by the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters; once women could get into Harvard, there was no need for Radcliffe. So post hoc ergo propter hoc it was to be and still remains. Cart, meet horse.

Once women made up the majority of college students, it was little surprise to find males abandoning higher education in favor of something more practical and less litigious:

Women have outnumbered men in undergraduate enrollment for about 40 years, and the gap continues to widen. Almost half of women age 25-34 have earned a bachelor’s degree, according to Pew Research Center data; for men the rate is 37%. Between 2011 and 2022, the number of Americans attending college dropped by 1.2 million, with men accounting for almost the entirety of that drop.

As part of the back-formation employers began to require at least a bachelor's degree in order for you to be hired. Never mind what it was: my Bachelor of Music degree was good enough to get my first job as a cub crime reporter on the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in 1972. And never mind the fact that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Ray Bradbury, Andrew Lloyd Webber, et al. either never went to college or dropped out before graduation because they had better things to do. Not to mention Thomas Edison and the ancient Greeks.

So (as the lawyers like to say) we could make the argument that -- since colleges screened for test scores and grades -- the incoming hordes of Boomers were by and large smarter than their former high school classmates, and would have succeeded in life anyway, with or without a degree in English or Philosophy or Black Studies.

Except in high-end specialty schools, most education takes place within the student's own mind and is fueled by his desire to learn. The teacher is there to guide, not to implant. That there might be a relation between the attainment of the degree and future earning power was entirely secondary to the act of learning itself. Which, of course, you can also do on your own, as the above list of dropouts suggests.

Thank "Childe Harold" -- he awoke one morning to suddenly find himself famous.

In other words the archetype was the English/European model of directed study in which the students were largely on their own. An indifferent student, Byron only occasionally attended lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and kept a bear in his rooms because the university forbade students to have dogs. Still, he became one of the most famous (or notorious) men in the world during his brief-candle existence as the greatest living poet and bisexual scourge of page boys and chamber maids.

But as the demand for degrees (not learning) grew and higher education became monetized, American universities became more akin to Renaissance Italian city-states than socially philanthropic organizations, metastasizing, gobbling up real estate and taking it off the tax rolls, thus helping to destroy the nearby neighborhoods -- hello, Columbia, hello University of Chicago, hello University of Southern California! Ever-expanding, they added fashionable if not downright imaginary "disciplines" to the curriculum, abandoning all pretense to original scholarship, scrapped Western Civ courses as arbitrary and racist, and increasingly viewed their role as political activists instead of teachers.

Wholly conquered by the sappers of the Frankfurt School, they poisoned the minds of generation after generation with cultural self-contempt. The staggering financial concomitants beggared parents or sold their children into a form of indentured servitude known as "student loans," justified on the grounds that their doctorate in LGBTQ+ Studies, aided in its attainment by heaping helpings of plagiarism and, latterly, AI monkeys, would surely put them on Easy Street, but instead it put them on Queer Street, where many remain today.

Seen in this light, Trump's current battles with Harvard -- ostensibly over its tax-exempt status and its horrifically overt anti-Semitism but in reality over its very existence and everything it stands for and has become -- is both practical and symbolic. Practical because Harvard (endowment: $53.2 billion) doesn't need the money (except to keep its racket going at the same size and speed), and symbolic because as the apex predator of the Ivy League its head on a pike in front of the White House would serve as an encouragement to the others to get their houses in order.

As things stand, college has now become what a bad high school used to be, except that skilled tradesmen are now making far better money than dancers, poets, and the scholars of radical leftist feminist South American transsexual climate activists. So even the value-added argument is gone.

As old joke goes, how do you someone's gone to Harvard? Because they tell you within the first five minutes of your meeting them. It's a credential, a shiny signifier of membership in the laptop class. Losing its fight with the Trump administration might be the best thing for Harvard and the other Ivies; getting taken down a peg or two is more hurtful to pride than infrastructure, and in any case Harvard could well afford to have fewer such "Harvard" boys and girls.

Founded as a school in which to train the Puritan clergy, Harvard has long since lost sight of its original purpose. Close it and other raciltrant Ivies down, fumigate them, and start over from first principles. For what does it profit an institution to gain a few blocks of real estate and lose its soul?