We Could Use Fewer College Graduates

A hundred years ago, roughly 10 percent of recent American high-school graduates attended college. Today that figure is 61 percent. Are we better off?

Hardly.

“The aim of education is wisdom,” writes Robert M. Hutchins, editor of Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Book series. But is that what contemporary college students attain in college? Wisdom?

Or do they emerge instead with what author Douglas Murray calls the nihilist’s creed: “Yours is a meaningless existence in a meaningless universe”?

Nihilism actually wouldn’t be so bad.  If college graduates were merely nihilists, they would drown themselves in decadence, but at least they would leave the rest of us alone. Alas, as Murray writes, “most people in their lives seek some form of certainty.” And so many graduates aren’t satisfied with declaring, like the ever skeptical Socrates, that they know nothing.  Instead they confidently assert that they do know something: America is racist to its core.

Should we be surprised then that Democrats – products of our “best” universities – think nothing of locking up their political opponents, arresting lawyers, and censoring conservative voices? Sure, these actions violate sacred norms that go back 250 years, but who cares about norms when the people who established them were evil white men?

Decades ago, Dartmouth college president James Freedman allegedly said, “The purpose of a college education is to question your father’s values.” Well, contemporary college students do that in spades. They enter university as nice, normal kids and emerge as angry, America-hating adults.

America, they learn in college, was conceived in sin. Instead of focusing on what distinguished America at its founding from the rest of the world – republican government, individual liberty, egalitarianism, etc. – they obsess over features it shared with virtually every society in history: slavery and racism.

“Thomas Jefferson owned slaves!” they incessantly remind us – as if they themselves wouldn’t have owned slaves if they lived in Jefferson’s era. Meanwhile, they ignore the unprecedented amount of human flourishing fostered by the country Jefferson helped found. Every year, millions of people try to immigrate – not to China, Botswana, or Peru – but to America.  They should ask themselves why. Why would millions flock to a “racist, sexist, xenophobic” country?

In a recent interview, Harvard University president Alan Garber argued that if President Trump continues to withhold billions of dollars in federal grants to Harvard, America will suffer. No, it won’t. The opposite is true. The more the government harms American universities, the better off America will be.

That wasn’t always the case.  In the 18^th century, Harvard University was a pious institution where students had to translate Bible passages from Hebrew and Greek into Latin in order to graduate. Over at Yale, President Ezra Stiles (1727-1795) “required his students at the college to master the Psalms, because he expected that those would be the first chants his students would hear when they got to heaven, and it would be highly embarrassing to him, their teacher, if they did not know them,” writes Professor David Rudavsky.

We could use – indeed, we desperately need – universities like the Harvard and Yale of old. We need institutions that present the treasures of Western civilization to students and (to quote Douglas Murray again) effectively say: “Here is an inheritance of thought and culture and philosophy and religion which has nurtured people for thousands of years and may well fulfill you too.”

We have a handful of such institutions in this country – Hillsdale being the most prominent example. But until we get dozens more, this country could use far fewer college graduates.

Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the former chief editor of The Jewish Press, a podcast host, and the author and/or editor of 10 books, including “In a World Gone Mad: An Appeal for Sane Thinking on Israel, Trump, War & More.” Follow him on X at @ResnickElliot.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.