Victor Davis Hanson September, 19,
2013
For the last 70 years, American higher education was
assumed to be the pathway to upward mobility and a rich shared-learning
experience. Young Americans for four years took a common core of classes,
learned to look at the world dispassionately, and gained the concrete knowledge
to make informed arguments logically.
The result was a more skilled workforce and a competent
democratic citizenry. That ideal may still be true at our flagship
universities, with their enormous endowments and stellar world rankings. Yet
most everywhere else, something went terribly wrong with that model. Almost all
the old campus protocols are now tragically outdated or antithetical to their
original mission.
Tenure — virtual lifelong job security for full-time
faculty after six years — was supposed to protect free speech on campus. How,
then, did campus ideology become more monotonous than diverse, more intolerant
of politically unpopular views than open-minded? Universities have so little
job flexibility that campuses cannot fire the incompetent tenured or hire
full-time competent newcomers…..To Read More….
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