Smith College is getting some unwanted attention. For the rest of us, it is a good test case for what is going on in American colleges and universities.
A tiny women’s college in Western Massachusetts, Smith has been much in the news. An employee has publicly quit her job in response to the mandatory critical race theory training which she has described, quite rightly, as creating a “racially hostile workplace.” Smith’s endowment currently stands just shy of $2 billion. That is a fat target for a hungry lawyer. If this weren’t enough, the New York Times has gone back and investigated a two-year old episode in which a black student was offended by cafeteria staff who told her she could not sit in an area reserved for visiting high school students (where all persons required CORI background checks).
'The result was a campus-wide protest against racism and the eventual removal of two employees whose combined salaries just barely equaled the cost of attending Smith for one year. Other employees were threatened at their homes. Lives were ruined. But then, after an investigation, it was determined no wrong had been done. But no apology or recompense was made to those who actually suffered, with the president of the college still insisting “implicit bias” may have been at work in this case. What is going on?
There is no single explanation for the decline in American higher education. We can look back to Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) or to Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s more recent Coddling of the American Mind
(2018). Standards have slipped, amenities have proliferated, and yet
learning seems to have fallen aside. I saw a comment on the internet to
the effect that a century ago we taught Greek and Latin to high school
students, and now teach remedial English in college. Something has
certainly gone wrong.............To Read More...
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