DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Joel Kotkin: The American university is rotting from within.
This arrogance reflects decades of the sector’s rising power and influence. University became the ultimate passport into what Daniel Bell called the ‘knowledge class’ a half century ago. A National Journal survey of 250 top American public-sector decision-makers found that 40 per cent of them are Ivy League graduates. Looking at the question globally, David Rothkopf, author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, compiled a list of more than six thousand members of what he calls the global ‘superclass’: leaders of corporations, banks and investment firms, governments, the military, the media and religious groups. Nearly a third attended one of 20 elite universities.
Also like their clerical ancestors, today’s academics tend to embrace a common ideology. By 2017, according to one oft-cited study, 60 per cent of the faculty identified as either far left or liberal compared with just 12 per cent as conservative or far right. In less than three decades, the ratio of liberal faculty to conservative faculty has more than doubled. As pollster Samuel Abrams and historian Amna Khalid note, all this has occurred just as the US itself became somewhat more conservative.
Ideologically homogenous universities have become something akin to indoctrination camps, where traditional Western values are trashed while woke ideology is promoted. Not surprisingly, the graduates of today’s universities are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues, confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity while being intolerant of other views. They also tend to be not particularly proud to be American. The kind of support professors gave to the war effort in the Second World War would be hard to imagine today.
How bad have things have gotten? This bad: Violent Anti-Semitism As a Campus Recruiting Tool. “That meant that in future years, already-radicalized students would seek to join these campuses, knowing they’d be well at home there. Which is exactly what appears to have happened with Hassan. Which means Hassan is unlikely to be much of an outlier. We can’t know how many people with violent designs will be caught while on campus, but we can be sure they know that America’s campuses—certain ones more than others—are the right destination for them.”