Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, offers this link between federal financing of higher education and the accompanying contols and the Virginia Tech massacre here. He concludes:
The murderer at Virginia Tech took a course
in which students watched the movie “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and were
invited to contemplate the altered rules under which horror has become
a “masochistic pleasure.” Such courses abound these days.Higher
learning directed toward the good, the true and the beautiful, toward
the “laws of nature and of nature’s God,” is being extinguished.
Taxpayers fund a kind of learning that undermines the principles upon
which their government was erected and their freedom established.Since
the Sept. 11 attacks, federal higher education spending has increased
about three times faster than defense spending. Maybe it is time to
reverse that trend. Maybe it is time to fund colleges through tax
credits or simple charitable deductions. Maybe it is time for
bureaucrats far distant from college campuses to stop making rules as
if they were the student affairs office.In some important respects, colleges were better when the government did not pay so much attention to them.
(Thanks to Peter Schramm at the Ashbrook Center)
