George has been arguing for years that “college is oversold.” Now the Washington Examiner‘s editors publish a column that proclaims “Political correctness controversies show that college is overrated.”
One possible explanation for perpetual campus outrage is that college campuses really are the most dangerous places in America, filled with the worst kind of people imaginable. As tempting as this sounds, there is a better explanation.
Most colleges are steeped in an intellectually corrupt, censorious left-wing culture that encourages students to assume the worst about their neighbors as a matter of ideoglogical dogma. This accounts not only for the disproportionate number of hate-crime hoaxes that are perpetrated on campuses each year, but also for the fact that campus communities are so credulous about the far-fetched idea that hate groups and hate ideologies secretly thrive in their ultra-politically-correct midst. (Consider the false rumors this week that the KKK made a surprise appearance at Mizzou.)
Considering the purpose of higher education, this latter explanation is even more damning than the former would be if true. Universities were first established to preserve and advance human knowledge, and to permit free-wheeling academic disputations that made even the civil and ecclesiastical authorities uncomfortable.
In 2015, the opposite is true. The dogmatists now control the campus. Free society anxiously witnesses from the outside their tyrannical purges of anyone failing to demonstrate sufficient enthusiasm for their preconceived ideas. Universities are now expected to be “safe spaces” for students to keep out “trigger words,” “microaggressions” and, heaven forbid, ideas with which they don’t already agree. …
… Each year, students are taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to have their intellectual curiosity extinguished and their souls harmed in such an environment.
