Can Higher Education Be Saved? | Politics & Policy - National Review

Universities are expensive engines of propaganda and intolerance, and many non-academics are offering scholarly material free online, insist NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. 

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America is schizophrenic about its major universities and, to a lesser extent, its undergraduate colleges.

On the one hand, higher education’s professional schools in medicine and business, as well as graduate and undergraduate programs in math, science, and engineering, are the world’s best. America dominates the lists of the top universities compiled in global surveys conducted from the United Kingdom to Japan.

 

On the other hand, the liberal arts and social sciences have long ago mostly lost their reputations. Go online to Amazon or to the local Barnes and Noble bookstore, and the books on literature, art, and history are often not the products of university professors and presses.

Few believe any more that current liberal-arts programs have prepared graduates to write persuasively and elegantly, to read critically and to think inductively while drawing on a wide body of literary, linguistic, historical, artistic, and philosophical knowledge. In fairness, that is no longer the aim of higher education. When students at tony colleges present petitions objecting to free speech or the right of guests to give lectures, they are usually full of grammatical errors and often incoherent.

Colleges, with some major exceptions (Hillsdale most preeminently), simply do not ensure the teaching of such skills any more.
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Source: National Review