The Economist attempts to segue from a indictment of the debauchery at elite colleges to one of their liberal bias:
Tom Wolfe's new novel about a young student, I am Charlotte Simmons, is a depressing read for any parent. Four years at an Ivy League university costs as much as a house in parts of the heartland—about $120,000 for tuition alone. But what do you get for your money? A ticket to Animal House. In Mr Wolfe's fictional university the pleasures of the body take absolute precedence over the life of the mind. Students 'hook up' (ie, sleep around) with indiscriminate zeal...Students hear only one side of the story on everything from abortion (good) to the rise of the West (bad).
This conservative criticism of life at contemporary universities confuses me: how does "hook-up culture" go against the "life of the mind"? Going back several decades, when hooking up was less out in the open and perhaps less pervasive, women would frequently leave college early (the MRS degree) and thus, in the name of securing a monogamous relationship, would leave the academic enviromnent without even getting a diploma. Hooking up may be mindless, but some great minds (Albert Einstein, Allan Bloom, etc.) have found time to both, in modern parlance, get some, and use their brains. I'm not saying conservatives should find hooking up moral, but they should acknowledge that, if anything, it is the result of contemporary students coming to college in order to be employable after (or, at times, in order to learn during), rather than with the specific goal of finding a spouse while on campus.
Furthermore, I just don't see the connection between the fact that today's elite universities are dominated by liberals with the idea that they are places at which "[b]rainless jocks rule the roost, while impoverished nerds are reduced to ghost-writing their essays for them." These are two entirely separate problems. Is the idea that college today is just plain worse, so debauchery and left politics can be lumped together by the conservative who's generally displeased with the state of things? The sort of debauchery arguably most prevalent, or at least most visible, at many elite colleges--aggressive, athletic boys and their well-kept-up female companions engaging in drunken, heterosexual experimentation--has more of a red-state than blue-state sound to it; if the faculties had their way, college students would squander their four years by challenging traditional gender roles, joining poetry circles and protest movements instead of sports teams, and drinking from wine glasses, not kegs.
Via Arts and Letters Daily.
The connection is standards. The same aversion to objective standards that has resulted in the erosion of the Core (in other schools, the teaching of the canon in general) has led our school, and others, to embrace policies that make soulless carnality the sine qua non of life at the school.
ReplyDeleteThe school has co-ed dorms, turns a blind eye to cohabitation in them, and gives the fraternities free rein to throw booze-soaked orgies every weekend [and during the week in some cases]. Also, the school either does not assign enough work to keep students from being able to indulge excessively in such distractions, or they are not making the consequences of slipshod scholarship painful enough to have an effect.
It's far easier to show a strong correlation between leftist politics and the moral depravity on campuses than to show that no such correlation exists. It just is. That there was some fooling around back in the day is undeniable, but the quantity of it today has exploded. As for the old MRS degree, women were a smaller % of students then. Even if all of them were focused only on boys, the situation now is that nearly everyone, at least a far greater %, is focused almost entirely on sex and booze today. Scholarship suffers far more today as a result of sex and marriage than it did then.
What sense does it make to say that all the sexual liberation messages put out in the classrooms, all the demands for tolerance of all manner of socially destructive behaviors, had nothing to do with the situation we have today on campuses? That's just absurd. When the beatniks started using drugs in the '50s, they didn't intend for millions of poor blacks to ruin their lives with drug abuse, but that's what wound up happening as a result of the mainstreaming of drugs. The sexual liberation movement on the left may not have wanted their agitations to lead to more hetero blond beast jock hookups, but that's what resulted. It's called the law of unintended consequences.