Joel Kotkin is one of our most prolific social commenters on the right. Today, writing for Spiked, he observes that our universities are “rotting from within.”
What he notes is not particularly news to those of us who have made our lives in academia. He does pull together a good summary of what has gone badly wrong with higher education in this great land. Some key thoughts follow.
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.
Ideological orthodoxy and fear of cancellation for the ‘wrong views’ is widespread on campus.
Already 40 per cent of recent college graduates are underemployed, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Timing, if not everything, is certainly a major factor. The other DrC and I were fortunate to catch the wave of higher education as it was peaking, and more fortunate to retire out before the inner rot became severe.
As conservatives in a basically liberal institution we had to do a fair amount of self-censorship to survive and modestly thrive. Going along with the liberal majority, while not fun, was worth it as we both otherwise very much liked our jobs.
There are downsides in any occupation.
