Universities have suffered a cataclysmic decline in public approval and support.
A Gallup poll taken this year found that only 36 percent of Americans polled either expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education—once the agreed-on touchstone to upward mobility.
Gifting to most universities has been down for two consecutive years.
There is zero intellectual diversity on most university campuses.
Speakers with conservative viewpoints are often either disinvited or shouted down—and worse.
The federally guaranteed student loan program is in shambles. Some $1.7 trillion in outstanding loans were taken out by half of all college students.
Nearly a fifth are now not being paid back.
Marriage, child-rearing, and home ownership are all delayed by some 40 million indebted graduates, who can take decades to pay loans back.
The Biden administration demagogued the issue by illegally granting rolling student loan amnesties to win votes just before both the midterm and general elections. That proposed debt relief would be covered by taxpayers, over half of whom never went to college.
The expansion of student loan debt roughly correlates with universities raising their annual costs higher than the rate of inflation—largely due to administrative bloat.
Although the Supreme Court recently struck down the practice of using race and gender to adjudicate applications and hiring, universities are already seeking ways to circumvent the ruling.
Asian- and white-Americans for decades have been systematically, overtly, and supposedly with justification, discriminated against by ignoring or not requiring test scores and downplaying grade point averages.
Stanford University may be representative of these crises.
In the 2020 election, 94% of Stanford faculty voted for the Biden-Harris ticket. Four years later, some 96% of all Stanford-affiliated donations went to Democrats during the 2024 election season.
Former Stanford law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried—parents of mega-Democratic donor and now imprisoned Sam Bankman-Fried, and recipients of millions in gifts from their felonious son—were reportedly heavily involved in either bundling large left-wing campaign donations or offering legal advice to their son’s bankrupt and Ponzi-like business.
In 2023, a federal judge was shouted down at Stanford Law School, his lecture aborted and then hijacked—by a Stanford DEI administrator!
Former Trump health advisor and Hoover Institution scholar Scott Atlas in 2020 was censured by the Stanford faculty.
Yet subsequent events supported Atlas’s prescient warning that a complete lockdown of the country and the shutdown of K-12 schools would not only not retard the COVID epidemic but would cause far greater economic, social, cultural, and health damage than the virus itself.
Two recent attempts to lift that censure failed—in part because some faculty claimed that to do so would empower the Trump reelection bid!
In contrast, Stanford Professor Jeff Hancock, who founded the “Stanford Social Media Lab,” boasts he researches “how people use deception with technology.” Yet when liberal Minnesota officials wanted such “experts” to support their new law banning “deep fake” technology at election time, they called in the expert deception-detector Hancock.
However, the references Hancock provided to prove his support for the law allegedly never existed.
In fact, the lawyers who challenged his online expertise argued his sources apparently were invented by artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT.
Who will police the deception police?
Last academic year, anti-Israel Stanford students with impunity violated university rules and camped out for months in the free speech area, shouting and disrupting passersby.
A small group of students occupied and trashed the president’s office and another vandalized historic campus architecture.
After October 7, a Stanford lecturer was suspended for singling out and targeting Jewish students in his classroom.
A Stanford faculty committee on anti-Semitism recently concluded, “The most existential problem at Stanford is the emergence of a general atmosphere in which Jewish and Israeli members of the Stanford community are denied dignity and respect based on their Jewish identities, denied treatment and protection afforded to other minority groups, and afforded equal respect and inclusion only if they denounce Israel in various ways and forms.”
Can out-of-control universities reform?
The incoming Trump administration has floated a variety of tough-love remedies.
They include predicating hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants on campuses’ adherence to the Bill of Rights, taxing the income on universities’ multibillion-dollar endowments, and removing the federal government from the student loan business.
Recently, there have been a few hopeful signs that campuses are aware of the need to change.
At Stanford, a new president was hired, widely respected for his singular commitment to disinterested education and freedom of expression.
The SAT entrance exam is returning to many campuses and is still appreciated as crucial to most universities’ applications.
A number of partisan elite college presidents have resigned in disgrace.
So, hope springs eternal, even if it may be too little, too late.
Obviously gubmint student loans have been a disaster, creating huge bureaucracies and making debt slaves out of young people.
Then there’s childhood education. Did you know that back in the day experts dropped off tablets in boxes in Ethiopian villages? Nicholas Negroponte:
You see, the village kiddies wanted to enable the tablet cameras…
So. We don’t need schools and teachers. Just moms handing out tablets.
I have a young (31-year-old) friend in Nigeria. (Being I am a less than young person - it does make me sad that the day has come that I call someone 31 young!).
He is also now working with me rather remotely in my business helping me develop two new websites as well as contributing ideas and editing my Next Great American Novel that I am writing.
He taught himself to read at the age of 5; devoured his father’s library then - thinking his Uncle and Daddy wouldn’t notice - began purloining (and returning) all the books in his Uncle’s.
He has a masters in biology, teaches elementary school and, God willing, in due course will be “Coming to America” if he is willing and wants - to work stateside in the business. (Not my first rodeo, when it comes to setting up H1-B visas and getting superior talent as a result consequent.)
I told him the other day that he was very lucky; despite the fact as a child his family went through very impecunious times until his father and mother - both well-educated and upwardly mobile - solved that problem. Told him was lucky.
Lucky because he wasn’t raised in America.
But rather, despite the teaching methods in Nigeria being too harsh - very dictatorial and unforgiving - for someone as open and excited about learning as he?
At least he didn’t have to deal with the mind virus that is force-fed children and young adults here in the United States; that is endorsed and carries the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval of our despicable Department of Brainwashing in cahoots with the American Federation of Communist Indoctrinators and Fema-nazi Teachers’ Union.
He doesn’t need to be deprogrammed and have removed bales and bales of “cotton, hay and rags” composed of?
“It’s a shame to know so much that isn’t so” BS that fills the minds of American kids to overflowing
till there’s no room left for rational thinking
because they were raised to be, become - fed on deliberately designed propaganda to make them little better than? Cookie cutter, stable sameness thinkers who are little better than automatons; platitude spouting parrots that we then call “educated” guys and gals whom? Woe unto them; unlucky for them; “Got a good college education”.
So - I agree with you Christopher and Nicholas Negroponte - if you give children who want to learn because seeking knowledge and truth hasn’t been burned out of them by vile, malevolent, Marxists “Teachers” Union Karen Harridans and are given even the most basic of basic tools? ?
Nothing - even poverty and meager resources - can keep them from seeking knowledge and understanding of what “this thing called life” is about.
And being born and raised - even in a back of beyond place - out of mind, forgotten (and thus safe and secure) is a far, far the better circumstance - than what young Americans face if they get the type of “good education” afforded - forced down the throats of children here in America.
Today, when I reflect on what I read and learned as a student, I recall that no one was afraid of recriminations. Discussions about everything were commonplace and although we had idiots that could not discuss the time of the day or the color of the sky no one was punished by schools, or the government, for the beliefs they had. And by punishment I mean censorship, grades and access to rewards and benefits. When I was in college I made some extra cash, helping other students complete term papers and book reports. Two decades ago I was asked to help the sister of one of my employees complete a college report. It would have been a relatively easy paper until I considered that if I included what was obvious and truthful she would not have gotten an A. She would be lucky to get a B minus. The professor could have successfully run a reeducation camp under the auspices of the Pol Pot Regime.
When Americans are afraid to even talk to their neighbors for fear of an FBI investigation it is apparent to those not indoctrinated that much of what was once a Liberal Arts education has left America. Fascistic indoctrination replaced it. If you want an A you need to comply. And for someone like me, who also reads Scientific American, Natural History and other scientific publications, it is apparent that science is now just as jaded with innuendo and conjecture. Consider what Fauci got away with. DEI and the Green New Deal would never have survived a smidgen of scrutiny and candid discussions four decades ago. Today’s educators make the Dark Ages seem like the Renaissance by comparison.
You are undoubtedly correct in your assessment that she would have gotten a lower grade if you had imparted too much truth to her report.
One of my guys is from Bangladesh - came here about jeez - 10 years ago - won the green card lottery. His first night in the America he had envisioned - you know the one - where the streets are paved with gold, money grows on trees and in due course America will build you a house on Easy Street? That one!
Well - he found himself staying in some friend of a friend of a friend’s home, who he knew in Bangladesh, in Queens
and had the somewhat rude awakening moment of finding his bed had bed bugs in it! Needless to say, that was a genuine “Wake up and smell the reality roses moment for him.” about what America was about - sans the gussied up folderol of Hollywood’s touch of gossamer varnish applied.
Nowadays - he works with a large government agency as an executive, has a family, has bought a home recently and invited me for Thanksgiving dinner yesterday.
He has come a long way baby with his command of English - what with his college studies in finance - but even now - when he asks me to proofread something he’s written for his work he says, “That’s sounds wonderful, but they will know I didn’t write it - it’s too good!”
So - he picks and chooses what he uses, and my role is more and more these days as I always wanted it to be -simply to act as someone who makes sure that every i and t are handled apropos.
Your tendency, as is mine, when we are asked to lend our talents - be they writing or guidance - is to hold nothing back, but we do have to remember that the world we live in is still populated by as Gene Wilder said in that wonderful scene where Clevon Little, as the black sheriff, had been rebuffed; talking about how these are the salt of the earth, the common clay of the new West, the simple people.
“You know, morons.”
I graduated magna cum laude with my BA in 2001 and passed with distinction with my MA in 2003. If I had to do it again today, I know I would never achieve that level of academic success – I’m just not that good at self-censuring.