The PC fringe provides the pit bull patrol

That line from this piece in First Things on the big problem in American universities nails it succinctly. Higher education isn’t.

Anthony T. Kronman’s title says it all, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.

snip…

A long-time dean of Yale Law School—which led to an exchange in First Things‘ pages back in 1997—he stepped down in 2004 to teach a great-books program at Yale. From that perch, he sees a central problem with higher education today: It’s not higher. “I have watched the question of life’s meaning,” he writes, “lose its status as a subject of organized academic instruction and seen it pushed to the margins of professional respectability in the humanities, where it once occupied a central and honored place.” In other words, students at places such as Yale learn lots of things, no doubt many important and useful things. But they don’t learn how to think carefully about how to live.

I heard on television today the results of a study on the problems college graduates are having these days in the workplace. Critical thinking skills and the ability to communicate well were chief among them. The students aren’t failing their courses. The universities are failing their students.

Goofy political correctness amounts to a protective belt of extremism around fairly conventional liberal pieties about equality and inclusive social justice. It’s not that Princeton or Yale or Harvard wants students to become post-colonial theorists. What the institutions really want is to protect the students from thoughts that might challenge the liberal status quo.

This is going to be a slow boat to turn, entrenched as these professors and their tendencies are in academia. But staring down the pit bull patrol is a good start.