What a University Education Really Means

For middle class parents who spend a king's ransom to send their children off to college there is the expectation that their offspring will receive an education in science, math, the humanities and social sciences. This rite of passage is not merely an expensive dalliance, it is regarded as a union card for success. After all, the education pundits are always saying a college degree pays for itself in increased earnings.

What these parents don't know or rarely realize is that universities have become re-education centers on the model of the old communist institutions that manipulated opinion for "higher" purposes. Let me cite one example that makes this point in an unadorned way.

Professor Richard Rorty, the much acclaimed philosopher who passed this mortal coil, argued that professors in the university ought "to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own." Rorty noted further that students are fortunate to find themselves under the control "of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious dangerous parents." Indeed, parents who send their children to college should recognize that as professors "we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable."

These were not comments made at Marxist Leninist University or by the Red Guard. Nor was this the ranting of a deranged atheist opposed to the Commandment that says "honor your father and mother." These views are those of a greatly respected senior professor whose positions not only influenced his colleagues but, to a degree, embody their sentiments.

Rather than teach, the prevailing pedagogical assumption is that you should preach. Indoctrination has become the university calling card. Since students enter the halls of the Academy having been "brainwashed" by parents and religious leaders, professors have arrogated to themselves the role of oracles who can decipher moral conundrums with ideological precision.

Is it any wonder that in the hothouse of political correctness we call the university, designated subgroups have privileged status, but evangelicals are routinely ostracized? Is it any wonder that religious observance is routinely derided, while secularism is embraced with religious fervor?

At one point in the history of the university, educate was a reflexive verb. You educated yourself through exposure to great books, scientific analysis and logical exegesis. In the Rorty age, students do not have this privilege. Now they are obliged to be brow beaten into submission, mere clay in the hands of ambitious professors who are intent on shaping students' beliefs.

At one point universities were committed to the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. That idea is also anachronistic. Now, each generation confronts ideas as existentialists resistant to a past and often loyal to the musings of teacher/preacher pronouncements.

Unfortunately, most parents who pay the tuition do not have the foggiest idea of what it is they are indirectly promoting. What they see with rose colored glasses is a son or daughter closing a chapter in their lives and entering the workforce. They rarely consider what the university experience means or the extent to which their own bourgeois and religious beliefs are under assault in our colleges and universities.

Without knowing it, Professor Rorty has actually performed a service. He said what many professors think and what many students experience. Lamentably, parents have not yet made the connection. But that day may be coming. And when it does, the university will have a hard time defending itself.

After all, most American parents don't want to send their children to Peking University.

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