Why Have Elite Colleges Gone Bad?

by Larry Aarn,

If you are old enough, you probably remember Michael Milken’s first professional life as a Titan of industry. He built great enterprises in a hurry, at risk, and at mostly profit to the investors. He was a force of nature.

In his second professional life, after being prosecuted for financial misdeeds in the ’80s—he has since been pardoned by President Trump—he has focused on philanthropy. He is still a force of nature and has probably done as much in the war on cancer as anyone alive. He remains what he was, active and effective regarding every good thing.

Having followed Michael’s career for years, I met him for the first time this month when I took part in an education panel he hosted in Florida. The panel consisted mostly of college presidents, and the question before us had to do with why elite colleges have gone bad.

The cause of these colleges going bad is very deep, but it is mostly this: they no longer understand their purpose as the pursuit of truth. Instead, they see it as training their students to be revolutionaries.

The search for the truth is a hard discipline at any level. At the highest level, it requires a lifetime. The classics say it requires even courage. One must focus upon each thing that is studied and attempt to hold these things together in one’s mind.

Being trained to be a revolutionary requires different virtues. First, the student must think he can perfect the world and think he knows how. Second, he must learn to comply. These seem opposite, but they are inextricable.

Revolution today is made easy by the view that the standards of perfect and imperfect, of good and bad, are completely subjective. Each of us decides what things mean. Each of us has a right to our opinions, whatever they are. This way of thinking does not make young people thoughtful; it makes them adamant. Some others are bored into passivity.

Gaining strength by declaring that opinions hold no value doesn’t create a forceful revolution. And who wants a limp revolution? So asserting the holiness of the cause is essential. But it can’t be a genuinely holy cause because holy things are uncreated. The cause needs to be created by men, and it’s even better if it’s implausible or fantastical. If it lacks coherence and is built on ignorance, then its followers can be certain that it is uniquely their own. Recently, the rising cause on college campuses has been support for the terrorist group Hamas. It identifies the murdered Jews of last October, and not the murderers themselves, as evil.

This is a grave matter not only for elite colleges, but for our nation. We are the most successful and longest-enduring free republic in human history. We have a constitution to protect our freedom, but our practices under that constitution have become warped. The cause of the warping is closely related to why elite colleges have gone bad.

The Constitution aims to protect our liberties under the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” These laws are proclaimed in the first sentence of the most beautiful political document ever written, the Declaration of Independence. Abraham Lincoln, arguing against slavery, called these laws the “father of all moral principle in us.”

Our elite colleges and many others have repudiated these laws. They recognize no laws above us, written in nature or ordained by God, to command what we do. They teach that we can remake the world as we please. This teaching is the basis of the American form of totalitarianism: scientific, comprehensive, ever advancing. It is evil. Read 1984.

Much of the blame for this madness has come upon Harvard, the oldest and most elite college in America. One must condemn what Harvard has become, but also one should wish Harvard well. It is an old institution that has been great, and there is still some greatness in it. It must return to its old purposes if it is to save its freedom and recover its interest in the truth.

To read more about the causes of the decline of education, read the “1915 General Declaration of Principles” by the American Association of University Professors, of which John Dewey was founder and president. Also instructive is an article I wrote years ago titled “Why the GOP is Flunking Higher Education” and an exchange about it I had with former president of Boston University John Silber.