The Decline of Tertiary Education

It has been said that, if one is not a liberal at 25, he has no heart, and if one is not a conservative at 35, he has no brain. The statement’s origins are murky and more than a century old, but, given what we know about how people tend to evolve politically, the statement itself, in particular the first part, carries more than a whiff of truth to it.

Some, especially liberals (obviously) will dispute the second part, and I’d postulate that “conservative” should be replaced with “libertarian,” but lets set that debate aside and discuss the tendency toward liberalism in one’s youth.

There is a reason we do not give the power to vote, drink, drive, and (most importantly, IMO) enter into contracts to children and teenagers. The human brain is not a fully-formed organ at birth, having neither ability nor skill at cognitive thinking and reasoning. The ability and skill grow over time, and society has elected to use age as the measure for granting the authority to engage in “adult” actions. While the education and upbringing that children undergo obviously has a major effect on their belief sets (and politics), children are not blank slates or unformatted, empty hard drives. They are influenced by hard wiring and natural instincts.

Among these are ideas like fairness, selfishness, immediate gratification, and deference to parental figures. These ideas, unprocessed by critical thinking skills that develop over years, foster a tendency towards a utopian (in the strictest sense of the word) idealism, where there is no want, no suffering, no dissatisfaction and no unfairness. So, no, it’s no surprise or shock that young people have a tendency to and affinity for the modern version of liberalism, embodied as it is by the likes of redistributionists and statists like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

I’ve broken no new ground here, obviously. But, consider this humorous/sarcastic quote by Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard from 1909 to 1933:

Of course there’s a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don’t take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.

Joke aside, this is a great explanation for why many universities have become the leftist echo-chambers they are today, echo-chambers so hostile to diversity of opinion that non-liberals are turning against the current manifestation of tertiary education itself. If universities elect to accumulate the naive prejudices of the young and unformed brains, instead of training those brains to think critically and process those prejudices rationally, then they’re failing in whatever duty we might consider a free and open society calls for. Consider:

Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one. — Malcolm Forbes

Who would argue with such an observation? But, it’s no longer the reality. Instead:

Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices. — Laurence Peter

And, given how our college kids and young adults have become parrots for the word salad produced by the social justice world:

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyfull of words and do not know a thing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

And,

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education. — Bertrand Russell

The Forbes quote is rational optimism. The other three are cynical sarcasm. Which attitude, today, is better suited for contemplating the state of universities today?