Academic Blues

George Will weighs in on the walking ideological scandal that is American academe. As he conveys in his article, these facts are becoming almost tiresome to relate, and it is even more tiresome to have to listen to academe's smug defenses. Smug, because the leading academic institutions are inbued with a unshakeable confidence that American parents will pay any price to gain for their children the imprimatur of their institutional brand name.

Hence, the real question is the one raised by the indispensable Betsy Newmark, who asks "How long can colleges continue this way?" She finds the prospects depressing and it is indeed hard to see how much can change under the present circumstances, so long as parents are willing to buy into this corrupt status-manufacturing machine. But Tom Wolfe's new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, provides parents with a glimpse into what they are buying (largely without even getting into the question of ideological conformity in the classroom). I daresay some will balk at what they see therein. Maybe not that many, not yet. But once parents start balking in serious numbers, then we will see change.

But probably not before. It may take a consumer rebellion in academe, just as it has in mass communications. And, following that same example, it may take the creation of alternative institutions which can work around the stubborn immobility of entrenched and heavily endowed institutions, should those institutions prove unable or unwilling to change.