ELLIOT RESNICK: We Could Use Fewer College Graduates

A hundred years ago, roughly 10 percent of recent American high-school graduates attended college. Today that figure is 61 percent. Are we better off?

Hardly.

“The aim of education is wisdom,” writes Robert M. Hutchins, editor of Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Book series. But is that what contemporary college students attain in college? Wisdom?

Or do they emerge instead with what author Douglas Murray calls the nihilist’s creed: “Yours is a meaningless existence in a meaningless universe”?

Nihilism actually wouldn’t be so bad.  If college graduates were merely nihilists, they would drown themselves in decadence, but at least they would leave the rest of us alone. Alas, as Murray writes, “most people in their lives seek some form of certainty.” And so many graduates aren’t satisfied with declaring, like the ever skeptical Socrates, that they know nothing.  Instead they confidently assert that they do know something: America is racist to its core.

Should we be surprised then that Democrats – products of our “best” universities – think nothing of locking up their political opponents, arresting lawyers, and censoring conservative voices? Sure, these actions violate sacred norms that go back 250 years, but who cares about norms when the people who established them were evil white men?

Decades ago, Dartmouth college president James Freedman allegedly said, “The purpose of a college education is to question your father’s values.” Well, contemporary college students do that in spades. They enter university as nice, normal kids and emerge as angry, America-hating adults.