The Harvard debacle: tracing recent academic history

The Harvard/gay debacle provides an opportunity to reflect upon how we arrived at this ignominious point in academic history in such a short time. As prelude, a story I taught in Wyoming’s community college system:

A Wyoming rancher, who struggled for decades to make ends meet, was suddenly a billionaire when oil was found on his land. A multi-million-dollar donation later, he was a newly enrolled Harvard freshman. Moseying across campus—that’s what Wyoming ranchers do–he stopped a trust fund snot:

“Hey there partner, can you tell me where the library’s at?”

“Heah at Haaaaaavahd, we do not end our sentences with prepositions.”

“Well alrighty then. Where’s the library at, asshole?”

My Wyoming students got the point.

Image: King’s College Chapel. Wikimedia Commons.org. 

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Harvard was founded in 1636 as a divinity school, an academy to train Christian Ministers. I wonder what Cotton Mather, among Harvard’s early graduates, would think of Harvard now? Actually, that probably doesn’t take much imagination. “Hellfire and brimstone” comes readily to mind.  Fast forward to the Age of Obama.

The academic and ethical decline of our universities and colleges was supercharged by the Obama federalization of the student loan industry, absolving colleges of all risk, transferring it instead to taxpayers. The justification was the idea every American should go to college. We’re beginning to remember we always knew better. Was the eventual cancellation of student debt part of the plan from the beginning? In any case, a booming college market, with colleges competing fiercely for students and their taxpayer-backed loans, greatly accelerated academic decline.

The Marxist rot undermining academic integrity had long infected colleges. By then, it was virtually unstoppable.

Colleges that did not have remedial high schools on campus rushed to establish them.  Students no ethical college would have previously accepted were ruthlessly recruited, paying full tuition for remedial classes that would earn no credit. Four-year degrees suddenly became six-or-more-year degrees, but that didn’t matter. Few of those utterly unprepared students earned a degree, commonly dropping out, disillusioned and in crushing debt without a degree or the job skills necessary to repay their loans.

Encouraging students any competent administrator or professor must know could do little but fail, leaving them thinking themselves failures, despondent and in ruinous debt, is the height of Self-Imagined Elite (SIE) cruelty. And they did know.

As they were setting up students for failure and ruin, colleges complained bitterly about the poor quality of students American high schools were producing. Scholar Charles Murray reasonably estimates only about 10-15% of Americans have the IQ necessary to do actual college-level work.

That K-12 schooling doesn’t—can’t–uniformly produce budding Rhodes Scholars used to be understood. If everyone is above average, ready to excel in college, “average” has no meaning.

However, as an inevitable result of enrolling huge numbers of people destined to fail, grade inflation is rampant lest the policies that predestine their failure be exposed. Maintaining legitimately high educational standards would cause average grade point averages to plummet, reduce registration to a trickle and impoverish colleges. Were that to happen, people might begin questioning why so many colleges have legions of six-figure, race-hustling DEI apparatchiks, in many cases more than actual faculty.

There is encouraging evidence Americans, in ever-increasing numbers, are catching on to the scam. Claudine Gay’s ouster from the Harvard presidency would arguably not have been possible were this not so. It appears academics can be made to feel shame, or at least temporarily feign it. The movement to return to vocational education, which provides good, vital careers and solid middle-class incomes, is thankfully growing. Computers, in AI guise or otherwise, are not going to wire houses, repair plumbing, treat illnesses or weld anything.  Americans are rediscovering the ancient necessity of self-reliance and the certainty that if you want it done right, or at all, do it yourself. Learning to do it yourself tends not to happen on college campuses.

The economic model of many contemporary universities and colleges, a house of toilet papers cards, is collapsing. No human endeavor with far more administrators than workers can long survive, and those built on Marxist, racist effluvia are particularly vulnerable. Produce a product or service people want to buy and prosper. Produce gaseous emanations, fake Indians like Elizabeth Warren, and diplomas not worth the tissue on which they’re printed and go the way of the dinosaurs.

No one should be refused the opportunity to attend college. I’ve taught many who never made the Dean’s List or even earned an “A,” but virtually all graduated because they were responsible, determined Americans with clearly defined goals and no patience for rhetorical, racist nonsense. All were better, more confident people for the effort. All paid back their loans in full and on time.

Perhaps there’s a lesson—or two–there.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor and retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.