Starving the Campus Beast
Writing at The American Conservative, Teresa Manning, a former professor at the Scalia Law School at George Mason University (motto: “Yes, George Mason owned slaves, but it’s complicated”), would like the terminally ill ivory tower that is higher education to be taken off federal life support. As she puts it:
“We cannot continue to fund the beast that is American “higher education,” which is unjustly enriching itself while impoverishing and culturally poisoning our young people even as it leaves them ignorant. Forget “defund the police.” Defund the colleges.”
I believe Ms. Manning underestimates our ability to walk and chew gum at the same time—we can simultaneously defund the police and the colleges!
Manning’s grievances include the absence of meaningful reforms that would prevent universities from producing “yet more ignorant and indebted youth. No action on student-loan forgiveness should happen,” she insists, “unless the American higher-education system is reformed from top to bottom.” In other words, for Ms. Manning, the perfect should be the enemy of the good; if we can’t fix everything, let’s not fix anything.
One specific reform Manning favors is to stop encouraging college attendance in the first place:
A sound domestic policy would not herd most of the nation’s young people into a system that takes their time, talent, and treasure to push resentment and radicalization, when they could be entering the workforce, earning money, contributing to society, and starting families.
Does Manning believe that resentment and radicalism did not exist before the Sixties, or that college campuses are the only environment that nurtures such phenomena? In any case, she insists that our emphasis on “higher education for all” is especially bad for women (says a woman who taught at George Mason University):
Society is making the one job that most women eventually want more difficult. Motherhood is also the job a country most needs to be done well; that is, with stable marriages and committed fathers. A truly pro-woman society would not put women on an educational and professional trajectory designed for men. Independent thinkers have suggested that women not be subject to time limits for degree completion. Fifty years of feminism, combined with 50 years of fall-out from the sexual revolution, like skyrocketing illegitimacy in both inner cities and rural America, has taught us the hard way that these ideologies lead to ruin.
Teresa Manning, who served in the Trump administration as Deputy Assistant for Population Affairs, should know something about the road to ruin, which is paved with both good intentions and federal dollars. She may be on to something, though; if ignorance is bliss, then maybe, if we defund enough colleges, our nation will be even more blissfully ignorant than it already is.
Defund the Colleges - The American Conservative
There Is No Crying in Tennis
At American Mind (motto: “Not to have a mind is being very wasteful.”), Alexander Zubatov informs us that “America is in the midst of a nervous breakdown.” He has a pretty good idea what is behind this crisis:
Between the psychological damage caused by government-imposed lockdowns, the stress of an economy flirting with recession, and our increasingly acrimonious domestic politics—amplified by the social media panopticon—there is ample cause to question the state of the American psyche. In the past, our political and cultural leaders would call for toughness and stoicism in the face of adversity. Today, however, our ruling class dismisses and condemns these virtues as “toxic masculinity,” extolling, instead, displays of victimization and vulnerability.
Zubatov even provides a poster child for our current decline into woke madness (and no, it is not Tonya Harding):
Modern America is becoming increasingly defined by a burgeoning victimhood culture. Even athletes, once models of perseverance and resolve, are now celebrated for bowing out and choking under pressure. The champion in this event is Naomi Osaka, whose every unraveling is lauded by reporters as a bold act bringing attention to the issue of mental health in sports. A healthy society would have scorned Osaka into re-conformity with the expectations associated with her ostensible status as a world-class athlete and, in doing so, would have benefited both her and society itself.
Why can Ms. Osaka not display the grace under pressure of, say, a John McEnroe or a Jimmy Connors? Of course, encouraging the use of “scorn” as a tool to enforce conformity with social expectations would be easier if we all agreed on those expectations in the first place and if we all felt comfortable with scorning people who deviate from them. “Thou shalt scorn the nonconforming” is not on everyone’s list of commandments.
Zubatov turns to a classic 1966 book by Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, to bolster his case that Americans have gone soft:
It is the job of cultural elites, Rieff argues, to transmit a culture’s system of moral demands. When authority figures no longer have the stomach to exercise their authority, and when powerful institutions act to enable transgressors instead of punishing them, a culture is near or at the stage of collapse. Understood in this light, our crisis in mental health goes far deeper than Covid, social media, or any transitory political tremors, whether domestic or foreign. It goes to the very heart of our continued viability as a culture. It is not just individuals among us who have grown out of sync and have become afflicted by a psychic and spiritual malaise for which they can find no obvious cure. The damage is civilizational.
Should the reader not yet sense the urgency of the situation, Zubatov concludes on this note:
Turning back the clock on our creeping malaise is no easy task, but it is necessary if we hope to rescue the nation—and its children—from total disintegration. It must be possible to restore respect for authority without succumbing to authoritarianism and to instill a sense of cultural shame and standards without trying to model society on an imaginary Golden Age. It must begin with families and schools, with our silent majority — those who still believe in our longstanding ethos of dignity and stoicism in the face of adversity — to come together and respond with strength that commands respect in the face of our cultural elites’ insistence on absurd and sanctimonious displays of weakness threatening to bring us as individuals and as a society to our knees.
Zubatov’s plaints may be, for the most part, risible, but he does, citing Rieff, make one point worth taking seriously:
In most contemporary Western societies, a set of compelling cultural norms no longer binds us. Individuals are left to their own devices in seeking out remedies for their misery, alienation, and other psychological distress. “When so little can be taken for granted, and when the meaningfulness of social existence no longer grants an inner life at peace with itself, every man must become something of a genius about himself,” Rieff explains—no easy feat.
Any good existentialist can relate to that, and to this:
Even when a particular individual can master the Herculean task of finding his personal pathway to equanimity, there is no guarantee doing so will leave him in a harmonious relationship with his social environment. Freud’s radical innovation, Rieff argues, was to divorce an individual’s pursuit of well-being from the pursuit of any higher aim or larger communal purpose. Well-being, then, becomes an individual project and an end in itself.
Unlike Zubatov, I have no problem with emotional displays or with a softening of our “longstanding ethos of stoicism”. But I do agree with him, and with the late Philip Rieff, that modern individualism, while in some sense the opposite of stoicism, carries demands and burdens of its own to which even iconic public figures can succumb—in which case, I for one prefer responding with empathy rather than with scorn.
Freakout Nation - The American Mind

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