Our pal David Bahnsen has very worthwhile review of Charles Sykes’s new book, Fail U.: The False Promise of Higher Education. Here’s a chunk:
It is my opinion that the basic “business” of higher education as laid out with simple, non-controversial facts above, is perverse and unacceptable. But sadly it doesn’t come close to telling the whole story. Once one swallows the pill that they are paying stratospheric costs for totally declining trade-offs, they also have to accept that the students are learning virtually nothing, the experience exists for the purpose of giving the students a 4-6 year span of unbridled hedonistic opportunity, the “research” coming from academia has lost any sense of utility or application, and the universities themselves have become the worst sort of coddlers of these “special snowflakes” we used to call young adults. Sykes goes to great effort to demonstrate the absurdities that take place on college campuses every single day, not as outliers, but as a core part of the normative experience in today’s academia.
By the way, I am pretty sure Charlie is going to attend the National Review Institute’s Third Annual William F. Buckley Jr. Prize Dinner in San Francisco on September 22. You should, too.