How Colleges & Universities Destroy Idealism
Jumbled musings of my experience as a university attendee
I am currently in my sixth year as a college student, and my second in graduate school. And despite everything, I remain an idealist. The ideals of academic freedom and unfettered scholarship have helped me maintain my conviction that the universities are not as hopelessly corrupt as conservatives, from William F. Buckley Jr. and Allan Bloom, make them out to be. But I am not going to shy away from saying that my higher education has destroyed much of the former optimism I had before enrollment, and I have witnessed similar stories of disillusionment and bitterness within my peers.
Recently, two new books have sounded the alarm on the dismal state of college attendees - The Coddling of the American Mind, authored by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff; and The Canceling of the American Mind, authored by Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott. Undoubtedly, the title of these books were inspired by Bloom’s notable 1987 polemic The Closing of the American Mind. Greg Lukianoff, the author of both books, also serves as the President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a watchdog group aimed at preserving academic freedom and free thought on American college campuses. In his capacity as book author and coordinator of FIRE, Lukianoff believes that a campus culture polarized by politics, in addition to a distorted concept of ‘safety’, has resulted in the miseducation of young minds:
A culture that allows the concept of 'safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy… The notion that a university should protect all of its students from ideas that some of them find offensive is a repudiation of the legacy of Socrates, who described himself as the ‘gadfly’ of the Athenian people. He thought it was his job to sting, to disturb, to question, and thereby to provoke his fellow Athenians to think through their current beliefs, and change the ones they could not defend.
While I agree with Lukianoff’s viewpoint, I do not believe he portrays the whole picture when it comes to the minefield that is campus life. While I do not claim to have a comprehensive sociological picture of what it is like being a college student, I can tell from my experience that university attendees, myself included, have been malnourished in terms of ideals and purpose. The words of legendary Beat poet Allen Ginsberg comes to mind when describing what I’ve witnessed coming to class every weekday:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
We all come to college looking to change the world in some ways. We hold in our heads ideals and dreams about a world where humans are better lived and treated. But many of us finish our degrees indebted and angry at the same world we wanted to change not so long ago. When not in classes, some of us spend our time being inebriated by booze, marijuana and casual sex. Others get involved in activist politics, channeling their ideals into the ambitious banners of Marxism, environmentalism and social justice. Some, of course, indulge in all of these. Not many of us seem to cherish the academic life, the revelatory pleasure of reading something from a book that challenges your viewpoint and enlightens you to a corner of life you were previously in the dark about.
This is because, for many of us, the academy has squandered our ideals. Rather than nourishing our ambitions - not without a sense of prudence, of course - the professors and administrators have turned the college experience into either a (largely left-wing) political boot camp or a series of drab seminars aimed at producing effective worker bees in a rapidly advancing economy. In both environments, conformity is expected. We have paid too much - not just money, but time and effort - and received too little.
I am reminded of the Pink Floyd song ‘Welcome to the Machine’, the lyrics of which have haunted me since the day I started high school:
Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
What did you dream?
It's alright we told you what to dream
Our university educators are mistaken in believing that universities are supposed to prepare us for real-life. We can do that on our own, thank you very much! What universities are supposed to do, I believe, is to show us how life can be enriched through books, ideas and endless interactions with them. Allan Bloom, whose books should be read by every college attendees as well as those who claim the authority to teach them, says that ‘the re-establishment of the theoretical life’ is ‘both possible and itself productive of self-sufficient happiness’. He also suggests, in the tradition of Rousseau and the Romantics, that the erotic life is also in dire need of rediscovery. Nowadays, the word ‘erotic’ has been vulgarized to mean ‘sexual’, but this betrays its root word Eros, which is the Greek god of love, passion and desire. Also criminally vulgarized is the idea of love. Once the domain of profound philosophical and spiritual discourse (think Plato, Augustine and Shakespeare), it has now been subject to the bloodless commercial forms of pop songs and romantic comedies. No wonder university students find transcendence and authenticity in the indulgence of mind-numbing substances and even more mind-numbing radical politics. In the words of Rousseau, students have not learned how to transcend their amour propre, which is selfish and depends on the validation of others, and reach amour de soi, which connects the profound love one has with himself with the shared love he has for his fellow humans. A culture of conformity on campus has resulted in deep nihilism among its participants. To rescue the universities from the pit they’ve dug themselves into, the adults in the room have to pay attention to the student’s ideals, and guide them towards the best way they can be fulfilled.