WHEN AN IDEA IS READY TO BE BORN.

This evening I went to a local watering hole and some former students now working in administration were dealing with another day of business as usual.  Conversation turned to business as usual and I suggested it was time for someone to publicly proclaim that higher education is being run by truly stupid people and it ought to be made great again.

Now comes Bernie Reeves at Phi Beta Cons thinking along similar lines.

What is needed is a Donald Trump-style higher education czar to jerk a knot in American colleges and universities — to make American education great again.

The most forbidding challenge to face the new czar is marshaling the nerve to obliterate the existing monolith of self-satisfied faculty and administrators. After decades of self-congratulation, conceit and power over 18-25-year olds, the professoriate, and their fellow traveling administration apparatchiks,  are imbued with a smug condescending demeanor suited to look down on the families, donors, alumni and, in many cases, taxpayers, who pay the freight — and their salaries.

There are two errors in the proposal.  The greater error is in vesting this authority in a Tsar.  That gives Someone in Authority powers that, while wielded today in the service of restoring the Canon and the Curriculum, might be wielded by someone else, perhaps the bastard grandson of some current Diversity Weenie, in the service of a restoration of the current madness.  The lesser error is in describing all of higher education in terms of the U.S. News league tables.

And yet, the bad ideas that originate at Harvard or Wesleyan or Santa Cruz leach into the soil everywhere.

Before most Americans noticed, a basic liberal arts degree was void of the wisdom of Western civilization over the past 2000 years. In its place, college children have been spoon-fed that the West, mostly America, is to be criticized, not praised. Consequently, the remarkable achievements of the world’s most advanced culture are tossed aside and stained with blame for exploiting everyone but white males.

Any cogent human free of the effects of collegiate propaganda can readily see the Academy, as it likes to call itself, is in need of shock treatment therapy, or a similar last resort. If desperate measures fail, the only alternative remaining is to shut down higher education to smithereens and start again — perhaps this time with a dress code that connotes maturity.

Or, perhaps, with trustees or legislators suggesting to administrative search firms that future potential chancellors, provosts, or presidents explain the ways in which they would be less prone to caving in to the failed policies of the present.