If anyone was still wondering how badly those three Ivy League presidents stepped on rakes during that Congressional testimony about antisemitism, CNN just gave them a beat-down for being too ideologically leftist.
Now, read that again. Slooowly.
Fareed Zacharia doesn’t have many things in common with the typical ClashDaily reader. But after seeing those three Ivy League Presidents blow themselves up for all the world to see, Fareed opened up a can of whoop-@ss on how higher ed is trading its reputation of being some of the most prestigious centers of education in the world to glorified ideological training centers.
America’s top universities should abandon their long misadventure into politics, retrain their gaze on their core strengths and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning.
My take: pic.twitter.com/smjkQ9fngE
— Fareed Zakaria (@FareedZakaria) December 10, 2023
For a guy who has more in common with Bernie Sanders than Mike Lee, seeing him take 6 minutes to tear a strip off of these schools — and their political monoculture in particular — is something worthy of notice.
It’s a shift.
A signal that even their political allies think they’ve pushed too far with their agenda.
Suppose enough voices on his side of the aisle join the chorus and call out some nonsense he’s putting in the spotlight. In that case, there is a (slim) chance that a system thoroughly captured by what Rudi Dutschke called a long march through the institutions might not have to be the irredeemable write-off we’ve assumed them to be.
In the meantime, public opinion about the actual value of their degrees has been in freefall. Almost as fast as Biden’s positive numbers. The price tag attached to such a dubious degree won’t be helping any.
The free market is already working to generate alternative ways to teach students the skills they would have otherwise gotten in school or test how real-world skills have been successfully mastered without formal training.
Cross-Posted with Clash Daily
