Higher education in the United States has been greatly oversold. Many students who are neither academically strong nor inclined toward serious intellectual work have been lured into colleges and universities. At considerable cost to their families and usually the taxpayer as well, those students sometimes obtain a degree, but often with little if any gain in human capital that will prove beneficial in the labor market or in dealing with the challenges of life.
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So says George Leef of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in this new essay. Roughly seven out of ten high school graduates in the United States today go on to college, many of whom will not complete a four year degree. To be perfectly frank, most of these people neither deserve nor even need higher education, and it will likely be to the benefit of everyone if vocational and technical training were emphasized rather than university education. The job market will benefit from more people having real-world experience and skills, the professors will not have to deal with students unprepared for intellectual rigor, and the students themselves will save a great deal of time and money.

For many students, college is not seen as a place to grow intellectually or increase the breadth of their knowledge, but rather as a four-year excuse to drink, party, and otherwise delay the responsibilities of adulthood while doing as little as possible to graduate. The results of this overselling of higher education are manifold: grade inflation, ever-rising tuition costs, the dumbing-down of curricula, and the ultimate devaluation of the Bachelor’s Degree itself.

This is from the Cornell Alumni Blog MetaEzra. Here’s a passage from Dr. Rabkin’s interview with former Sun Editor Andy Guess ’06, and it does not bode well for the ability of Cornell to retain its top professors:

On the other side is this: Cornell made no effort of any kind to keep me here. I told my department chair that I had this offer. She told me I could have an “exit interview” to discuss my feelings about Cornell before I left. She did not offer to ask the administration for a counter-offer — which is the usual thing to do in these circumstances. She did not ask me to wait until I saw what Cornell would offer. She did nothing at all. I waited some five weeks, in the course of which I was never contacted by the chair (Val Bunce) or by anyone else. In the circumstances, I did not feel I had any choice. If an institution wants to keep a senior person, it does what it can to match an outside offer. Cornell didn’t even bother to inquire what the details of GMU’s offer actually were.

The fact that the Cornell Government Department made little or no effort to try to keep Professor Rabkin here is sad, to say the very least. It is distressing as a student (and soon-to-be alumna) to hear that as distinguished a scholar as Dr. Rabkin did not feel as though his contributions were being adequately appreciated at this university.

With students away on Spring Break, except me (stupid storm), I think most students will miss this interesting Cornell news item:

“We are distressed by the reports regarding a Cornell student’s torture of a dog. We find any abuse or torture of animals totally unacceptable and abhorrent and the facts of this incident as reported appear to be truly egregious.”

Read the rest of the release here.

This is an interesting case as it combines the typical “dog bites man” story (though reverse “dog” and “man,” apparently) and it directly relates to the new campus code of conduct. If this case picks up steam, look for it to be used as the reason for why we should welcome the new code with open arms. “Didn’t you hear about what that evil student did to that puppy??” Let’s see Danny Pearlstein and Jeff Purcell argue against that!

This video is well worth the 75 minutes of viewing time. “The Great Global Warming Swindle” is a documentary produced in England that demolishes the arguments of “climate change” ideologues using a combination of rigorous scientific analysis and plain common sense.

One of the most striking features of this documentary is its examination of how the environmental movement has actually hindered the development of the most desperately poor people on the planet. Advocates of “sustainable” energy block programs for bringing electricity and clean water to developing countries out of concern for burning fossil fuels, using chemical pesticides, and so forth. These technologies could prevent millions of deaths each year from disease and hunger, but environmental extremists through lobbying groups and other NGOs consistently act to keep the developing world from developing. It is easy to lampoon tree-huggers such as the now-famous Redbud Eight at Cornell, but it’s sobering to know that such activism often is literally a death sentence for millions of people in the world’s poorest countries.

Columbia College’s graduation speaker is apparently going to be Matthew Fox. Yes, the guy from Lost (or Party of Five for you children of the ’90s). Fox graduated from Columbia back in the late 80s and is now famous. The Columbia student body has never been one to let things like this go. Everyone remembers their response to the Minuteman fiasco last fall. It is funny because the students protested John McCain as commencement speaker last spring. I wonder if now they would rather have a presidential hopeful than a B List (I’m being generous) actor.

I bring this up because as of today, Cornell does not have a commencement speaker. As far as I know we do not even have a short list. Now, there is not that much to be said for a great commencement speech. The greatest value probably comes 20 years after the fact when we can say, “That guy spoke at my graduation.” Do we want someone who will say something interesting or someone we can brag about later? I would personally prefer the latter. Columbia, unfortunately, will get neither.

I just read an excellent essay entitled “The Organization Kid,” by David Brooks (The Atlantic Monthly, April 2001; you can find it through the university’s library website, but not Google). It is an exploration of the mindset of the modern high-achieving Ivy-Leaguer. Brooks visits Princeton University to get a sense for what the future leaders of the nation are up to. Happily, he find that the hard-charging Princetonians are extremely intelligent, studious, hard-working, well-organized, energetic, and responsible — at first glance, precisely the sort of people that you would want filling the ranks of the nation’s business and political elite.

But there is a dark underside to the Ivy League mentality. The students, Brooks observes, lack a strong moral compass. They are not immoral, per se, and they are certainly not bad people (a lot of them do community service, for example), but they are not animated by any kind of overarching moral vision. When he tries to discuss morality with the students, they evade his questions. One student offers his opinion that all wrongdoing can be purged from the human race within a few generations, leading to a perfect world where government, laws, and punishment will be basically unnecessary. Another student at the table, a conservative Christian, agrees with him. “Apparently the doctrine of original sin had not left much of a mark on her,” Brooks comments.

Brooks attributes this rather breezy worldview to the fact that the current generation of students does not have (or does not feel that it has) much to fight for. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the intellectual elite was engaged in a constant war against the established order, fighting everything from capitalism to colonialism to racism to Vietnam; even conservatives fought the established order (the liberal one). By 2001, it seemed as if all that fighting had become pretty much obsolete. The great ideological battles of the twentieth century had been waged and concluded. The world was, it seemed, vastly more just and harmonious than it had been only forty years ago. Things were going very well for America, and, it was believed, for the world at large. From the perspective of the average Ivy League student, who had grown up in unprecedented prosperity and privilege and had never lived through the national trauma of a major war or economic depression, the world seemed like a very reasonable, equitable, fair and orderly place. Just work hard, play by the rules and be pleasant and open-minded — and see what happens: you’ll have a wonderful time at a prestigious college, and a whole range of exciting, high-paying careers at investment banks and consulting firms will be open to you after you graduate. The world is yours; and what a wonderful world it is.

I hope I am not the only person (besides Brooks) who finds this attitude a little repugnant. It is, at any rate, a radical departure from what prior generations of Ivy Leaguers apparently believed. Brooks quotes an address by John Hibbens, the president of Princeton University, to the graduating students of 1913:

You, enlightened, self-sufficient, self-governed, endowed with gifts above your fellows, the world expects you to produce as well as to consume, to add to and not to subtract from its store of good, to build up and not tear down, to ennoble and not to degrade. It commands you to take your place and to fight your fight in the name of honor and of chivalry, against the powers of organized evil and of commercialized vice, against the poverty, disease, and death which follow fast in the wake of sin and ignorance, against all the innumerable forces which are working to destroy the image of God in man, and unleash the passions of the beast.

As Brooks points out, educators at the time felt comfortable talking about evil, sin, and God. They did not see anything unusual about conceiving life as an epic battle between vast forces of good and evil. They saw it as the mission of the university to instill students with nobility and virtue, not merely to “educate” them and prepare them for lucrative careers. Above all, they tried to impress upon students the reality that within every human heart is a perpetual struggle between good and evil, and that it is the duty of every individual to fight the evil with every ounce of their moral, intellectual, and even physical strength.

How things have changed. Brooks makes it clear that the Ivy League universities were, in some respects, much worse places to be back in 1913 than they are now. However, when I look around at the shallow, insipid careerists that are spawned by our meritocratic university system, I find the conservative (or is the radical?) within me wishing for an injection of the old values, to stir things up a little, and shatter the boredom of this place.

Sources have confirmed that Prof. Jeremy Rabkin ’74, a senior professor in the Department of Government, will be leaving Cornell at the end of the academic year. He will be beginning work at the George Mason University School of Law in the fall.

Prof. Rabkin has had a long and illustrious academic career at Cornell. He has published four books and has won several awards including the Merrill Presidential Award for most influential professor and won the “Best Professor” award for the Ithaca Times in 2002. Prof. Rabkin also serves at several noted public policy organizations, most notably a member of the Executive Committee at the Federalist Society and a member of the Board of Academic Advisers at the American Enterprise Institute.

However, Prof. Rabkin is most notably known for being a strong conservative voice amongst the vast sea of liberal professors in his department and at the university at large. He is currently the lone registered Republican in the entire government department. He also serves as the faculty adviser for the College Republicans. Prof. Rabkin is unabashedly conservative and has contributed much to the conservative cause outside the classroom at Cornell as well as offering his unique points of view on public policy during his lectures.

Prof. Rabkin will be sorely missed at Cornell. Conservatives on campus will be hard pressed to find a new ally amongst the faculty who is so willing and ready to support the cause. Prof. Rabkin’s departure is very unfortunate and his support for Cornell’s conservatives will be remembered for years to come.