The liberal corruption of higher education

Michael Barone:

American colleges and universities, long thought to be the glory of the nation, are in more than a little trouble. I've written before of their shameful practices — the racial quotas and preferences at selective schools (Harvard is being sued by Asian-American organizations), the kangaroo courts that try students accused of rape and sexual assault without legal representation or presumption of innocence, and speech codes that make campuses the least rather than the most free venues in American society.

In following these policies, the burgeoning phalanxes of university and college administrators must systematically lie, insisting against all the evidence that they are racially nondiscriminatory, devoted to due process and upholders of free speech. The resulting intellectual corruption would have been understood by George Orwell.
...

American graduate universities, dating back to Johns Hopkins's founding in 1876, have been built on the German professional model. Students are taught by scholars whose Ph.D. theses represent original scholarship, expanding the frontiers of knowledge and learning.

That model still works very well in math and the hard sciences. In these disciplines it's rightly claimed that American universities are, as The Economist recently put it in a cover story, "the gold standard" of the world. But not so much in some of the mushier social sciences and humanities. "Just as the American model is spreading around the world," The Economist goes on, "it is struggling at home."
...

But now the assumption is that adult-aged students must be coddled like children. They are provided with cadres of counselors, so-called "trigger warnings" against supposedly disturbing course material and kangaroo courts to minutely regulate their sexual behavior.
...

The "trigger warnings" nonsense is teaching students to be wimps.  Can you imagine a Marine Corps drill instructor having to give a trigger warning to recruits he is training to deal with adversity.  It si ludicrous on its face.

Universities have become bloated and expensive institutions sustained by predatory lending to unsophisticated borrowers who are then burdened with massive debt while trying to make do in an anemic Obama jobs market.