The Outstater
I.U. and the ‘Stupid Stuff’
“We can require public universities to return to strong and mandatory core curricula, which challenges students to think, brings them together around shared knowledge and ideas and prepares them for lives as productive and engaged citizens.”
— Andrea Neal in “Indiana Mandate: A Return to Founding Principles.”
GIVE SOME CREDIT to the Braun administration for reigning in Eric Holcomb’s Indiana Economic Development Corporation. New board members such as Roanoke’s Richard Waterfield have injected common sense in what was meant to be only a gentle encourager of hometown investment, not an experiment in neo-mercantilism.
Now, on to Indiana universities the incubators in recent years of all sorts of unpleasantness, turmoil and silliness. Compared with untangling the IEDC, fixing our higher education system should be a snap — just quit funding the stupid stuff.
Like what exactly? A course at Indiana University, “Understanding Diversity in a Pluralistic Society,” simplistically divided students (and all Americans) into “oppressor” and “oppressed” identities. Relatedly, strike anything offered for a bachelor of arts in African American or African Diaspora studies plus gender studies, billiards, bowling and the history of rock ’n’ roll. We don’t need to mention any money spilling over to the on-campus Kinsey Institute, that great normalizer of deviancy.
So the Indiana Commission for Higher Education should be applauded for taking up the recommendations of our “Indiana Mandate: A Return to Founding Principles.” The commission announced this summer that Indiana University is suspending or eliminating more than 100 such dubious academic programs.
And it has only scratched the surface. Any marginally practical, mentally balanced Hoosier going through the I.U. academic catalog will find hundreds more courses and a good number of departments that can be eliminated without adverse effect on the state’s intellectual health — rather, that can be eliminated to its great betterment.
The problem is not just the stupid stuff, it’s what has been left out. I hope someone can prove me wrong, but I don’t see at any Indiana university a solid base for understanding Western Civilization other than a stray course or two. Nor can I find a full appreciation of the contribution that the thousands of settlers in the Midwest and Great Plains made to the wealth of this nation —an achievement that historians consider unprecedented and, one would think, a pertinent topic for study at an Indiana university.
Instead, we are left with flotsam and jetsam of the woke movement. As observed by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and quoted in our “Indiana Mandate:
“Students still learn things on college campuses, of course, but too often, they are allowed to graduate having learned little of lasting importance. They have taken a set of classes on specialized topics, but they have no way to connect these ideas together. They take courses that relate to their preexisting interests and identities rather than those designed to broaden their horizons and challenge their preconceptions. Thus, when they leave school, often in tremendous debt, they have aged, but often they have not grown.”
At the same time, many universities have become centers of progressive group-think, stifling conservative voices among the faculty and student body. This is from the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, again as quoted in “Indiana Mandate”:
“Free inquiry has been replaced by ‘safe spaces’ and the shouting down of anyone who speaks out against anti-Western ideologies and the cult of victimization. Bureaucracies that smack of the old Soviet Union enforce a code of political correctness infusing every aspect of university life with suspicion and resentment. Having banished all but a tiny remnant of conservatives and even most liberals from the professoriate, universities become ever more determined to undermine all aspects of American culture and higher learning.”
In summary, the excesses and hubris of academia are coming to roost. In 2010, three-quarters of Americans rated having a college degree as “very important.” Today, only about a third believe that, and a quarter of people believe it is “not too important” at all.
Education expert Richard Vedder of Ohio University tells the blog Unleash Prosperity that no industry or profession has had lower productivity gain than universities – with the possible exception of prostitution.
We’ll leave it at that. — tcl
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