Briefly Noted: A Covid Success Story?
Yesterday Steve Hayward at Powerline returned to a topic he's touched on before: The Higher Ed Meltdown Accelerates . He includes a chart that pretty much tells the story. The meltdown he's talking about is the collapse of employment at universities as a result of Covid. The other meltdown, the ideological meltdown, continues apace, of course. Here's the picture:
Hayward follows with some more or less anecdotal examples--but which surely must reflect the larger reality across the country--and takes some pleasure in pointing out that the deepest cuts are in the liberal arts. I'm a liberal arts guy, myself, but I recognize that the liberal arts are from where they used to be--are the epicenter of our cultural and, therefore, political crisis. Obviously, the universities are symptomatic of a deeper spiritual problem in the West, but they have also become an engine driving us more quickly down the slippery slope.
Hayward does recognize that the STEM departments have also been ideologically affected, and includes an example.
It occurs to me, however, that there really is no happy ending here. Of course Covid on its own won't cause universities to shed their ideological baggage and return to educating American young people for productive futures--which, I fear, is how the purpose of university education is viewed by most Americans. Still less will they return to passing on the spiritual core of Western culture. If the two most recent 'scientific' hoaxes--Global Warming and Covid--have taught us anything it is surely that "science" as we thought we knew it is largely dead. It is now increasingly an adjunct to politics, seeing its role as supporting whatever the current political orthodoxy of the Left happens to be. Few in the STEM departments of our universities have the intellectual background and training to launch a defense of the disciplines they grew up in.
The other side of the coin is that, if Trump is indeed forced out by a global Left coalition, our Republican senators will gleefully join in opening the floodgates, not just to cheap blue collar labor, but to foreign born (largely Asian) students and researchers who will work for less and will replace our dumbed down offspring. The Trump economy will prove to have been a speed bump, unless--against all odds--there is a spiritual rebirth in America that will prove capable of sparking an intellectual rebirth. The resources are there--scattered behind us along the roadside of our history. Otherwise, the Great Reset awaits us, sooner or later. Or worse.