{"id":1784789,"date":"2022-12-23T07:56:27","date_gmt":"2022-12-23T12:56:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1784789"},"modified":"2022-12-23T09:03:42","modified_gmt":"2022-12-23T14:03:42","slug":"victor-davis-hanson-are-universities-doomed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/victor-davis-hanson-are-universities-doomed\/","title":{"rendered":"Victor Davis Hanson: Are Universities Doomed?"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">12<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fvictor-davis-hanson-are-universities-doomed%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1784789&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/109aba81-4123-4be2-9b92-b51172d7c81d-1110x740-1.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\"   style=\"display:none\"><\/div>\n<p>In a famous exchange in the The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway wrote: \u201cHow did you go bankrupt?\u201d Bill asked. \u201cTwo ways,\u201d Mike said. \u201cGradually, then suddenly.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cGradually\u201d and \u201csuddenly\u201d applies to higher education\u2019s implosion.<\/p>\n<p>During the 1990s \u201cculture wars\u201d universities were warned that their chronic tuition hikes above the rate of inflation were unsustainable.<\/p>\n<p>Their growing manipulation of blanket federal student loan guarantees, and part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants always was suicidal.<\/p>\n<p>Left-wing indoctrination, administrative bloat, obsessions with racial preferences, arcane, jargon-filled research, and campus-wide intolerance of diverse thought short-changed students, further alienated the public \u2014 and often enraged alumni.<\/p>\n<p>Over the last 30 years, enrollments in the humanities and history crashed. So did tenure-track faculty positions. Some $1.7 trillion in federally backed student loans have only greenlighted inflated tuition \u2014 and masked the contagion of political indoctrination and watered-down courses.<\/p>\n<p>But \u201cgradually\u201d imploding has now become \u201csuddenly.\u201d Zoom courses, a declining pool of students, and soaring costs all prompt the public to question the college experience altogether.<\/p>\n<p>Nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year \u2014 or over 4 percent alone from spring 2021 to 2022, and some 14% in the last decade. Yet the U.S. population still increases by about 2 million people a year.<\/p>\n<p>Men account for about 71% of the current shortfall of students. Women number almost 60% of all college students \u2014 an all-time high.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Related:<\/strong> <em><a class=\"hl\" title=\"Woke Nike Was a Playground for Drunken Sexual Predators, According to Just-Released Documents\" href=\"https:\/\/pjmedia.com\/vodkapundit\/2022\/12\/21\/woke-nike-was-a-playground-for-drunken-sexual-predators-according-to-just-released-documents-n1655329\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Woke Nike Was a Playground for Drunken Sexual Predators, According to Just-Released Documents<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>Monotonous professors hector students about \u201ctoxic masculinity,\u201d as \u201cgender\u201d studies proliferate. If the plan was to drive males off campus, universities have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.<\/p>\n<p>The number of history majors has collapsed by 50% in just the last 20 years. Tenured history positions have declined by one-third to half at major state universities.<\/p>\n<p>In the last decade alone, English majors across the nation\u2019s universities have fallen by a third.<\/p>\n<p>At Yale University, administrative positions have soared over 150% in the last two decades. But the number of professors increased by just 10%. In a new low\/high, Stanford recently enrolled 16,937 undergraduate and graduate students, but lists 15,750 administrative staff \u2014 in near one-to-one fashion.<\/p>\n<p>In the past, such costly praetorian bloat would have sparked a faculty rebellion. Not now. The new six-figure salaried \u201cdiversity, equity, and inclusion\u201d commissars are feared and exempt from criticism.<\/p>\n<p>Since 2020, the old proportional-representation admissions quotas have expanded into weird \u201creparatory\u201d admissions. Purported \u201cmarginalized populations\u201d have often been admitted at levels greater than percentages in the general population.<\/p>\n<p>Consequently, \u201cproblematic\u201d standardized tests are damned as biased and antithetical to \u201cdiversity.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To accommodate radical diversity reengineering, the only demographic deemed expendable are white males. Their plunging numbers on campus, especially from the working class, are now much less than their percentages in the general population \u2014 regardless of grades or test scores.<\/p>\n<p>At Yale, the class of 2026 is listed as 50% white and 55% female. Fourteen percent were admitted as \u201clegacies.\u201d In sum, qualified but poor white males without privilege or connections seem mostly excluded.<\/p>\n<p>Stanford\u2019s published 2025 class profile claims a student body of \u201c23% white.\u201d Fewer than half of the class is male. Stanford mysteriously does not release the numbers of those successfully admitted without SAT tests \u2014 but recently conceded it rejects about 70% of those with perfect SAT scores.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, universities are quietly junking test score requirements. Ironically, these time-honored standardized tests were originally designed to offer those from underprivileged backgrounds, or less competitive high schools, a meritocratic pathway into elite schools.<\/p>\n<p>At Cornell, students push for pass\/fail courses only and the abolition of all grades. At the New School in New York, students demand that everyone receives \u201cA\u201d grades. Dean\u2019s lists and class and school rankings are equally suspect as counterrevolutionary. Even as courses are watered down, entitled students still assume that their admission must automatically guarantee graduation \u2014 or else!<\/p>\n<p>Skeptical American employers, to remain globally competitive, will likely soon administer their own hiring tests. They already suspect that prestigious university degrees are hollow and certify very little.<\/p>\n<p>Traditional colleges will seize the moment and expand by sticking to meritocratic criteria as proof of the competency of their prized graduates.<\/p>\n<p>Private and online venues will also fill a national need to teach Western civilization and humanities courses \u2014 by non-woke faculty who do not institutionalize bias.<\/p>\n<p>More students will continue to seek vocational training alternatives. Some will get their degrees online for a fraction of the cost.<\/p>\n<p>Alumni will either curb giving, put further restrictions on their gifting, or disconnect.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually, even elite schools will lose their current veneer of prestige. Their costly cattle brands will be synonymous with equality-of-result, overpriced indoctrination echo chambers, where therapy replaced singular rigor and their tarnished degrees become irrelevant.<\/p>\n<p>How ironic that universities are rushing to erode meritocratic standards \u2014 history\u2019s answer to the age-old, pre-civilizational bane of tribal, racial, class, elite, and insider prejudices and bias that eventually ensure poverty and ruin for all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a famous exchange in the The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway wrote: \u201cHow did you go bankrupt?\u201d Bill asked. \u201cTwo ways,\u201d Mike said. \u201cGradually, then suddenly.\u201d \u201cGradually\u201d and \u201csuddenly\u201d applies to higher education\u2019s implosion. During the 1990s \u201cculture wars\u201d universities were warned that their chronic tuition hikes above the rate of inflation were unsustainable. &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1784792,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[547],"tags":[6962,10905,5458,7243,8803,7244,3819,10658,7245],"class_list":["post-1784789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-bongino-report","tag-the","tag-are","tag-bongino","tag-davis","tag-doomed","tag-hanson","tag-report","tag-universities","tag-victor"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1784789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1784792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1784789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1784789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1784789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}