Abandon truth, all ye who enter

As I approached the spring of my high-school graduation, with middling grades but stratospheric PSAT and SAT scores, I found myself getting recruited by colleges as if I were a six-four howitzer-armed quarterback. Lesser schools pitched full rides plus book and living expenses, while Ivy League universities beckoned with the opportunity to become a diploma-carrying member of the East Coast elite.

If intelligence is mental firepower, wisdom is knowing where and when to use it. Looking back, it is apparent that at 17, the amount I possessed of the former was in inverse proportion to the latter. Due to various family connections, I was encouraged to attend Harvard, the Naval Academy or Princeton; I favored SMU myself based on its reputation for a) parties, and b) really hot girls. A compromise was reached, and I attended a second-tier Ivy wannabe that knew one brief shining moment as a top-five party school before the administration decided things were getting a little out of hand during my stay there.

In fact, the only time I can recall getting misty-eyed about the old alma mater was a year after graduation, when my best friend called to tell me about the two busloads of police being brought in to control the riot that started when the administration tried to shut down House Party weekend. Our apathetic student body had never gone in for the anti-apartheid shanty towns or other activist fads, but by the sacred Stroh's 30-pack, we were more than willing to fight for our right to party. Hurray for the Orange and the Blue!

As an athlete, I visited a number of other campuses, including Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, William and Mary, Georgetown, Syracuse and others I can't remember. Only the Dartmouth campus partied harder, but the basic scene was always the same. I particularly remember one pompous Harvard jerk who was trying to impress a few Harvardettes by implying that he, a hockey player, was a member of the university's top-ranked NCAA Division One squad. Unfortunately for him, I happened to know that Harvard's team was playing the University of Minnesota in Minnesota that night ...

Now, it seems my memories have just been sold. Tom Wolfe, America's distinguished Novelist Emeritus, has recently drawn attention to the devolution of the university with his latest masterpiece, "I Am Charlotte Simmons." (I haven't read it yet, as I'm presently enjoying a bilingual literary threesome with Charles Stross and Umberto Eco.) But Wolf's condemnation of the university of a student body far more concerned with matters carnal than academic rings very true. Indeed, my first thought upon reading the various book reviews was that this was a novel someone of my generation could have – should have – written, and in writing it, launched their career into the literary firmament.

The truth is that I learned very little in college, despite graduating with a double-major. Had my father not provided me with a strong background in Austrian economists such as Hayek, Schumpeter and Mises, I might easily have joined my fellows in falling for the neosocialist claptrap spouted by the same professors who had literally written the Econ 101 book we were using. And as bad as the situation is at elite schools, it is even worse at public universities. I once spoke with a graduate of the University of Minnesota who majored in economics – she had never heard of John Maynard Keynes. While one could argue that the nation would be better off if no one had ever heard of the man or his poisonous theories, the question of what on earth that economics department had been doing with its students for four or more years remains a mystery.

Last weekend, two students from Patrick Henry College, a venerable institution founded all of four years ago, defeated Oxford University's moot court team at Balliol Hall. I suspect that the victory of the two former homeschoolers may presage the next step in the ongoing homeschooling revolution, which could eventually engulf the present university system in its rising tide of independent anti-academic intellectualism.

The universities abandoned their Christian roots over a century ago. Beginning in the '60s, they abandoned their commitment to intellectual development as well. Having already purged their collective Borg-minds of almost every vestige of religion and non-leftist thought, the tenured faculties that dominate the academic asylums have ensured that the devolution of the academy will continue, until eventually the idea of sending your child to college for intellectual development will seem as absurdly counterproductive as watching ABCNNBCBS to learn what's really going on in the world.