Educational Freedom: Colleges Adrift

The Founding Fathers of the United States were convinced that only with an educated population, could a free society progress.

Since then, many U.S. colleges have been established and continued to grow in order to become higher education models for the rest of the world.

These colleges produced scientists, humanists, politicians and all sorts of professional graduates ready to face what life might throw at them. As well as offering specialized fields and degree programs, American colleges imparted a strong sense of freedom, of the country’s history, and of the important values of the Constitution. Nobody doubted the value and the importance of an authentically free education (in the classic sense of the word), which led America to become a leading world power.

After the 1960s, however, college campuses saw a gradual infiltration of cultural relativism stemming from Marxist roots and a readiness to overlook or distort history, leaving degree programs, faculty departments and colleges as a whole to be overtaken by a growing number of people who managed to transform, for the worse, the very meaning of higher education in America. It was, and today remains, a sort of “fifth column,” formed by a group of professors, and in a large way, administrators, who became intellectual parasites in their respective communities. In many cases this was not due to direct action, but to neglect; that is, the failure to teach the value of freedom and the morals of history.

Under a false concept of freedom of expression, colleges are today governed by cultural relativism, which tends to shun progress and promote political correctness, thus leaving students in the dark as to what America’s founding basis of freedom really means. The indoctrinating ideology against authentic freedom has already been widely documented thanks to such books as “The Closing of the American Mind” by Allan Bloom, “Illiberal Education,” by Dinesh D’Souza, “Tenured Radicals” by Roger Kimball, “The Professors” by David Horowitz, and “Brainwashed” by Ben Shapiro, to name but a few.

Several organizations such as the National Association of Scholars (NAS) have attempted to encourage a return to sanity in U.S. colleges, yet they remain in the minority, often discriminated against or seen as parasites in the macro-market of tyrannical academia, which today controls the highly politicized network of college organizations. It would be interesting to carry out an analysis of the ways in which political science departments, for example, teach the Constitution, if they actually teach it at all. A recent NAS study (“The Vanishing West, 1964-2010”) documents the gradual forgetting of history and of Western values of freedom. This problem has extended as far as elementary and high schools, according to U.S. government reports via initiatives on educational progress (for example, “The National Assessment of Educational Progress”). The same can be said of reports published by the American Council for Trustees and Alumni on the lack of historical knowledge held by today’s youth.

Various decades have passed in which college campuses have been politicized, education has been trivialized, and the very ideology of freedom made possible by America itself has been struck down. Major works on Western culture are conspicuous only due to their absence in college libraries, with humanities and social sciences supported by foundations only concerned with matters of race, class and gender. Meanwhile, the cost for families to fund their child’s education has increased exponentially, with unstable business models and well-paid administrators living in a world different from that of college professors, who may not be so well-paid, yet are guaranteed permanent work for the remainder of their lives.

The current climate in the majority of U.S. colleges does not favor the debate of ideas, and instead promotes unique thought, therefore excluding traditional and conservative values. Various scandals involving plagiarism, fraud, and the inflation in grades and qualifications, run parallel to a sense of indoctrination which favors certain ethnic groups, and all those ideologies which break with the very foundations of freedom planted by America.

All in all, this has led to an increasingly fractured higher education system in the United States. These are dangerous times today for freedom. Colleges should be paramount among those propagating freedom and forming future political leaders. Regrettably, and with the exception of very few, the majority of U.S. colleges seem to be centers of indoctrination of failed Marxist ideologies. They represent, therefore, yet another threat for the future of freedom in America.