Higher Education: An Oxymoron?

'The boldest university presidents need to do two hard things at once. First, tell incoming freshmen — and the parents shelling out fortunes on their behalf — that the primary purpose of a university education is to help make them wise, whether or not it makes them rich, rather than rich, whether or not it makes them wise. Second, insist that no student can graduate without being grounded in the essentials of a real liberal education: Plato and Aristotle; the book of Genesis and the Sermon on the Mount; Locke and de Tocqueville and Lincoln and Douglass; Darwin and Einstein; Austen, Tolstoy, Steinbeck and Mann. And Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare. All the rest is commentary.' Brett Stephens I attended two institutions of Higher Education: Manhattan College and University of Baltimore. Taught graduate and undergraduate courses at NYU. My children have graduated from a myriad of colleges, including Vassar, Oberlin, SUNY Maritime, University of Maryland, University of North Carolina and CalArts. I have guest lectured at over a dozen schools, including the Harvard Business School. Donald Trump has taken on the Higher Education system like no other President. His agenda is biased, his motivation is flawed. But this feckless quest has revealed serious institutional flaws in the way we are educating tomorrow's cohort. Restrained free speech, anti-semitism, inequitable admissions, questionable management of assets, warped mission statements, permissive standards. To these I will add my sense that what is being offered is a modicum of training, by library-educated pseudo-experts, wrapped in a coddling veneer of attractive life-style. Rigorous academia is being replaced by Margaritaville. I am going to advance Brett Stephen's prerogative in the opening fragment, with which I totally agree. These are the further steps I would take if I was a University President. To the litany of curricula stated by Stephens I would add the following: Mandatory Civics. The deplorable fractures in our democracy can be traced to growing ignorance of our heritage. Mandatory Ethics. We have an emerging population that does not have clarity between right and wrong. That accepts falsehood. I would also add a mandatory course in Apologetics. To clear up intellectual doubts and answer hard questions rather than to win arguments. Global Political Geography Comparative Religion I would base admissions totally on merit. Remove both racial and legacy preferences. Eliminate athletic scholarships. However, I would double my efforts in recruitment to those cohorts I wished to attract. Go find achievers among athletes, underserved communities, immigrants, and increase scholarship opportunities. Stop trying to make your campus appear like Club Med. Throw out the fraternities and sororities. Increase the number of honor societies. Get serious. Compete interscholastically no higher than Division III. Quit the fiction of the 'scholar athlete'. Have only scholars. Finally, completely revamp your mini term offerings. Stop the nonsense of destinations that are tourism focused rather than truly educational. It's fraudulent. Don't eliminate the term, but have it include destinations like: Gernica. Site of the 1937 bombing massacre. Picasso's great mural. Home of Basque freedom and independence. Hiroshima and Nagasaki A tour of Holocaust sites A tour of Chile, Argentina and Mexico, with an emphasis on human rights violations during each country's eras of 'Desaparecidos'. Prague and Gdansk. Study the writings, actions and poetry of Lech Waleça and Vaclav Havel. No one has offered me the keys to their Higher Education bus. I wonder why.