I have never believed that the college years should be spent dabbling in dangerous behaviors and extreme ideas.

Of course, it happens, and I don’t go out of my way to criticize people for their youthful dalliances with stupidity. I certainly had my own. Rather, I am bothered by the promotion of this idea by adults, which infantilizes young adults and encourages them to waste one of the great opportunities in life- the ability to get a good education.

It’s not the kids we should blame–what teenager wouldn’t grasp the opportunity to engage in sex, drugs, and exciting things? The offenders are the adults who encourage people who should be entering adulthood and responsibility to be the opposite.

When we look at the chaos on college campuses and recoil, we should hold students who cross the line responsible for their behavior, but even more so, we should hold the administrators and professors who encourage them. As bad as the worst students are, their professors are worse still.

More from the @Algemeiner here: https://t.co/Vo2jGnQHpV

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) December 1, 2023

To deny that professors and administrators set the tone on campus is to deny the mission of the university. Universities are not trade schools where practical skills are taught; they exist to create educated human beings especially suited to become decision-makers in a liberal society. That implies that students should become more thoughtful, mature, and nuanced as they move up the educational ladder.

We’ve all heard the spiel. The “search for truth.” “Well-rounded people.” “Liberal education.” To put it bluntly, higher education’s mission used to be the formation of an educated elite whose role would be to lead a society informed by history, knowledge, and virtue.

It is a mission I believe in, and for decades, it has not been the mission of higher education.

Today’s colleges and universities are shot through with intellectuals thrilled at the idea of radical thought and radical action. It is often portrayed in the most positive light–activism aimed at making society more just–but in reality, it seems to be driven by people seeking the vicarious thrill of witnessing or inciting violence—actual, honest-to-God rape and murder.

This has been true for decades–Tom Wolfe described how our cultural elites loved to rub elbows with violent revolutionaries, and universities started hiring actual terrorists like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. But it used to be on the fringes–normal people who liked to rub elbows with those they saw as outré.

What was once a fringe phenomenon has become mainstream, and the embrace of terrorism has become overt.

Russell Rickford, the Cornell professor who celebrated Hamas terror attacks as "exhilarating," has written that BLM must "form insurgent, international alliances" with Palestinian groups in order to elicit a "popular revolt" against white American and Israeli oppressors. pic.twitter.com/nnY0GkFzrJ

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 17, 2023

In the 1960s and early 70s, radicals in academia focused their rage on authority because it was easier to justify murdering agents of the state than innocents on the street. Today’s academic radicals have metaphorically taken the masks off (while encouraging people to wear actual masks) and have openly embraced the rape, torture, and murder of innocents, including children.

The students we are subsidizing to attend these ideological factories promoting barbarism have been well prepared to hear the message at our K-12 schools, but it is the universities that are the ideological finishing schools that explicitly link “social justice” theories to murderous action.

Students are encouraged to engage in mob action, and too many professors love to see it.

Universities today are populated by, if not a majority, a substantial minority of “educators” whose primary characteristic is not intellectual curiosity but bloodlust. The intellectual activity provides the excuse for what they really want: violence.

The United States spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on higher education, and we do so with the belief that educated people are the foundation of a functioning democracy. People who fail to study history are condemned to repeat it, right?

Without that goal, we could slash our educational spending by 2/3rds at least, focusing on training scientists and doing research. If liberal education is no longer about promoting civilization, what is the point of funding it?

The goal of the liberal arts is to create liberal–in the classical sense–citizens capable of self-governance. Higher ed no longer does that.

And until it recommits to that goal, perhaps it should simply be allowed to die on the vine.