The Miseducation of Rick Santorum

Liberals have likely been double-checking their passports and looking into foreign real estate trends with Richard John Santorum becoming an even more viable candidate for the Presidency . . . especially since he appeared in a Tennessee church and attacked President Obama for saying that every child should go to college. "I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because of their indoctrination mills, absolutely," he also told Glenn Beck, expressing fear that liberal college professors are trying to pollute young minds. "The indoctrination that is going on at the university level is a harm to our country."

The Pennsylvania State University alumnus somehow sees higher education, traditionally the realm of critical thinking and intellectual development, as a form of brainwashing just because students tend to develop more tolerant attitudes towards different sorts of people and may be open to more contemporary ideas. So how did Rick manage to escape indoctrination - not just in Penn State's undergraduate department but at the university's Dickinson Law School? And how much liberal indoctrination could there possibly be in the University of Pittsburgh's business administration master's program, from which Ricko received an M.B.A. in 1981?

This latest hypocritical belittling of intellectual development from the Republican party as an un-American activity is pathetic, but even more troubling is that the real crisis of American higher education is not that students are being told what to think but that they're graduating without learning how to think . . . just like Rick Santorum. America boasts of having the most colleges and universities in the world - at last count a total of 5,758 higher education institutions, an average of more than 115 per state - but, as I have noted before, few of these institutions have produced many great thinkers. For more on this subject, please see my earlier post, "Higher Miseducation."

As for Santorum, I imagine that he's shown no curiosity in art and letters despite his own education. I seriously doubt that he's even displayed any curiosity in the intricate machinations of the body politic despite his own B.A. degree in political science. It would benefit a politician running for President to learn of the rise of Islam in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to understand the Middle East or the balances of power in post-Napoleonic Europe to understand how the Old Country went from imperial competition in the nineteenth century to a legally sanctioned socioeconomic community today. But Santorum seems to be comfortable with his own righteousness and absolutism without seeking out the nuances of how the world he'd have to deal with as President got to be the way it is. All he knows is that Iran may have the bomb, and we may - no, as far as he sees it, will - have to start another war in the Middle East.

If Santorum does get the Republican presidential nomination, I hope he releases his college transcripts. I want to see how he fared in his remedial courses.