Dropout Boys

Michael Smerconish recently reported on his CNN Saturday morning program that more and more men are shunning college, with women accounting for 60 percent of students of college students.  The main reason is that men can go straight from high school to high-paying jobs in the trades at a time when college is becoming more expensive.

Some feminists are celebrating this as a triumph for women in higher education, but Smerconish noted that this trend indicates a greater desire on the part of men to drop out of  and become more alienated from society.  Men who go into trades may more a lot of bread, but without any exposure to a liberal arts education, they will likely become dumber and less informed.  In other words, they'll perpetuate Fox News' audience.  Smerconish fears that these men will be disconnected from society in large part because women with college degrees will be less likely to date men without college degrees . . . and with more women going to college, men without college degrees will be outcasts and more embittered due to their lack of social standing.  The few men who do go to college will join the elite, the divide between the professional and the proletarian class will widen further, and . . . 

You see why Trump - who attended the University of Pennsylvania, where his father bought him a degree - can make a comeback in 2024?

I mean, this is just what we need, right? A generation of anti-intellectual and undercultured Americans ("I love the undereducated" - Donald Trump) defining politics and driving These States further into degenerative state . . .  Oh, maybe we can avoid that by electing a majority female Congress, just as Iceland elected a majority female Parliament, though Republicans will find a way to restrict "Democrat women" from not only voting, but also holding office.  With the support of uneducated Republican male voters.  Who watch Fox News.

Look, even blue-collar guys need a liberal arts education.  In Italy, taxi drivers go to the opera.  My Italian maternal grandfather, who never went to college and worked as a maintenance man in a factory in a proletarian city in New Jersey,  loved opera himself.  But then, maybe cultured blue-collar workers are the exception rather than the rule.  Consider the hapless tradesmen trying to stage a play in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.  (Shameless plug: I wrote a play recasting A Midsummer Night's Dream as a Marx Brothers movie, with Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo as the tradesmen.)

The upside to more women than men in college?  You know how undergraduates love to check out the opposite sex? Well, the guys now have an easier time of it than the gals. 

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.