The Outlaw Campus — The university has become a rogue institution in need of root-and-branch reform.

From Victor Davis Hansen of National Review:

Two factors have so far shielded the American university from the sort of criticism that it so freely levels against almost every other institution in American life. (1) For decades a college education has been considered the key to an ascendant middle-class existence. (2) Until recently a college degree was not tantamount to lifelong debt. In other words, American society put up with a lot of arcane things from academia, given that it offered something — a BA or BS degree — that almost everyone agreed was a ticket to personal security and an educated populace.

Not now. Colleges have gone rogue and become virtual outlaw institutions. Graduates owe an aggregate of $1 trillion in student debt, borrowed at interest rates far above home-mortgage rates — all on the principle that universities could charge as much as they liked, given that students could borrow as much as they needed in federally guaranteed loans.

These two paragraphs simply expand why Universities in this Country need to be gutted and re-built from the ground up.

Hansen continues:

Few if any other professions — not law, medicine, finance, engineering, etc. — offer guaranteed lifetime employment after a six-year apprenticeship. Tenure was predicated on a simple premise: The protection of faculty free speech and instruction was worth the possible downside of complacency and an absence of serious ongoing faculty audit. Whatever may once have been the case, in our time tenure does not ensure free expression, but instead a banal orthodoxy, in which 90 percent of the faculty in the humanities share the same progressive outlook.

Hansen lists 10 areas that need radical reform at colleges to fix the problems.

Read the whole article.