Higher education now stands for mob rule, civic ignorance and contempt for truth and free inquiry

See Quotation of the day on universities dragging America back toward a more primitive state from Mark Perry.

"from John Ellis’s (professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz) Wall Street Journal op-ed on Tuesday “Woke Universities Lead America to a Primitive State” (sub-titled “Higher education now stands for mob rule, civic ignorance and contempt for truth and free inquiry”):

… our civilization seems to be regressing to a more primitive stage of its development..

That’s bad enough in itself, but worse yet is that this social regression began on college campuses, of all places, before spreading to the national culture. On one-party campuses, radical-left faculty have established a political orthodoxy that student mobs enforce, and the political culture of the nation is poisoned as those students take home with them their professors’ habit of seeing opinions that differ from theirs as an evil not to be tolerated.

America’s universities were once the leading edge of an advanced culture, reinforcing and expanding the country’s best features. They steered differences of opinion away from rancor and toward well-regulated, informed debate. They welcomed eccentric opinions, expanded the boundaries of thought and learning in every sphere, prepared students for citizenship by rooting them in their society’s government and history, and trained students for nonpartisan service in the specialized professions an advanced society needs.

None of that persists today. Far from being the leading edge of an advanced culture, the universities drag America back toward a more primitive state. They have contempt for the restraints and rules that define society, such as political neutrality in nonpolitical institutions. For radicals, politics takes precedence over everything, and every field within social science and the humanities eventually degrades into a mere channel to spread progressive orthodoxies.

In an advanced society, journalists have the vital job of keeping the citizenry well-informed so that the government can be held to account. Only in less-developed cultures is the press commonly under firm political control. But since America’s university journalism programs are now overwhelmingly left-activist, we now effectively have the politicized press of an undeveloped nation. The same holds for schoolteachers, at present also trained by campus radicals, which is making public school systems increasingly ideological. Socialist dictatorships and banana republics hold their universities under strict political control; it’s astonishing that the U.S. seems to be joining that club.
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In the past, universities were indispensable in maintaining American culture, but now they undermine and sicken it. The public should learn to see through the patina of prestige that still covers elite schools, and should assess realistically the damage these schools are doing today. That damage goes beyond a failure to develop graduates who think independently. Universities now attack the most basic principles of American society, and do so with lavish taxpayer support. We should decide how best to cut them off."