Megan McArdle follows the consequences of not sending everyone to college in the pages of WaPo:
The increasing interlinkage of partisan leanings and cultural identity has allowed both sides of the political spectrum to consolidate control over key cultural institutions, which they can leverage to foment policy change. But it’s also concentrated partisan power within those nodes, leaving both sides dependent on them — and vulnerable to their decline.
And while tearing down the other side’s redoubts may seem like a win for your own, recent experience should give everyone pause. As Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a columnist at the Week, pointed out last year, liberals who thought they hated the Christian right were shocked to find that they disliked the post-Christian right even more. And in the twilight of the universities, conservatives might equally well find themselves trembling before an opposition that is no longer sheltered in institutions, nor constrained by institutional norms.
Perhaps the educated hater is more restrained, less savage than the unreasoning hater? The conservatives may see the university as a center of power for the left, but the university is also a primary conservator of secular moral values, and those values, which are the result of careful reasoning about the world and humanity, act as constraints on those who have learned to respect them.
Not incidentally, the rise of the ‘antifa’ movement on campus, and its employment of violence, both physical and mental, is troubling for the more traditional university graduate or student, as we’re taught that violence often begets violence, and violence is not conducive to a productive and happy society. I haven’t run across an investigation of the ‘antifa’ as to its origins, which could be authentic or manipulative, but I doubt are legal in the sense that they descend from valild university values.
