Time to put college on double secret probation. That’s the punishment Dean Wormer meted out in Animal House, but there’s nothing funny about college campuses these days.
Colleges are admitting students who can’t read, write, or do basic math or science. They’re graduating students with made-up degrees from fake academic departments such as gender studies, which teaches that men are bad; racial studies, which teaches that white people are bad; and climate studies, which teaches that everyone on the planet’s bad, except Greta Thunberg.
The fraudulent, immoral nature of college today can be summed up in two words. Not “frat house” but “Claudine Gay.”
Gay teaches at Harvard University, where she was briefly president, until she told a Senate committee that antisemitic violence and rage at Harvard was basically fine by her.
She stepped down from the presidency but got to keep her job as a professor, even though she got caught plagiarizing other people’s research at least 50 times. She cheated 50 times. And got away with it. If you or I plagiarized 50 times at college, we’d be out on our behinds. The university called her behavior “mistaken attribution,” which is an outrageous cover-up of her dishonesty. I guess at Harvard, if standards are good, double standards are twice as good.
But it’s not just the Ivy League schools that aren’t worth their tuition. Two kinds of inflation permeate college campuses these days. One is grade inflation, which turns A’s into participation trophies. The other is old-fashioned financial inflation. College costs, for years, have radically outstripped the overall inflation rate. Eventually, students discover the degrees they “earned” with all those fake A’s from the Department of Empty-Headed Studies haven’t qualified them for any kind of real job. Put those two kinds of inflation together, and you’ve got graduates who can’t function in the real world but who’ve saddled themselves with massive debt that will take decades to pay off.
Some students are getting smart. They’re bypassing college and going to vocational school. You can scoff at someone who eschews four years of Marxist gender history to do heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. But you won’t be scoffing in 20 years when that same person sells his HVAC business for $20 million.
Another concern on college campuses is an unexpected consequence of race-based preferences. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas benefited from them, but he’s become their biggest opponent. Thomas writes that academically qualified minority students quietly fear that classmates and professors assume the only reason they were admitted was because of their race.
But wait, there’s more. Today’s undergraduate darlings are so attached to their technology that they don’t know how to relate face-to-face to other students. The epidemic of campus depression is so great that many students have trouble getting out of bed and coming down to breakfast.
They’re actually better off staying in their dorm rooms and scrolling TikTok than going to class. Colleges today teach students to hate free enterprise, capitalism, and the business world, but they’re taught diddly about America. Many young people can’t name a single freedom the First Amendment protects or what war Gen. Dwight Eisenhower fought. But they all know that socialism is fabulous, and that if you break into our country, you’re entitled to everything for free. The idea of American exceptionalism is treated on most campuses as a total joke.
That’s during the day. At night, you’ve got hookup culture. Used to be, you dated and got to know the other person. Today, you wait until 2 a.m., have random sex, and avoid eye contact should you run into each other later. No wonder you end up with situations such as the one at Cornell University. And because both parties are usually inebriated, consent is a moving target.
If you’re an athlete, I hope you didn’t go to college expecting to play a minor sport such as volleyball or swimming. Most colleges have cut those team sports because all the money goes to athlete compensation for name, image, and likeness in football and men’s basketball.
TRUMP’S APPOINTEES ARE VERY PRETTY. AND PRETTY UNQUALIFIED
There ought to be a serious entrance exam that you must pass to enter college, and an even more demanding exit exam before you get your degree. Until then, you’ll have people spending a fortune on a degree not worth the sheepskin it’s printed on. (Do they still even print degrees on sheepskin? Or did pro-sheep activists get them canceled?)
College today is a rip-off, pure and simple, run by the immoral for the benefit of themselves and the companies that collect on student loans. Learn a trade. Get a job. If you’re smart, stay away from college, or you could end up on double secret probation, too.
Michael Levin is a two-time New York Times bestselling author. His next novel, 2028, A Political Thriller, will be published by Morgan James in April 2027.