I could write a book on what I think is wrong with college in America, but this story is a simple example.
Michael Wilbon has been one of Northwestern’s biggest and most visible fans. Now he will have a hand in running his favorite university.
Wilbon was among the six new members elected to Northwestern’s Board of Trustees. The co-host of ESPN’s “Pardon The Interruption” was a 1980 graduate of the Medill School of Journalism. He has maintained his Chicago roots by writing columns for ESPNChicago.com.
In 2010, Wilbon gave the commencement address at Northwestern.
Wilbon told the graduates: “I know from my own professional and personal experiences that you, as a group, are as well prepared as any and better prepared than most to leave Evanston and be successful, by any measure, at whatever you want to do.”
Wilbon isn’t the only new trustee with sports connections. Bulls president Michael Reinsdorf and Mark Walter, chairman of the Los Angeles Dodgers, also were named to the board.
Michael Wilbon is a racist, but that’s not the issue here. I’ve said on many occasions that I am not scandalized by racism. I think all of us are as tribal as ever and it is not something that can be exorcised from the human animal. Morality is about action and it is morally wrong to treat your countrymen poorly simply because they are not of your race. That’s a matter of choice. You can think bad thoughts about the Korean guy down the block. You may even say bad things about him. As long as you don’t act on it you’re just a guy with an opinion. That’s Michael Wilbon, a guy with opinions, many of them racist.
That’s not the issue. He is wholly unqualified to sit on the board of anything. Wilbon is a TV performer. His job is to sniff the jocks of NBA players and describe the experience on TV. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it does not qualify him to sit on the board of a major university. Wilbon has never run a lemonade stand. What could he possibly know about the complex financial, administrative and philosophical decisions facing a university?
The answer is nothing. They put him on the board because he is a famous clown.
That’s the problem with our colleges. There is a fundamental lack of seriousness. It’s why Rice can have a rapper teach classes and be proud of it. It’s why every university in the nation can populate its ranks with crotch warriors. When you have an unlimited supply of free money and face no consequences, thanks to an ever growing debt bubble, you can pretty much do what ever you want. That’s what they do. Our universities are a five star playground for crackpots, perverts and charlatans.
There’s always going to be a degree of silliness to universities. When 80% of the people on a campus are young people, you are going to get what you get from young people on their own for the first time. In fact, the kids are not what’s wrong with our colleges these days. It’s the adults. It strikes me that the kids today are more serious about college than in my day. When I was coming up, a man could still aspire to a middle-class life without college. It was a luxury good.
Today, kids leave high school, having been told for a dozen years that they have to get a college degree. otherwise, they will be permanently trapped in the underclass. Four year graduation rates are down, but much of that is due to the massive increase in students. But, 5,6 and 7 year graduation rates are way up. That says even the weak students keep plugging away. I know plenty of adults who returned to college to finish a degree just to do it.
What the Wilbon story underscores is college has become a racket. Northwestern has no need for his expertise or opinions. What they need is his fame. They have got to keep the suckers lining up and loading up with debt to pay those tuition bills. Those massive tuition bills finance a petty nobility who get to live outsized lives, despite contributing fairly little to the sum of human capital. College is just part of the big skim.
It used to be that hard core social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer championed free market capitalism. In the brutal competitive world of the market, the fittest would rise to the top and reap the spoils. And for a brief period this was true. This was the world that, in popular imagination, Ayn Rand idealized in Atlas Shrugged. But Atlas Shrugged is actually about something far different, far more truthful, and far more insidious. Rand knew that free market capitalism engenders its own destruction. The titanic efforts of the makers facillitates a world where the takers can flourish. The parasites will… Read more »
Who says the takers have to flourish? The republicans to their credit are trying to clamp down on the problem. When you look back, every time the US has had an economic setback it wasn’t because of spending. Often it’ because of valuations or leverage with systemic risk. Moochers are a problem, but a low level one like a fungus eating away at an oak tree. It could weaken the integrity of the trunk but not that much. I agree we have an entitlement spending problem but it doesn’t have to inevitably get worse nor will it bring down the… Read more »
“When I was coming up, a man could still aspire to a middle-class life without college.”
Still can, at least in a “right to work” state. MAY involve Go JO and ambition though.
“Expenses” all depend on how much debt (with “interest”, fees, and penalties, of course) accumulates to “get ahead” , or if your “work” clothes” get washed, or need dry cleaning.
A man or woman can still aspire to a middle-class life without college…in China. In the U.S., it is increasingly difficult. It is really only possible because of the increase in the entitlement state. The black middle class is now almost entirely the creation of government, local and Federal. The old industrial system, unionized and not, with its well-paid factory jobs and generous benefits, which allowed average people to live a decent middle-class life, is now almost gone. Where it still exists it is increasingly precarious, and the quality of life sinks daily. Once decent middle-class suburbs are now toilets,… Read more »
Regents hire university presidents and raise money—lots of it. What else do they do? Academic issues work their way up through faculty departments, faculty committees, faculty senates, the vice president’s office for academic affairs, finally the university president’s office. By the time that kind of issue gets to the board of regents for approval, it’s been debated, amended, vetted, analyzed, voted on, all ad nauseam. Every once in awhile the regents will get to put their two cents in on an issue with educational consequences, but most of the time they’re there to rubber stamp what the faculty and administration… Read more »
College is about class signalling. If it were about teaching anyone to think then Philosophy would be the #1 Major.