My youngest son is three years away from university, and while the usual questions about his future major are swirling, there’s a far more pressing concern: how to protect his brain from the ideological sewage.
He’s already wise enough to know that all institutions try to shape the minds they touch. But few do it with more arrogance—or toxicity—than higher education. University today isn’t just about learning; it’s about signaling loyalty. If you don’t stroke the professor’s fragile ego with the proper murmurs of social justice, you risk academic sabotage. Disagree too visibly with the activist student hive mind, and you may find yourself socially erased, one whisper campaign at a time.
Stealth has become a survival skill.
And for what, exactly?
Forty years ago, degrees in medicine, law, or engineering weren’t just educational achievements—they were passports to a stable, respectable life. Not necessarily riches, but dignity. Purpose. A career. Today? Plenty of STEM graduates—some from elite universities—find themselves lining up for unpaid internships or fruitless job hunts, blinking into the void of LinkedIn and wondering what went wrong.
Universities lost their luster because they stopped doing the one job that justified their existence: turning young people into competent, capable professionals. Instead, they pandered. They entertained. They indulged adolescent delusions and called it progress. They betrayed their most important constituency—the students.And for that, they deserve to fade away.