(From Real Clear Policy):
The Higher Education Scandal
by Harvey C. Mansfield
Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, is an institution of good reputation and high quality, where I have some friends. It offers a liberal arts education typical of the best available in America today. It troubles me that Bowdoin, rather than, say, Harvard—a bigger and richer place where I work—should be made an example of. Nonetheless, Peter Wood and Michael Toscano have done just that in a comprehensive new study, “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” the first of its kind and probably destined to be the best, which shows in the practices and principles of one college what political correctness in our time has done to higher education in our country.
The authors are conservatives and their study was sponsored by the National Association of Scholars, a conservative organization. (It is available as a free download at www.nas.org.) It seems that liberals, even those critical of American education, are not inclined to investigate what their liberalism has done to it. Once upon a time, earlier in my life, liberals took pride in the high standards they set for the colleges that they had recently come to dominate and had made the headquarters of their liberalism. Now, they have made an unholy sacrifice of the devotion to excellence they once prized as a mark of distinction over fuddy-duddy, tradition-bound conservatism, and it is conservatives who stand for high standards in education. READ MORE HERE