Changing the Chemistry on Campus ...

Over the past dozen years, many excellent books have been written about the decline in higher education in this country. Allan Bloom’s now classic Closing of the American Mind alerted many to the risks of the change of attitude taking place in our institutions of higher learning. That book is still one of the most quoted sources on the subject. Equally important were books such as Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals and Martin Anderson’s Impostors in the Temple, which examined the impact of the 1960s’ “free love, free everything” generation now ensconced within the faculties and administrations of our colleges and universities.

But there’s a problem. While such works have added to our understanding of the problems, they have not led to any visible change of attitudes or habits among those who keep the system alive: that is, the mothers and fathers sending their sons and daughters to college each year. Freefall of the American University approaches the problem from a distinctly different angle. Combining hard-edged reporting on the political and social conditions in university classrooms, along with first-hand accounts from more than two dozen faculty members, students, recent graduates, and alumni, the book takes a hard look inside the system and offers a reasoned assessment of where we are and where we need to be. The truth is, America’s elite universities are, for all intents and purposes, working against the historic moral and social values of the American people. Sociologist Paul Hollander has said, “The university is the reservoir of the adversary culture.” And the evidence is undeniable.

From Harvard to Stanford, and on hundreds of campuses in between, legions of faculty members are effectively at war with the rest of America. As we enter the 21st century, at least three generations of young Americans believe what they've been taught: that their own native land is populated by men and women who are homophobic, bigoted, misogynist, exploitative, environmentally insensitive, and morally corrupt. Even as traditional learning is dismissed in many classrooms as reactionary and irrelevant, students’ ability to reason, to ask responsible questions, and to challenge bad ideas is being subverted, and efforts to think independently are everywhere undermined. Some students are able to rise above the indoctrination and preserve their independence, but never without consequences.

The purpose of this book is not to attack higher education or to keep students from attending these institutions. Rather, the aim is to offer a dynamic assessment of the undeniable crisis in higher education in a way that will compel educators and other concerned citizens to deal with the problems, and to make the sorts of changes that will allow genuine learning to take place once again, and so that genuine education may at last be restored at all levels of American education.

• The Recklessness of Higher Education — By Tim Ferguson for The Pope Center

• Avoiding the Freefall — From "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson"

• Don't Send Your Kids to College — Editorial Commentary by Chuck Norris

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• Blue Universities vs. Red America — By Jim Nelson Black for WorldNetDaily.com