The University of Narcissism
25th October 2019
Most Americans now take it for granted that universal education is a good thing, including in particular “higher education.” To be sure, only about a quarter of American adults have a bachelor’s degree, but even so, it’s commonly thought that the more of us who go to college, the better. A citizenry, after all, needs to be educated and informed, able to debate the important issues of the day, as opposed to just asserting their biases—the natural, and frequently vulgar, instinct of mankind.
Yet it is trite but true that all life is trade-offs, so it’s worth contemplating whether fulfilling the university mission, and maintaining academic standards, are compatible with the presence of a massive number of persons of average and of below-average intelligence in academia. There is also an important gender issue here: Men and women are different; those differences are not just social constructs; and as university bureaucracies increasingly are dominated by women, it seems clear that, as in the cases of the family and the workplace, the gender equality experiment is hardly an unmixed good in academia.