Timothy Gordon - Dont Go to College: A Case for Revolution

Dont Go to College

A Case for Revolution

Michael J. Robillard M.A., M.A., Ph.D.

Timothy J. Gordon M.A., Ph.L., J.D.

Foreword by Michael Knowles, B.A., Yale

T he most memorable scene on the Bayeux Tapestry depicts a man smacking another man with a large stick beneath the caption Here Bishop Odo, holding a club, comforts the boys. Odos vocation precluded him from actual fighting at the Battle of Hastings. But the bishop was permitted to help rally the troops for his half brother William, who conquered England in 1066. This tough concept of comfort tends to shock modern sensibilities accustomed to safe spaces. Fortunately for the Normans, Odo was an eleventh-century prelate rather than a twenty-first-century academic, so he understood that to comfort means to give strength. Odo did not intend to hurt the boys; on the contrary, he wanted to encourage them to get back onto the battlefield. Bishop Odo smacked because he loved.

In Dont Go To College, Michael Robillard and Tim Gordon smack the university because they love the university, where they have spent much of their lives earning eight degrees between them. Unfortunately, universities no longer arm their charges for the intellectual, political, and spiritual battles that they will face upon graduation. Or rather, they do not arm them in such a way as to help them win the fight of their lives over ignorance, decay, and damnation.

Many contemporary critics of higher education contend that a college degree no longer means anything. But as Robillard and Gordon show, that fted credential still means quite a lotand none of it good. Today a college degree implies stunted maturity, philosophical incoherence, crippling debt, and at least a species or two of venereal disease.

Liberal education exists to train students in the subjects and skills necessary to make them free people. No less important than the seven liberal artsgrammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometryare the seven virtues: faith, hope, charity, justice, temperance, prudence, and fortitude. Liberal education cultivates not merely the mind but also the will to tame the students appetites and strengthen his rational will. Both ignorance and vice compromise a mans freedom; a proper education must address the whole man.

Today, institutions that purport to offer a liberal education usually deliver the opposite. Professors peddle fashionable lies and obscure eternal truths. Administrators mock virtue and subsidize vice. The whole experience often leaves students less educated than they were when they matriculated. In 2007, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute administered a sixty-question quiz on American history and civics to twenty-eight thousand freshmen and seniors at more than eighty college and universities around the United States. At most schools, the seniors fared no better than the freshmen; at many schools, they performed worse.

Even a cursory look at the history of the American university reveals just how far our system of higher education has fallen. From Americas earliest colonial days into the nineteenth century, university commencement ceremonies entailed graduates giving orations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as formal disputations on philosophical questions. In the 1650s, Harvard might have denied a student his degree if he could not explain how form is the principle of individuation or why the soul does not come into existence from the physical contribution of the parents. As late as 1810, a Harvard man had to explain at commencement why God demands the actions which beget happiness and prohibits those which bring misery to obtain his degree. In 2003, the commencement festivities at Americas most prestigious university demanded nothing more of the graduating class than that they show up and listen to Will Ferrell recount his favorite sketches from Saturday Night Live.

Comedians have become regular fixtures at commencement ceremonies in recent years: Maya Rudolph at Tulane, Jon Stewart at William and Mary, Stephen Colbert at the University of Virginia, Conan OBrien at Dartmouth. The list goes on. Comedy routines are routinely the capstones of a college career because higher education is now a farce, and benighted graduates are the unwitting butts of the joke.

One doubts that most college students today have ever heard of Bishop Odo or even the Battle of Hastings, so thoroughly have radical ideologues conquered the university and perverted curricula to their own destructive ends. But the fight for truth rages on. In Dont Go to College, Robillard and Gordon offer urgent comfort to those seekers of wisdom willing to endure the tough love of a true education.

Michael Knowles

Nashville, Tennessee

May 9, 2022

Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity.

Antonin Scalia

T he average American college hopeful would be better off drilling a hole in his head than attending a present-day university. Hed learn about as much, wouldnt be financially crippled with student debt, and would likely avoid acquiring a variety of sexually transmitted diseases. And if a drill to the head sounds like self-harm, what do you think four to six years of safe spaces, trigger warnings, grievance studies, and neo-Marxist indoctrination amounts to, if not an expensively acquired ritual lobotomy?

Most people today go to college not for a deep, decades-long dive into ancient languages or philosophy, but rather for the prosaic reasons given by the character Jack Gaines in the movie Accepted: Society has rules. And the first rule is: You go to college. You want to have a happy and successful life? You go to college. If you want to be somebody, you go to college. If you want to fit in, you go to college.

Today, though, if youre facing facts, college has become a detriment to a happy, successful life, given the years and money you will waste on courses that you will never need and that will only help you fit in if by fitting in you mean becoming a politically correct mantra-drone. (What is correct in this sense is factually, scientifically, and philosophically wrong.)

Needless to say, thats not what college was supposed to bebut thats what it is, at least in about 99 percent of the nations colleges and universities. The university, as an institution, was founded in the Middle Ages. Its purpose was to teach Christian Aristotelianism. American universities were founded in much the same spirit, but also to create civic-minded, moral citizens. One might even go so far as to say the modern-day American university has completely inverted what the medieval university and Americas founding universities set out to achieve. Instead, Americas universities now function as institutional, skills-based assembly lines to produce citizen-serfs for the global economy, tutored in an ideology of obedience to Big LGBTQ+, Big Tech, Big Government, Big Media, Big Business, the Big Nonprofits, and of course Big Educationthe latter of which confers the credentialing keys to the kingdom. How often do we hear parents say that their sons and daughters were conservative, Christian, happy, independent thinkers before going to college, only to emerge on the other side brainwashed and woke, faithless and unhappy, underemployed and broke.

If thats the result, why gowhy send our kidsto college? Dont go! Under Jack Gainess foolish yet understandable misapprehension, college remains a universal cultural goal so long as it guarantees social and financial success: if a college education will make me rich, then Ill put up with whatever tomfoolery the academicians put me through. That if-then statement is still reiterated throughout our culture. Even when, as in our day, this statement has not proven to be true, most students and parents dont blame the college or university; they blame