That’s the premise of this article:

For most of its history, America’s higher-education system, for all its flaws, operated around a hard but fair rule: Raw intellectual firepower mattered. Talent mattered. The ability to retain information and apply it correctly mattered. Academic excellence was the surest path to opportunity. You didn’t need family connections (although they certainly helped). You didn’t need a billion-dollar last name (again, that didn’t hurt either). You needed results.

Academic brilliance is now, in many cases, a liability unless paired with the “correct” ideological identifier.

Today, that operating system is being systematically dismantled. Academic brilliance is now, in many cases, a liability unless paired with the “correct” ideological identifier. In the modern Ivy League, identity is currency. Grievance is gold. Merit, once the only metric that really mattered, is treated like a relic of an oppressive past.

That’s been true for quite some time, and the article indicates that despite Trump’s efforts, nothing has really changed. Well, it’s early yet. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it doesn’t change, because colleges are now dedicated not to learning but to destructive leftist goals.

The article doesn’t say too much else although it does give some details. But it brought to mind once again the fact that one of the main goals of today’s education in most Western countries is learning to hate your own country. It’s taught in lower levels and in higher ones, and it’s certainly not unique to the United States. In fact, it’s not only the US that is labeled hateful; it’s western civilization as a whole, and all its traditional values – one of which is meritocracy.

Which in turn reminds me of an old post of mine based on some work by Allan Bloom. I reproduce the relevant portion here (it constitutes the remainder of the present post), but you might want to read the whole thing.

[Here’s Allan Bloom] again [emphasis mine], with an important and telling anecdote from his own past: …

Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

I find that passage about the obtuseness of Bloom’s history professor astounding as well as very descriptive of how we got here. The complete dominance of the radical professors as far as numbers go are a more recent manifestation, although there have long been some. But Bloom was a student of that history professor back in the mid-1940s, having been born in 1930 but having also been precocious enough to get his undergraduate degree at the age of eighteen from the University of Chicago after having entered at fifteen. The unnamed history professor Bloom describes in that passage was almost certainly not a radical. At most he was probably only mildly liberal. Perhaps he even passed for what was then known as conservative. If so, he was also unaware of the lessons to which Bloom refers to in that last sentence I quoted, even though – as Bloom notes – they had just experienced those lessons in WWII. The professor did not see any relation between what he was saying about the Founders and what would ultimately undermine our republic and all the values he probably held dear.

But Bloom, his student, saw it, even back then, even at so young an age.

Note also the tone of barely-restrained sarcasm; Bloom seems to have had a certain amount of contemptuous anger at those academics who could have been so stupid as to not have realized the effects of their throwing out the precious baby and leaving the dirty bathwater (it seems his first history professor was none too happy with his challenges, either). As the book goes on, some of the best passages involve Bloom’s description of the faculty’s craven abdication during the student uprisings of the 1960s, when he was one of those who tried (in vain, as it turned out) to hold his finger in the dike of the best traditions of Western Civilization. If you read the book [The Closing of the American Mind], pay particular attention to those uprisings, which were the template for what’s happening today.