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Friday, September 17, 2004
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Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
Thomas Sowell's recent column, "Choosing a College," is a model of agitprop. The essay meanders among features of the modern American college that Sowell doesn't like (drugs, coed dorms, political correctness, psychobabble, "cafeteria" curricula), but the prose is bored with itself: it has ticked off this list so often it's doing it in its sleep. The innovation in the essay is Sowell's decision to haul into his argument the recent suicides of students at NYU [see UD, 9/10/04]. Youth is a dangerous, tumultuous time, and parents and their children too often bow to the pressure of "experts" who tell them what school to attend: "But these 'experts' suffer no consequences if their bright ideas lead some young person into disaster. It is the parents who will be left to pick up the pieces." [Nice choice of image there, given the way most of these students died.] Parents should be more careful about the "atmosphere" of the university their children decide to attend, because this is "always important and sometimes can even be a matter of life and death." In time-honored fashion, Sowell doesn't come right out and say that liberal campuses kill, but you get the idea. |