16 October 2010 9:47 PM
Is university really such a good thing? I spent three years learning to be a Trot
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
What are universities for anyway? I went to one and spent the whole time being a Trotsky ist troublemaker at the taxpayers’ expense, completely neglecting my course. I have learned a thousand times more during my 30-year remed ial course in the University of Fleet Street, still under way.
I am still ashamed of the way I lived off the taxes of millions of people who would have loved three years free from the demands of work, to think and to learn, but never had the chance.
We seem to accept without question that it is a good thing that the young should go through this dubious experience. Worse, employers seem to have fallen completely for the idea that a university degree is essential – when it is often a handicap.
For many people, college is a corrupting, demoralising experience. They imagine they are independent when they are in fact parasites, living off their parents or off others and these days often doomed to return home with a sense of grievance and no job. They also become used to being in debt – a state that previous generations rightly regarded with horror and fear.
And they pass through the nasty, sordid rite of passage known as ‘Freshers’ Week’, in which they are encouraged to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol and to lose what’s left of their sexual inhibitions after the creepy sex educators have got at them at school. If they have learned self-disciplined habits of work and life, they are under pressure to forget all about them, suddenly left alone in a world almost completely stripped of authority.
And if they are being taught an arts subject, they will find that their courses are crammed with anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-traditional material. Proper literature is despised and ‘deconstructed’. Our enviable national history is likewise questioned, though nothing good is put in its place.
Even if they are study ing something serious, their whole lives will be dominated by assumptions of political correctness, down to notices in the bars warning against ‘homophobia’ and other thought crimes.
I think this debauching of the minds and bodies of the young is more or less deliberate. The horrible liberal Woodrow Wilson, who eventually became President of the United States, was originally an academic who once blurted out the truth as seen by many such people. He said in a rare moment of candour: ‘Our aim is to turn out young men as unlike their fathers as possible.’
Well, look at the modern world as governed by graduates who despise their fathers’ views, and what do you see? Idealist wars that slaughter millions, the vast corruption of the welfare state, the war on the married family – and in this country the almost total disappearance of proper manufacturing industry.
Rather than putting an entire generation in debt, the time has come to close most of our universities and shrink the rest so they do what they are supposed to do – educating an elite in the best that has ever been written, thought and said, and undertaking real hard scientific research.
The last time I tried was when I was required to do so with the beautiful female staff of the North Korean consulate in Shenyang, China. It was part of the price of getting a visa to go to Kim Jong Il’s paradise, and worth paying for me (though not for the poor ladies).
But Miss Widdecombe – a fundamentally thoughtful person and the author of intelligent novels – was also paying a price. It is one which anyone must consider who is trying to get serious ideas across to a population that isn’t very interested in them. If you even want to be heard in the modern world, let alone listened to, then you must seek to become some sort of celebrity. This is the new aristocracy and the new priesthood, and if you don’t belong to it you are nobody.
There have been dark nights when I have wondered if I should try to get myself on to one of these programmes, swallowing grubs or enduring the company of morons on live TV, or making some sort of exhibition of myself, in the hope that people might in that case read my books and listen to what I have to say.
I decided not to try because I concluded that even if I did these things, it would be the terrible dancing, or the dinner of weevils, or the absurd costume that would be remembered. People still wouldn’t pay any attention.
By contrast, Nobel awards to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Lech Walesa all helped to bring down the Kremlin’s evil empire, causing genuine grief and dismay to its leaders.
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