Rick Santorum on Higher Education

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Rick Santorum is taking a lot of heat for some things he said about higher education in America last week.

In this speech, he made two basic points:

• Not everyone is suited for book-learning; so it ought to be possible to earn a decent living with one’s hands.
• Colleges and universities in this country today tend to indoctrinate the young in a radical relativist and hedonist ideology.

The first claim is normative—it raises the question of what the place of higher education in our society ought to be.

The second claim is factual—it describes an aspect of how higher education in fact operates in America today.

I believe Santorum is basically correct on both points. But he was of course speaking in the middle of a hard-fought political campaign, not in a philosophy seminar. So, it is not surprising that both claims could use some qualification.

Therefore, let’s try to add some perspective by examining both claims in a more nuanced way.

First, I want to distance myself from Santorum’s comment that Obama is a “snob.”

True, Barack Obama often comes across as a denizen of the Ivy League seminar, in the same way that Mitt Romney comes across as a denizen of the corporate suite. But personalities are one thing, policies are something else.

And whatever his personal failings may be, Obama cannot be seriously accused of believing that “everyone should go to college” in the sense Santorum imputed to him. The construction that Santorum placed on some of his remarks does not hold up under scrutiny.

The President was simply saying that the United States needs  a more highly educated work force if it is to compete successfully in the twenty-first century. That is hard to argue with. Many of the manufacturing jobs that used to pay good wages to men with little education are gone, and they aren’t coming back.

Obama was just telling it like it is. He is not responsible for globalization. Therefore, Santorum went over the line by distorting Obama’s remarks on the need to expand higher education.

That said, was Santorum wrong to make the two main claims that he did in his speech?

No. He was absolutely right.

The Dignity of Work

Santorum is a breath of fresh air in our politics for many reasons, not the least of which is because he places an emphasis on the dignity of work.

While Democrats celebrate the welfare state and the Occupy Wall Street philosophy of class resentment, and while country-club Republicans celebrate Wall Street and trickle-down economics, Santorum is a politician of an old-fashioned breed that is now almost extinct: He celebrates work itself, as a moral force.

Freud said that only two things matter in human life: love and work.

If secular leftists confuse love with sex, a certain kind of free-market conservative confuses work with money.

It is not money that matters to a successful human life, it is work. Work, in the sense of a moral commitment to fulfilling a function in society to the best of one’s ability, and thereby winning a living for oneself and one’s family. Work in this sense is the bedrock of individual happiness and social stability.

The erosion of work in this moral sense—not just the loss of manufacturing jobs themselves, but the loss of the very idea of work as a moral obligation—is one of the two main sources of the moral rot eating at our society. (The other, of course, is the secular left’s confusion of sex with love.)

Of all the men and women on the political scene in America today, no one gets the moral nature of work like Santorum. I assume this comes from his own working-class roots, as well as from his Catholic faith. But whatever its source, it is indeed refreshing to hear a candidate extol the dignity of manual labor on the campaign trail.

How to help men and women with little aptitude for book-learning to prepare themselves to find meaningful and rewarding work in a global economy is of course another matter. Personally, I would rejoice if President Obama and Candidate Santorum would sit down together to discuss this difficult and exceptionally important problem.

That is not going to happen, but at least Santorum is placing the problem front and center—and in its correct moral context.

College as a Cloister

The other claim Santorum made in the speech that engendered so much controversy last week—that colleges inculcate a left-wing ideology—is self-evidently true to anyone with first-hand experience of American university campuses today.

In itself, this is not a very interesting observation. What is more interesting is to listen to some of the arguments that left-wing journalists are using to justify the situation. I have in mind especially Frank Bruni’s op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, entitled “It’s a College, Not a Cloister.”

Bruni’s column is all over the place—to the point of incoherence. But he makes two points relevant to this discussion.

First, he attacks homeschoolers like the Santorum family for brainwashing their children:

About 1.5 million American children were home-schooled in 2007, the latest year for which the Department of Education provides an estimate. When their parents were asked why, they most commonly cited moral and spiritual reasons. There’s a positive way to regard that: these moms and dads are making a greater personal investment in their kids. There’s a negative way as well: they’re not so much impressing as radically imposing their values on their offspring by cutting them off from alternative viewpoints.

Is that really good parenting? The likelihood is already strong, when you rear kids, that you’ll turn out rough copies of yourself, whether you mean to or not. Home schooling is like firing up a Xerox machine to seal the deal.

Then, he claims that the reason Santorum attacks the political-correctness culture of American higher education today is because he is afraid of his children’s beliefs being “tested” by exposure to the wider culture:

And is it really good policy for Santorum to fill young adults with suspicions about higher learning, which rightly exists to challenge—in a healthy sense—what parents and maybe pastors have poured into them?

If their beliefs survive that, then those beliefs can be seen as genuinely earned and are probably all the stronger for it. Santorum’s did. He went not only to college but also to two graduate schools, getting an M.B.A. from one and a law degree from the other.

But to listen to him talk about universities is to get the sense that he doesn’t trust others to emerge from such an obstacle course of unsavory influences as uncorrupted as he did. For safety’s sake, he’ll bless a little ignorance.

This way of viewing the matter is perverse for a reason that should be obvious to anyone—and would be obvious to Bruni himself, were he not blinded by his own self-righteousness:

It is Bruni’s culture that dominates American society, not Santorum’s.

Anyone who believes religious conservatives are the ones who need exposure to the wider world is living in a fantasy. On the contrary, it is obviously secular liberals like Bruni who live in a cloister nowadays.

In America today, a bien-pensant liberal may go from prep school to university and beyond, reading The New York Times and listening to NPR all the way, without ever having one of his most deeply held beliefs challenged. In this sense, American colleges are indeed cloisters—devoted to secular-liberal self-congratulation.

Religious-conservative parents do not have the luxury of raising their kids in an echo chamber. They must do their best to support their children with a vision of morality and faith strong enough to sustain them for a lifetime under assault from the reigning leftist ideology.

For this reason, social conservatives and people of faith need no lessons in the philosophy of hedonism and relativism. The practice is preached to them 24/7 from innumerable media outlets throughout America. When their kids get to college, they will learn the theory.

Would that our colleges really were cloisters in the original sense—where one could devote oneself to the pursuit of truth, while shutting out the clamor of economics and politics.

Instead, they have become to a very unfortunate extent finishing schools where secular liberals go to put a shiny, pseudo-intellectual gloss on what everyone they know believes and practices already: that there is no truth, and no right or wrong apart from carpe diem.