OPINION:
Dear Parents:
Let me be blunt. If there is one thing I have learned in my over 40 years of leadership in the ivory tower, it is this: If you care about your children, you must stop sending them to the colleges and universities you’re reading about in the news. You need to stop sending them to places like Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Emory, Columbia, Northwestern and UCLA.
Don’t you see the foolishness of what you are doing?
Why would you sell the family farm for your son to attend a college that mocks the very idea of the traditional family and fatherhood and browbeats him into believing his masculinity is toxic and thereby the cause of everything that’s wrong with the world?
Why would you borrow tens of thousands of dollars to send your daughter to a school that indoctrinates her to mindlessly mutter that a woman is not a biological reality and being female is not an empirical fact?
Why would you incur untold debt to have someone brainwash your 18-year-old to parrot the narcissistic pablum of moral nihilism, the racism of “anti-racism,” and the neo-Marxist lie of multicultural syncretism?
Why would you spend one thin dime on such nonsense?
Why in the world would any good parent send their son or daughter to a school that disagrees with essentially everything you hold dear? Why would you trust your child to a school that takes pride in tearing apart his heart, mind and soul?
This makes no sense. If you’re paying for your child’s schooling (and the research says that over 80% of you are), why would you spend tens of thousands of dollars to have some team of arrogant professors undo everything you’ve worked so hard to accomplish in the first 18 years of your child’s life?
Please, parents, take this seriously. When you choose a college or university for your child, you must remember that ideas matter. Ideas have consequences. Good ideas result in good behavior, and bad ideas result in the opposite. Only those in blatant denial can pretend that the chaos you’re seeing on campuses across the country right now is not the obvious result of these schools teaching some terrible ideas.
Don’t you realize that these universities have the express goal of stripping away anything that smacks of traditional values as soon as your child arrives on campus? Don’t you understand that freshman orientation at the college of your choice is no longer simply a time for your daughter to become acquainted with friends and learn about academic life, but instead the first step in a blatant attempt to reorient her to disregard essentially every value and every virtue you have taught her to embrace?
At Columbia University, for example, new student orientation is intentionally designed to force students to “reevaluate and rid themselves of their own social and personal beliefs that foster inequality.” In other words, your sons and daughters will be told, in the first few minutes of their college experience — before their boxes are unpacked or they even know where their first class will be held — to “rid themselves” of anything that smacks of the worldview that you, the parents, hold dear.
Lest there be any confusion as to the intent of such reorientation programs, hear the words of the noted philosopher and professor Richard Rorty, who served on the faculty of such noted institutions as Wellesley College, Princeton University, the University of Virginia and Stanford University, who told parents that “we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than desirable.”
The goal of every one of these universities now playing host to the insanity of pro-Hamas antisemitic protests is not to orient students, but to reorient them. Their intent is not to educate, but to reeducate. It may not be what you thought you were buying when you read that pretty, four-color brochure that promised you the best American education has to offer, but the evidence is irrefutable: garbage in, garbage out.
Parents, be warned: There is no such thing as “value-neutral” education. If you can’t find a school that boldly stands against this nonsense and proudly teaches the time-tested ideas of truth, goodness and beauty, you’d be better off skipping higher education altogether and instead sending your progeny to a trade school.
As Voddie Baucham has so rightly said, “You can’t continue to send your children off to be educated by Caesar and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”
• Everett Piper is president emeritus of Oklahoma Wesleyan University and author of “This Is Not a Daycare, It’s a University.”
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