On the opinion page of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Charles Murray completed his great trilogy of columns on the state of American education by arguing against the rampant egalitarianism and cultural relativism prevalent in higher education today. See the article here.
This argument dovetails Murray’s claim in Wednesday’s Journal that too many people are in college today. Too many students in college necessitates the dumbing down of the curriculum, the dilution of standards, and creeping grade inflation, all of which are manifest in academia today.
And egalitarianism also leads to the push for more racial and ethnic diversity. In this case, egalitarianism is defined as perfectly-proportionate representation of all racial and ethnic groups.
Finally, perhaps Murray’s argument about too many people in college today explains racial and ethnic “underrepresentation.” Maybe it’s not that there aren’t enough blacks and Hispanics in college today. Instead, maybe there are too many whites and Asians in higher education today – many of whom are upper middle class — and this accounts for the presumed racial “gap.”