Briefly on the election: The size and scope of the thumpin’ the president got is really a source of wonder, especially because the Republicans lacked an “alternative agenda.” And he’s being a major-league jerk about it. A minimal sign of basic humanity is some self-deprecating humor when you’ve been rather unexpectedly mega-shellacked by people you don’t even respect.

On education: I wrote another rant for liberal education and against technology, inspired in some way by Arthur Melzer’s Philosophy between the Lines. Melzer proves the case that philosophers — and others — routinely used to write esoterically and even brag about it. But his is also the book that rather definitively gives the distinctively Straussian line on pretty much everything I can claim only to have begun to appreciate it. Our Jim Ceaser had an able and witty intro to this book in the WSJ a couple of weeks ago.

On education, part 2: My friend David Corey of Baylor University posted on Facebook that the surest sign that an academic administrator doesn’t know much is his or her repeated used of the phrase “critical thinking.” Someone added in the thread: Even more clueless is the repeated use of the phrase “critical-thinking skills.”

On education, part 3: Ramesh and Yuval have a very interesting an article on the main page (from the WP) on how policies based on reform conservatism can make higher education better. That’s the one area of conservative reformism to which I dissent, at least some. Will explain later.

For now: I do agree that our colleges have been given, largely by default, a more complicated role in preparing people for the increasingly demanding rigors of the 21st-century global competitive marketplace. I don’t mean our “cognitively elite” schools here. Kids who show up at Harvard or Swarthmore with killer SAT scores and fantastically impressive teenage résumés of accomplishment are already, in most cases, more than competent enough. At Berry College (which has the ranking of 196 on the list of brainiest colleges), some students show up with such good habits, so verbally and numerically literate, and so skillful at self-presentation that all we have to do is not screw them up. But lots, too, don’t show up that way.

America, for the most part, is getting less competent, mainly because of increasingly pathological families and the declining quality of most of our high schools (some, meanwhile, are getting better and better). And many experts are saying with a straight face that the key to maximizing social mobility in our country is to get as many people as possible to go to college. It is a quite reasonable question whether our less-selective residential colleges are or could be set up to do the job now expected of them all that well.

Meanwhile, academic freedom is on the decline our country. You can and should point to the increasingly intrusive and completely unironic political correctness. But you should also highlight the ironic (if not esoteric) writing deployed by our professors who explain on their syllabi why their students achieve the outcome of “critical-thinking skills” in such a way as to carve out a safe space for teaching them what they, in many cases, really need.