Daily Wire Essay Argues Western Universities ‘Deserve To Fail,’ Touts Hillsdale As Model

American higher education is in the middle of a slow-motion collapse, and at least one conservative publication argues that many institutions have earned it. In a new essay for The Daily Wire, a writer affiliated with Hillsdale College contends that the financial and enrollment crisis hitting schools across the country is not merely a matter of bad luck or market cycles—it is the logical result of decades of mission drift, ideological capture, and public subsidies that have priced colleges out of reach while emptying them of purpose.

The piece opens by pointing to reporting from The Wall Street Journal on the struggles of Syracuse University, described as one of the large and reputable American institutions now feeling the squeeze. The essay notes that what many observers assumed would be a problem confined to small private schools has now reached major, well-known universities.

The numbers cited are stark. According to the essay, roughly 300 institutions of higher learning have gone defunct since the 2008 financial collapse, and the Huron Consulting Group estimates another 370 could close over the next decade. Private liberal arts colleges have been hit hardest: in 1960 there were nearly 570 in the United States; today there are only around 200.

A Multi-Front Crisis

The essay attributes the decline to five overlapping forces. First, beginning in the 1960s, large state systems deliberately built regional campuses aimed at driving private schools out of business. Second, colleges became too dependent on tuition and federal funding—especially federal student loans—while public interference in the marketplace artificially inflated prices and drove institutions to price themselves out of the market.

Third, the essay raises a demographic argument that it acknowledges is rarely discussed in polite company: falling birth rates combined with legalized abortion since 1973. It asserts that abortions likely account for the loss of about 66 million Americans and that nearly one in four women under 50 has had at least one, a reality that the writer says has left the country unable to replace its population through procreation.

Fourth, the essay argues that almost no institutions of higher learning are genuinely mission-driven anymore, making each college essentially interchangeable. Small private schools, in particular, have been reduced to what the writer calls a “vanilla tapioca” over the past 50 years, bowing to what he describes as the heretical gods of race, class, and gender.

Fifth, liberal arts schools have forgotten what the liberal arts actually mean, substituting serious study of the classics with novelty courses driven by what the essay calls hateful ideologies. The writer claims the most self-proclaimed anti-racist institutions are in fact the most hostile to majority student bodies.

The blame, in this telling, belongs to the New Left of the late 1960s. The essay argues that while the Old Left embraced an economic form of Marxism, their children—”red diaper babies”—pursued a cultural Marxism instead, entering education and cultural institutions en masse. What the writer calls Maoist in 1968 became political correctness in the early 1990s, then wokeness and DEI over the past two decades. Freshman orientations, the essay charges, are now essentially reworked consciousness-raising sessions, compared—though the writer allows they are gentler in execution—to China’s Cultural Revolution or Cambodia under Pol Pot.

“In other words, many colleges subvert everything noble about Western civilization and human dignity and deserve a quick death,” the essay states bluntly.

The Prescription: Babies, Mission, and Independence

Yet the piece does not end in despair. It offers four prescriptions for institutions willing to return to first principles.

The first is demographic: have more babies. Invoking economist Julian Simon’s argument that people are the ultimate resource, the essay laments not only the missing 66 million Americans but their creativity, uniqueness, talent, and artistry. Stable families, it adds, are equally essential.

The second is for colleges to reclaim their individual missions. A comprehensive, compelling mission statement, the writer argues, is the only way to attract students and donors, tie alumni across generations, and prevent one institution from blending into another in conformist homogeneity.

The third is to recover a proper understanding of education. For centuries, the essay notes, Western education meant the seven liberal arts, the classical languages, and either philosophy or theology holding it all together—liberal in the sense of being freed from the immediate cares of the world, focused on man, God, and their relationship, with its most important question being “What is man?” Training for law or engineering is important, the writer concedes, but it is not the same as education. Even major research universities, he argues, should take liberal education seriously, because ethical and moral grounding is needed to decide how to use profit and technology—lessons the writer says come from Socrates, Cicero, St. Augustine, and Sir Thomas More.

The fourth prescription is financial independence: colleges must wean themselves off federal and state money. The essay argues that public funds come with strings that drive reckless conformity, and that government provides nothing healthy for a society of learning. It singles out Harvard’s $57 billion endowment as having absolutely no business taking public monies while insisting smaller institutions must find alternative ways to fund their campuses.

Hillsdale Held Up as the Counterexample

Throughout, the writer holds up his own institution, Hillsdale College, as the model. He notes its acceptance rate is around 20% and claims it competes with the Ivy League on standardized testing scores. On the first prescription, he describes a campus and local Catholic parish full of children—a “major baby boom” since he arrived in 1999, which he calls loud and messy but also brilliant and beautiful, an extension of how the college treats students and colleagues.

On mission, he cites Hillsdale’s founding in 1844 by abolitionists and its historical colorblindness—described as the first college to integrate students of European and African descent, and the second to allow women to study. The essay’s argument is clear: institutions that recommit to a real mission, a classical understanding of education, and independence from government money may survive. Those that do not, in the writer’s view, have already sealed their fate.

Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-western-higher-education-deserves-to-fail-and-how-to-save-it