Universities make people smarter, the search for academic inquiry and the honing of talents against the whetstone of fellow students increases a person’s intellectual capacity. The college-educated can rattle off Plato and Shakespeare or go on diatribes about how an ancient civilization pronounced words. And the more prestigious the university, the greater the knowledge obtained by their students, or at least the higher median salary upon graduation. I would hope this reality would be the case. Four years of schooling priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes two more years for a masters and maybe five or six more for a PhD. After over a decade spent at institutions of higher learning, I would hope these students are smarter than when they entered.
Universities do impart lots of information like how much alcohol the human body can intake, but on a more serious note, there is a lot of learning that does occur in universities if you look for it. Whether universities make their students smarter though, depends on the definition of “smarter”, if being smarter is knowing more or being successful, clearly universities excel. But if the definition of smarter is more encompassing like developing common sense the answer is a troubling no.
The universities create a lot of alumni who are book smart but common sense stupid, or what can be called “educated fools.” There is a stark difference between encyclopedic knowledge and wisdom; it is in this gap where the educated fool exists. Society does not usually call people fools due to their failure to understand complex subject matters but because they fail to understand basic subject matter. If a person knows calculus but thinks that two plus two equals five, society would still consider him a fool.
If someone said that parents of disabled newborns should have the choice to kill the newborn, society would most likely consider that person a monster. If that person then also advocated for veganism because animals feel pain, society would hopefully consider that person not only monstrous but their philosophy foolish. But since the person who says this, Peter Singer, has several degrees behind his name and is a professor at Princeton people do not dismiss his horrendous ideas. You may think we might be only a few years from flat earthers being taken seriously.
The reason why academia has been inundated with educated fools is because academia is always clamoring for the daring. History tends not to remember those who towed the line, it remembers people such as Galileo whose theory, taken for granted now, was earth-shattering at the time. But there is a core difference between the Galileos and the educated fools of the world, Galileos try to discover the truth, no matter its gravity, while the educated fools attempt to replicate the achievements of the Galileos and Newtons. To paraphrase from Karl Marx, “History repeats itself the second time as a farce.”
Educated fools try to make profound discoveries by taking truths everyone knows and then subverting them. If a homeless man told you that you cannot be sure of your existence or of anything else’s existence for that matter, most would shrug him off. But if someone who has spent decades in academia says this, their opinion is treated as bold and they are awarded.
Universities have come to the point where the only truth accepted is that there is no such thing as truth, a contradiction befitting those considered educated fools. The ruling principle is boldness not necessarily correctness. A portion of academia subscribes to moral relativism where the only moral tenet is that everyone has different views of right or wrong which should be respected. A view contrary to most of human history, while cultures do differ, it is a common feature that to kill an equal without sufficient reason is wrong. While who should be considered equal varied in cultures and sufficient reasoning varied, to say that no common principle on murder exists ignores what the evidence bears out, sacrificing what is true for what is new.
The educated fool is a plague to the university, corrupting the education just as they corrupt the truth. A Shakespeare quote that encompasses the phenomenon of the educated fool is this “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
Armand Chancellor is a fourth year student in the Brooks School of Public Policy. His fortnightly column The Rostrum focuses on the interaction of politics and culture at Cornell. He can be reached at [email protected].
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