Peter Hitchens is rather surprisingly; not a bad writer. His foreign correspondant pieces tend to be pretty good for one thing, his book "The Broken Compass" isn't bad either, even though his beliefs are not my cup of tea, but then we do have freedom of speech so there ain't much I can do about that. As a columnist though he does seem to be increasingly lazy and cliched, his polemics are sometimes so silly, I actually suspect he is just Poe's lawing his own column in the Mail on Sunday. So it is perhaps why we end up with articles like this one.
In one sense I can see why he may have indulged in this sort of thing. The Mails increasingly elderly and right wing readership often seem to have a bit of an axe to grind in regards to yoof. I don't think I am wide off the mark saying that a lot of this is down to a lot of these bitter and disappointed people trapped by the dreary hard right conservatism that they would like to impose on us all -being jealous of a more dynamic and opportunity laden younger generation. But that really doesn't excuse Peter asking the stupidest rhetorical question ever asked by a human in the opening part of his anti - university screed.
"What are universities for anyway?"
They're there to stop the clouds falling out of the sky Peter.
"I went to one and spent the whole time being a Trotskyist troublemaker at the taxpayers’ expense, completely neglecting my course."
Just because he pissed around being a plazzy Lenin, doesn't mean everyone else will. Students are more likely to work harder now anyway, what with fees going up. Fees Hitchens never was landed with.
"I have learned a thousand times more during my 30-year remedial course in the University of Fleet Street, still under way."
Oh, the "university of life" rant. I don't doubt real world experience is very important, but you don't become a brain surgeon, or an engineer, or learn about particle physics on the street, and many other important careers that make our world go round. You learn them at university, in academic disciplines.
"And they pass through the nasty, sordid rite of passage known as ‘Freshers’ Week’, in which they are encouraged to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol and to lose what’s left of their sexual inhibitions after the creepy sex educators have got at them at school."
Young people do all of the above outside of uni as well. Some of freshers week isn't pretty, but you don't have to take part if you don't want to.
"And if they are being taught an arts subject, they will find that their courses are crammed with anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-traditional material. Proper literature is despised and ‘deconstructed’. Our enviable national history is likewise questioned, though nothing good is put in its place"
Loosely translates into:- they teach stuff in a way Peter Hitchens doesn't like.
"Rather than putting an entire generation in debt, the time has come to close most of our universities and shrink the rest so they do what they are supposed to do – educating an elite in the best that has ever been written, thought and said, and undertaking real hard scientific research."
That would be a bit of a silly thing to do. We live in a knowledge based economy, we have little in the way of manufacturing jobs, not to mention competition from South East Asia in intellectual fields. I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry to do this.
"Or do these places exist only to hide the terrible youth unemployment that is a result of having a country run by graduates?"
Playing the anti intellectual card again. I'll let you into a secret Peter. Politicians who have few qualifications are just as likely to fuck stuff up as those that are highly qualified. For all I know, they'd probably be more likely. Running a country isn't easy. Why is there this ridiculous notion that highly educated people are somehow less qualified to seek office than some bloke off the street?
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