Some of those schools are shockingly small. Should any state continue to fund a university that had has only 1,400 undergraduates enrolled, especially a crappy one?
The notion that we as a society must provide access to a college education regardless of merit has always been flawed. There are far too many unqualified students in far too many supposed universities in this country. States can no longer afford to subsidize mediocrity, much less abject failure.
Matthew Arnold had an interesting take on such foolishness. In Culture and Anarchy he notes that while Culture’s acute relevance is that it is the, “pursuit of perfection through the best that has been thought and known in the world so that all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light…" the reality is that Man’s inherent imperfection and penchant for sloth, indolence, and pleasure precludes attainment of any state of blissful transcendence.
Arnold therefore argued reasonably that the natural evolution of a stratified, codified, and delineated society consisting of an enlightened intelligentsia, aristocracy, artisans, and tradesmen addressed the needs and continued progress of a thriving civilization.
Arnold believed that true happiness comes from within and that the citizenry should seek good in themselves while resignedly accepting the external world’s chaos, violence, and evil. He struggled with his Anglican faith but dismissed the notion that this corporeal existence would ever inherit or realize any sort of eternal bliss and so we should therefore moderate our desires rather tilt at windmills that will never be defeated.
It is when Man upsets the natural algorithm of a society organized into rational verticals of experience, interest and expertise that the community devolves into anarchy, entropy, and disarray. He argues that this is what happened in the cases of both the Greek City-State and Roman Republic models. Each gave way to totalitarianism which replaces anarchy with bland conformity.
Arnold’s philosophy is best reflected in his poetry. In “Dover Beach” Arnold observed:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
While in "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" he commented on futility:
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride--
I come to shed them at their side.
Were Matthew Arnold to look at the American educational model as it stands today he would admire the nobility of aspiration yet deplore the fatuousness of chimerical folly.
