It is becoming increasingly apparent that what we have come to call Higher Education is little more than what the North Vietnamese called Re-Education in their brutal, totalitarian camps. Dissent is not tolerated on campuses. Speech codes are the Orwellian counterpoints to thought crimes. No part of American life is as Nazified as the college campus.

Few places are as useless as college campuses. Except for courses dealing with hard science or technology, the vast majority of what passes for study in colleges is fluff whose value is nonexistent and whose sheepskin is simply the purchase of a minor title of nobility. The Constitution expressly prohibits titles of nobility. The Founding Fathers had a reason for that. Merit, not the buying of an earldom or confirming of a knighthood as reward for slavishness to convention, was the only distinction which government would draw between citizens.

Today, government requires college degrees – however meaningless these degrees may be – for a wide variety of professional and occupational opportunities. Why? Literacy, competence and knowledge can all be tested objectively in a wide variety of ways. That risible blob of tasteless gelatin which we call Higher Education is doubtless the most dubious way to determine actual intellectual ability or mastery of a body of information. Where is the ACLU when the constitutional rights of those without college degrees are being trampled? (The ACLU, of course, does not care about constitutional rights at all.)

The modern university is a spawning ground for ill-informed nihilists who leave their Re-Education camp knowing less than when they entered, but believing that they know more. The frustration felt in the streets of many cities around the world is the hunger for true knowledge and thought felt by mind-starved college graduates who have been solemnly informed that they now know something. All these wretches have been fed, of course, are the failed theories of Marx or some other Nineteenth Century windbag whose musings allow goateed professors to act like little Hitlers.

We should reject the whole idea of universities. Once, in the Middle Ages, universities were genuine sources of intellectual ferment. Instead of spouting propaganda, people talked, listened and thought. The rot began to set in over a century ago. Instead of truth, militantly secular college managers began to maliciously edit reference materials, to end inquiry with pre-determined academic articles of faith, and to create a powerful priesthood less a Creator.

The hucksters of Higher Education have succeeded so well that they have persuaded parents to send their children to college so that they will make more money, without grasping the true awfulness of that. Germans who joined the Hitler Youth or the National Socialist Student Association (NSDStD), the most popular campus association in Germany in 1930, would earn more income. The acquisition of wealth for its own sake is hardly a moral goal.

Even if modern colleges really educate students – which they do not – that would hardly qualify these institutions as noble if the education itself was malignant. One of the false gods we have been led to worship is education. Werner Heisenberg, the greatest theoretical physicist of the last century, was Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute at the University of Berlin under the Nazis. Konrad Lorenz, the greatest behavioral psychologist of the last century, was an enthusiastic Nazi professor at Immanuel Kant University. Martin Heidegger, the most renowned philosopher of the last century, was a equally proud Nazi and he was made Rector of the University of Freiburg.

No one questions the genius of Heisenberg, Lorenz or Heidegger. No one should doubt the brilliance of the college system that produced them. But no one should question their slavish surrender to Nazism and, in the cases of Lorenz and Heidegger, their infatuation with pure evil. The best that can be said about professors at American universities today is that they are so limp mentally that their malice is largely harmless, but let us not deceive ourselves that replacing the midgets of American academia with serious thinkers would make anything better.

Justice, equality and integrity are proper aims of government. Wealth and learning are what each person should seek for himself and should use wisely. It is not the business of government to grant petite titles of nobility, which signify nothing noble at all, to millions of young Americans each year. If it has value, let its consumers support it. If it is vile America-bashing, let it fail. All education is self-education. Let colleges stand or fall on their own.