Dear Editor,
I read your interesting wish list for the university. I as a physician, an employer of hundreds of people, a father of college kids, a husband and citizen would have said the following about your priority list.
It touches on none of the core issues of problems in education today. I have interviewed hundreds of young people just out of college and graduate school for work. Many are from the most elite institutions. In general I’m impressed by their deep ignorance in vast areas. They come to me highly unprepared in many ways to work and act as good American citizens. Rather than focus on campus lighting and the food court, here is a priority list you might consider.
Prioritize learning American values instead of leftist ones. In so doing, learn about what made this country great and brought more dignity and wealth to more people than any other value system in the world. Learn that our founders were incredibly wise despite their human faults and gave us the precious ideas of freedom over equality, small government and big people, a Constitution to be revered and followed as written and free market capitalism.
Learn that the value system of leftism with its focus on race, class and gender, wealth redistribution and socialism is very old school, generally immoral and very destructive to our freedoms, virtue and wealth. Prioritize reading clearly and thoroughly things like our Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, the Bible, Milton [Friedman’s] “Free to Choose” and [Hayek’s] “Road to Serfdom.”
Prioritize learning about how progressivism and leftism have radically undermined our American value system, how it came from Europe from people like Karl Marx and has harmed every society it has touched. Prioritize learning the deep practicalities of life like basic economics and finance, where our money comes from and goes to, how businesses are built, why is the structure and meaning of our vast entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security are in many ways unethical and unconstitutional and why overreaching government power harms our fundamental freedoms and wealth creation.
Prioritize learning how the wool is being pulled over your eyes with leftism building up a vast entitlement state that cannot survive and will harm you terribly economically and spiritually. That is what I would prioritize — not nicer selections on the food court line.
Check out things like Prager University on line: I pay my kids to watch these five-minute gems on American values. Each is worth exponentially more than the leftism you get at our schools for vast sums of hard earned money. Have people like him speak at your school to push against the narrowness and rigidity of thought now prevalent on our campuses.
— Howard Sachs
M.D., Washington, D.C.
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