I think I agree with @Pizzagirl about 90% of the time, maybe more. But I am having trouble understanding how this particular screed from Ross Douthat is going to help keep anyone’s mind sharp.
There’s elegance and promise in his assertion that students are both pampered and exploited, and of course it’s easy to understand what he is talking about when he starts with the football recruit. But then his argument – if one can even call it that – not so much goes off the rails as separates itself from any concept that could be represented by metaphorical “rails”.
Huh? The writing here is grammatical – barely – but the content is straight out of Jabberwocky. We’ll give him a pass on the common, if uneducated and highly misleading, mistake of substituting “liberal arts” for “humanities”. I’ll also pass on wondering just what percentage of liberal arts students have “absurd” debts. But what, exactly, or even inexactly, does Douthat think is wrong with liberal arts education? That is doesn’t try to pass along “the best”? Or that it doesn’t try to pass along what Matthew Arnold thought was the best? Those are two very different complaints, one a heck of a lot more credible than the other.
Instead of resolving the ambiguity, or explaining why it might be worthwhile to take on absurd debts to study the Matthew Arnold curriculum, he doubles down on more ambiguity. Is “pursuing worldly success” what’s bad? Or is “pursuing worldly success” OK as long as you do it right, without “mental breakdows”? And do we really believe that liberal arts education is manufacturing mental breakdowns? Excuse me, not manufacturing them, “inducing” them? Really? How? How often? This is a common problem in the real world of today, humanities-induced mental breakdowns of junior investment bankers? That sounds like more of a 19th-century fictional-world problem to me, something that Matthew Arnold would have recognized.
The rest of Douthat’s examples repeat the pattern so precisely – ambiguous rhetoric without any comprehensible connection to something that may actually happen in the world – that I have to conclude that he meant to do that, although why is beyond me. What the heck is a “carefree Rumspringa justified on high feminist principles”? Is he making a point, or just stringing phrases together than look nice next to one another, like beads on a necklace?