Will: Trump sets bad example

“Unearned praise and hollow successes,” Nichols says, “build a fragile arrogance in students that can lead them to lash out at the first teacher or employer who dispels that illusion, a habit that carries over into a resistance to believe anything inconvenient or challenging in adulthood.” A habit no doubt intensified when adults in high places speak breezily of “alternative facts.”

“Rather than disabuse students of their intellectual solipsism,” Nichols says, “the modern university reinforces it,” producing students given to “taking offense at everything while believing anything.” Many colleges and universities, competing for tuition dollars “too often drawn thoughtlessly from an inexhaustible well of loans,” market a “college experience” rather than an education. The experience “turns into five and, increasingly, six (years).” Nichols notes that “the fragility of 21st-century students” results from “the swaddling environment of the modern university” that “infantilizes students” who demand “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces.”

Taking correction as an insult

Much attention has been given to the non-college-educated voters who rallied to Trump. Insufficient attention is given to the role of the college miseducated. They, too, are complicit in our current condition because they emerged from their expensive “college experiences” neither disposed nor able to conduct civil, informed arguments. They are thus disarmed when confronted by political people who consider evidence, data and reasoning to be mere conveniences and optional.

For all the talk in high places about emancipating the many from “the elites,” political philosopher Walter Berns was right: The question always is not whether elites will govern but which elites will. And a republic’s challenge is to increase the likelihood that the many will consent to governance by worthy elites. So, how is our republic doing?

What is most alarming about the president and his accomplices in the dissemination of factoids is not that they do not know this or that. And it is not that they do not know what they do not know. Rather, it is that they do not know what it is to know something.

Soon, presidential enablers, when challenged about their employer’s promiscuous use of “alternative facts,” will routinely use last week’s “justification” of the illegal voting factoid: It is the president’s “long-standing belief,” so there. In his intellectual solipsism, he, too, takes correction as an insult. He resembles many of his cultured despisers in the academy more than he or they realize.