Charles J Sykes

We have experienced a shift in American character: we've become a nation of moochers. Increasingly dependent on the efforts of others over our own, Americans are free to freeload. From the corporate bailouts on Wall Street to the alarming increases in personal default and dependency, from questionable tax exemptions to enormous pension, healthcare, and other entitlement costs, the new moocher culture cuts across lines of class, race, and private and...

The cost of a college degree has increased by 1,125% since 1978-four times the rate of inflation. Total student debt has surpassed $1.3 trillion. Nearly two thirds of all college students must borrow to study, and the average student graduates with more than $30,000 in debt. Many college graduates under twenty-five years old are unemployed or underemployed. And professors-remember them?-rarely teach undergraduates at many major universities, instead...

College curriculums that were once centered on instruction in the classics of Western civilization have become smorgasbords where almost anything qualifies as a course in the liberal arts and where political conformity is enforced by professors. Stanford University, caving in to demands from the Black Student Union (“We don't want to read any more dead white guys”), removed Homer, Dante, Luther, Darwin, and Freud from its course on Western civilization....