Choosing the Right College: The Whole Truth About America’s Top Schools

 by Bob Cheeks  

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Help has arrived to assist those of you about to select a college or university for your recalcitrant, tattooed, and pierced progeny.

Choosing the Right College: The Whole Truth About America’s Top Schools
published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (6th edition, 2007)
Ppbk., 1084 pgs.
ISBN 10: 1933859237
ISBN 13: 9781933859231

“Twenty years of schoolin’ and they put you on the dayshift . . .”
– Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues, 1965

My pal, Tom, was one of the sharper knives in the proverbial drawer. He was studious, punctual, and inclined toward good behavior; he was our grade school quarterback, played a mean shortstop, served faithfully as an alter boy, and, it was rumored, helped around the house without being told. Tom was the All-American boy.

Tom didn’t join with us in our daily pranks and buffoonery nor did he become a member of our 6th-grade “Girls Haters Club” inaugurated a couple of years prior to puberty, when our attitude toward the distaff side would take a different tack.

While Tom was consistently getting straight A’s and was a handsome young man, he had at that time, one small physical flaw; a minor speech impediment that resulted in mangled “sh” words.

Which leads to an incident, again in 6th grade, when the beloved Sister Constantine, a devoted daughter of Christ, who had earmarked Tom for the priesthood and consequently ignored the rest of us other than to administer well-deserved punishment, was passing out the results of a test. I don’t remember what the test was about and the report of the incident came to me via my pal, Butch-the-Greek, who sat next to Tom.

It seems that when Tom opened the aforementioned test, there in red marker, as if he had committed some offense, was the letter grade “B.” Butch witnessed the drama that unfolded, an event that has become the stuff of legends.

Tom’s eyes were riveted on the offending paper, his sweaty hands trembled slightly, and with his face contorted he, who we all thought would someday be canonized, plaintively muttered, “Oh, Chit!”

Butch told me as soon as the recess bell rang. After the shock had worn off, I had something of an epiphany, a pneumatic (spiritual) irruption. This unhappy and mind-boggling incident taught me that Augustine of Hippo, that erudite African theologian/philosopher, was right: mankind is inherently flawed.

I don’t know if Tom ever cussed again, I doubt he did. He was our high school class valedictorian, matriculated to that bastion of liberal Catholicism, Notre Dame (Go Irish!), then on to Harvard Law all paid for with scholarships. He became a lawyer (we can forgive him that) and succeeded brilliantly in various business, political, and governmental endeavors. He is currently the president of a small albeit elite college and in terms of the immanent world-reality my pal Tom, through his acuity and hard work, has hit the home run of life.

Tom’s success, I think, was established early in his life by his parents, but his decision to attend Notre Dame then Harvard gave him the opportunity to attain his goals, an opportunity of which he took full advantage.

The college children choose is critically important but not all kids are as smart, hard working, or as goal oriented as Tom. He told me our senior year in high school that he intended to be president and while that hasn’t happened yet, I haven’t counted him out (Tom’s forgotten more than Fraufuhrer Hillary knows!).

As far as how smart your child is, his willingness to study, or his desire to develop goals you are, as parents, pretty much on your own. However, help has arrived to assist those of you about to select a college or university for your recalcitrant, tattooed, and pierced progeny. The newly published 6th edition of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s now famous tome, Choosing the Right College: The Whole Truth About America’s Top Schools, contains 1,084 pages of “reliable information about colleges across our nation.” And, when these people say “reliable information” they aren’t kidding.

The three introductory essays are must reading. The first, by the now famous Dr. Walter Williams of George Mason University, a self-described “tall, dark, and handsome” gentleman whose consideration for his spouse led him to buy her winter boots so she wouldn’t slip while shoveling snow off the driveway, provides the reader with the wisdom of man who has spent his life in academia. Dr. Williams is both eager and willing to tell parents or would be students the truth about American colleges and universities.

“Moreover,” Professor Williams writes, “it is all too common for a student to spend his freshman and possibly his sophomore years in classes taught by graduate students, some of whom have difficulty with the English language. This tactic, in the area of consumer fraud, is known as bait and switch.” And, to illustrate the current academic reality, Dr. Williams writes, “The unfortunate fact is that many college classes today consist of little more than indoctrination in leftist propaganda.” However, on an upbeat note, Dr. Williams suggests that by reading, and indeed studying Choosing the Right College, “. . . it is still possible to get a good, nonideological liberal arts education.”

The second essay, by Mark C. Henrie, editor of the Intercollegiate Review, executive editor of Modern Age, and the author of A Student’s Guide to the Core Curriculum (ISI Books), concurs with Dr. Williams by offering the hope that regardless of the marked decline in collegiate standards, the result of a seemingly endless number of neo-Marxist professors and the effete demeanor of college administrators, it is “still possible to acquire a genuinely fine liberal arts education.”

The first casualty of the postmodern deconstructionist onslaught was the “core curriculum,” the idea that students should have at least an introduction into “the best that can be thought,” in the hope that they might acquire an appreciation for Western culture both historically and an understanding the theological, philosophical, literary, and artistic achievements of Western man. Henrie declares that, “The good news is that much of the substance of the old core is still available, scattered across various courses in the departments.” Thus, the primary service rendered by the guide is that the editors have located, “The eight courses that may constitute a ‘core of one’s own,’” and they are dutifully listed for each college and university in the book. Which means you don’t have to spend upward of two hundred grand and end up with an uneducated boob.

The final essay is written by the Editor-in-Chief, John Zmirak, who earned his doctorate in English literature at Louisiana State University, and is the author of Wilhelm Ropke: Swiss Localist, Global Ecconomist; The Bad Catholic’s Guide to Good Living; and The Bad Catholic’s Guide to Wine, Whiskey, and Song.

Zmirak explains that the purpose of the guide is to point students in the direction of those colleges and universities that provide an opportunity to receive “a serious education.”

“In this guide,” Zmirak writes, “you will find colleges that survived the philistine outrages of the 1960’s and ‘70s and retained (or regained) their mission of humanistic education.” This guide has been “independently researched, written, and funded” while addressing the various colleges in a bifurcated, multi-question examination of “Academic Life,” and “Student Life,” as well as listing each institutions “top professors.”

There are 134 schools listed, including the three U.S. service academies (they’re free!). Under “vital statistics,” the editors provide a great deal of pertinent information — pay particular attention to tuition and room and board – that will be necessary in helping you decide where Sissy or Junior will continue their education. Each essay also contains statistics concerning the incidents of rape, assault, and thievery visited upon American campuses the previous year.

I would suggest that the editors add the following “good professors” to their list: Dr. Regis Martin of Franciscan college, a facile writer and true theologian; Lecturer Elizabeth Campbell Corey of Baylor University, a gifted writer and profound thinker; and, Dr. Roger Berkowitz of Bard College, a true philosopher, possessing a moral imagination, whose recent book, Liebnitz: The Gift of Science, may be the most significant and profound criticism of the juridical aspect of the Enlightenment project ever written.

Choosing the Right College is must reading for any parent about to re-mortgage his home in order to educate his child. Each essay is in-depth, critical, objective, and fun to read.

We live in a time when disoriented postmodernists and “para-Marxist” buffoons, the intellectual flotsam of this disordered ideological age, are misconstructing reality. Any hope of entering into an age of order, of restoring the proper understanding of human existence — man’s relation with the divine ground – lies with these youngsters being or about to be “educated.” If wisdom prevails they will consult Choosing the Right College, then choose the right college. Much depends on this generation of Americans.

Choosing the Right College is available from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Book Reviews, Political Theory, Humanities, Language, Academia, Histo

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