This is my final post as guest blogger and I must say that many of the responses demonstrate what’s wrong with higher education.

My first set of posts built on my recent Chronicle article, “America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree.” It continued to discuss the dismal results of undergraduate education and the terrible lack of disclosure to prospective students about their prospects of success and growth there, and proposed solutions. Rather than engage on the issues, most of the responses were deflective: for example, blaming the problem on K-12 education, that hermeneutics was more valuable than literature’s universal themes, or most often and most surprising, ad hominem attacks. For example, commenters called me, not just my ideas, for example, “off the deep end.” To bolster such claims, commenters went to my personal Web site and noted, for example, that I am an atheist.

If they treated me this way, I wonder how they treat colleagues or students with whom they disagree. Is that the “free and open marketplace of ideas” that colleges — when recruiting students or begging for money from the government or other donors — claim to provide?

I ascribe some of the commenters’ antipathy to their defensiveness about their teaching — for example, that their undergraduate courses should be based heavily on arcane, often outré research, especially their own.

But some of the antipathy, I believe, derives from those commenters’ repulsion at my grave doubts about a core principle held by most social-science and humanities faculty: redistributive “justice.” I believe that redistributive “justice” is far from just, because it yields a net negative to society and because, in moral-reasoning researcher Lawrence Kohlberg’s terms, it’s immoral in a universe-wide sense; it’s cosmically wrong.

Most of the commenters’ belief in redistributive “justice” is so zealously held that my posts related to that topic mainly engendered even more name-calling-rich deflection. Without any inquiry into my rationale for questioning redistributive “justice,” some commenters immediately jumped to calling me racist or sexist, among the most damaging labels that can be placed on a person today.

Is this the free and open marketplace of ideas that colleges claim to provide?

Side Note: I was struck by how the negative comments, even the ad hominem ones, rather than demotivating me, motivated me to try even harder in my rejoinders and in subsequent posts. That reminded me of all the people who say they were unmotivated until someone said, “You can’t.” or “You’re a loser.” That motivated them to prove those people wrong. In contrast, we all know people who, despite lots of praise and encouragement, remain unmotivated. Perhaps all the praise engendered more complacency than motivation. So, is it possible that that linchpin of educational and psychological theory — that people are motivated primarily through positive reinforcement and self-esteem building — isn’t necessarily true? But I digress.

Dear readers, please remember that not all wisdom resides left-of-center, and that the well-educated person is fairly exposed to the full range of benevolently derived ideas. That seems an obvious truism, yet in the past 40-plus years, higher education has ever-more censored ideas and people that dare veer right of center. Higher-education administrators and faculty in the social sciences and humanities rarely hire such people, and usually prefer to admit students whose admission essays reveal a leftward bias. Courses typically present right-of-center ideas and readings only as strawmen to be knocked down. Faculty tend to demean students’ right-of-center classroom comments and shepherd students into left-leaning term papers and dissertations. Professors almost never choose a right-of-center research agenda.

My closing exhortation is this: Ever more leaders, beyond just the Spellings Commission, are convinced that undergraduate education deserves far more external scrutiny, that you provide frighteningly little benefit for the time, money, and opportunity costs. To avoid major intrusion into what you do, you must look much harder at what you’re giving to students in exchange for the enormous time and money they spend on you. Reread the aforementioned Chronicle article, “America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree,” my posts, and my rejoinders to the comments, and then ask yourself, whether even your own children are likely to derive what they deserve from their undergraduate experience.

In closing, I’d like to thank Chronicle Review Deputy Editor Alex Kafka, whose counsel was most helpful and kind. I should have expected no less, given my equally positive experience with all the other Chronicle editors with whom I’ve worked, most recently Sarah Hardesty Bray and Carolyn Mooney.

And on that note, I wish you all — critics and supporters alike — a reinvigorating summer.