I’ve spent more than two-thirds of a century (since 1958) at American universities. Never in all those years has their earned and deserved reputation as the best in the world suffered bigger threats than today. US colleges and universities not only have behaved abysmally, but they’re now paying a high price for showing contempt for the prevailing values of the public that sustains them, according to the Tribune News Service.

College is too expensive; graduates seem to be increasingly ill-equipped for the workplace; new technologies may be reducing a degree’s value to employers; the federal government is cutting financial support and making new demands; other nations are challenging our research preeminence, and, arguably the worst of all, falling fertility rates are reducing the size of the potential future student pool.

Getting trained as a plumber, welder or home healthcare aide increasingly looks more attractive than getting a degree in gender studies, sociology or even computer science.

Can and will universities be saved, overcoming this crisis? Not without some serious behavioural modification. Our........

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