Derek Bok's most recent book, Our Underachieving Colleges, is worth scrutinizing. . . . Bok is . . . on solid ground in pointing out that our colleges underachieve in preparing students for citizenship.

What is so bad about big government? My indictment of big government is that it is bad because it attacks liberty, prosperity, progress, harmony, and morality. Thanks to big government, we have significantly less of all of those good things than we would if we had been able to keep government right-sized. Big government is cancerous. Like a cancer, it hurts the body and tends to spread, doing more and more harm as it grows. It is time for some radical surgery.

The free market is constantly under attack from those who believe that they know how to make the world a better place with properly administered doses of state coercion.

People who don't have the interest or aptitude for serious college studies at age 18 may find that later in life they do, but those who enroll just because they think that the mere possession of a college degree is the passport to success will just dig themselves a financial hole.

Whereas students minds used to be the chief concern of colleges and universities, it is now more their bank accounts (more accurately, that of their parents and of the taxpayers). If students happen to learn anything useful while enrolled, that's good, but if not, as long as they've paid their bills, that's not the university's problem.

Derek Bok's most recent book, Our Underachieving Colleges, is worth scrutinizing. . . . Bok is . . . on solid ground in pointing out that our colleges underachieve in preparing students for citizenship.