It’s sad when a book that purports to expose the bad state of an institution (in this instance, higher ed) that has been ruined by government interference turns out to be a sputtering 97-pound weakling.

There have been quite a few splendid books that analyze the problems with our higher-ed system, such as Richard Vedder’s Restoring the Promise and John Ellis’s The Breakdown of Higher Education. Unfortunately, a recent book by Oliver North is a big disappointment that will probably do more harm than good. Professor Joseph Knippenberg makes that case in today’s Martin Center article.

Knippenberg observes that the book is long on hot rhetoric but short on data. Repeatedly throwing around the term “Marxist” isn’t going to convince people who need convincing.

He also sees two huge flaws in the book: “First, the book contributes to a caricatured understanding of ‘Christians and conservatives’ that many of my colleagues across the academy already harbor. Entertaining that caricature is unworthy of them, but this book does absolutely nothing to dispel it.”

Indeed so. When you get into a topic such as the flaws in higher ed, you don’t want to write in a way that the other side can easily ridicule.

And, “Second, the book doesn’t accurately inform its principal audience, the ‘Christian and conservative’ grandparents and parents of college students, as well as the students themselves. In the spirit of full disclosure, these are my people: I’m a Christian and a conservative parent of recent college graduates, both of whom were homeschooled for almost the entirety of their pre-college education. The picture the authors rather sloppily paint overstates the dangers associated with higher education and misstates those dangers’ character.”

Read the whole thing.