Welcome back to the re-education. Today's show is about college and humanities, and specifically

what I am calling the illiberal arts. My guest is Gabriel Noah Braun, the founding director

of the Center for Academic and Intellectual Freedom, a professor of English and world literature

at Northern Michigan University, and a co-host

of three Jews for Opinions, a wonderful podcast that I highly recommend.

Honey, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I thought, God, something happened. This is before cell phones.

I saw something happen to one of my brothers or my sister or my mom or something. I said, what's the matter, Dad?

He said, I went to see the guy's name was Charlie Delcher, who was a vice president of the

Farmers Bank, which was a state-owned bank that did a lot of the financing of people wanting to purchase a car.

He said, I went to Charlie and asked to borrow the money.

He said, he won't lend it to me.

He said, I'm so ashamed.

I'm so damn ashamed.

That was President Joe Biden, rambling, as is his want, about the shame his father felt when he could not secure a loan for Joe to attend college.

This story reveals Biden's age, because the federal government has, at least since 1965, guaranteed college loans for financial need, and since 1993, it has made those loans eligible for anyone.

Now, the problem is that too many students are graduating, more or worse, dropping out of college,

and they are saddled with crippling debt from those easy-to-get loans. So Joe Biden has

issued a constitutionally dubious decree to forgive up to $20,000 of that debt for students earning less than $125,000 a year.

Now, I'm not going to go through the reasons why I think this policy is ill-advised and amounts to a midterm bribe to likely Democratic voters.

For more on that, I recommend reading Charlie Cook at the National

Review or listening to Commentary's podcasts last week. I do, though, want to examine how college

has transformed as the cost of attending it has soared. And make no mistake, the price of college

...