Yet, all the evidence of higher education's vast moral failure notwithstanding, most liberals deny the link between immoral values and higher education and continue to perpetuate the myth of education as the solution to society's problems.

They do so for a number of reasons.

First, the university is to the secular liberal what the church is to a religious Christian or a yeshiva (Talmudic academy) is to a religious Jew -- a place of holiness and the epicenter of his values.

Second, it is through control of higher education (and the media) that liberal and leftist values are most effectively communicated to the next generation. Even the media have somewhat more ideological diversity than Western universities, which almost exclusively convey a leftist worldview.

Third, a secular liberal education is the best antidote to the Judeo-Christian value system that the left most fears.

And there is a fourth reason why a Democratic senator, in particular, would say that education is the "the answer to all other problems." Teachers unions and the National Education Association provide major political and financial support to the Democratic Party.

There is, of course, a form of education that can indeed solve most of society's problems: moral education. That would consist of teaching young people what is good and what is bad, how to develop personal integrity and providing them with the life stories of the best individuals in history.

But little or none of that is now done in schools. "Good" and "bad" are terms that are rarely used, and usually derided as "Manichaean." Personal integrity is essentially defined as taking liberal positions on social issues such as global warming, same-sex marriage and income redistribution. And the best Americans -- those who laid the foundations of our liberty -- have generally been vilified as slave owners and racists.

So, Sen. Dodd, education as it presently exists, is not the answer to all of society's problems. Indeed, it is at least as often the source of many of them.