Charles J. Sykes’s latest indictment of higher education, Fail U., in stores Tuesday, comes at what’s widely considered a low point for the American college. “Brainwashed Bernie fanatics,” and a “crisis-level plague of indecency” have gripped campuses, reflected Rick Santorum in the minutes leading up to his Young Americans for Freedom address at George Washington University in late July. Sykes echoes the former Pennsylvania senator: “Despite the cant about ‘college for all,’ the reality is that too many students are already going to college.”

Fail U. re-ups the author’s earlier ProfScam—a junior college version of The Closing of the American Mind—to the tune of “I told you so.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that: Sykes, now a Milwaukee radio host, then a print journalist, did in fact tell them so. In 1988, he blamed the professoriate for “a modern university distinguished by costs that are zooming out of control, curriculums that look like they were designed by a game show host; lectures of droning mind-numbing dullness often to 1,000 or more semi-anonymous undergraduates.” The learned men and women cloistered within the scam just didn’t listen. (It may not help convince the skeptical that Fail U. reads like radio copy. Anyone not already predisposed to tune in for a well-reasoned but suitably sensational anti-college argument can just adjust the dial.)