"And is it really good policy for Santorum to fill young adults with suspicions about higher learning..."

"... which rightly exists to challenge — in a healthy sense — what parents and maybe pastors have poured into them?" asks Frank Bruni.

If their beliefs survive that, then those beliefs can be seen as genuinely earned and are probably all the stronger for it. Santorum’s did. He went not only to college but also to two graduate schools, getting an M.B.A. from one and a law degree from the other.

But to listen to him talk about universities is to get the sense that he doesn’t trust others to emerge from such an obstacle course of unsavory influences as uncorrupted as he did. For safety’s sake, he’ll bless a little ignorance.

He’ll also massage facts. In explaining his Kennedy-induced nausea, he claimed that the former president had said that people of faith had no place in public life. What Kennedy asserted was infinitely more nuanced than that. He said people of all faiths were welcomed, so long as they weren’t slaves to their creeds.

Apparently, Santorum used bulimia against those ideas that the academics attempted to pour into him. Others digest what they've been fed.

Speaking of pukeworthy: "infinitely more nuanced." What is it about nuance that liberals love so much? And infinitely more nuanced? Ironically, that's quite crude. Infinitely? Kennedy had oodles and oodles of nuance. Or is it that Santorum, in Bruni's book, has zero nuance, so anyone with any nuance at all has infinitely more than Santorum?

And I love the way Bruni modifies his idea of challenging family and religious values with the phrase "in a healthy sense." There's no assurance of healthfulness!

And if challenge is so good, college students who were raised in liberal families with liberal or nonexistent religions are being horribly deprived!