June 29, 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
This is segment 20 of the Nihilism series. All of the excerpts in the segment come from the book The Breakdown of Higher Education (2020) by John M. Ellis, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
My Takeaways:
Next:
The next segment (#21) is titled “Socialism in America.” All the excerpts are from the book Why You Should Be A Socialist by Nathan J. Robinson. He presents a case for America to become a socialist country.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This is segment 20 of the Nihilism series. All of the excerpts in the segment come from the book The Breakdown of Higher Education (2020) by John M. Ellis, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
My Takeaways:
- The traditional academy analytical approach to political ideas has been replaced with political advocacy wherein differing viewpoints from the campus orthodoxy are stamped out. This is happening throughout all campuses in the United States.
- At the heart of this problem is the teachers. Over time the left/right ratio of full university professors has moved from a 45 to 28 ratio in 1969 to an 8 to 1 ratio today. Further the ratio for the two junior ranks of professors is 49 to 1.
- Freedom of thought throughout the university system is constrained because the conclusion is fixed in advance by a political agenda.
- American history as now taught is largely distorted in order to paint as dark a picture of America as possible, against an objective to persuade people to accept equality of outcomes versus equality of opportunity.
- College campuses are replete with intimidation and radicalization. The radicalization includes ideological concepts of white privilege, critical legal studies, microaggressions, socialism, political correctness, and critical race theory.
- A return to traditional university principles and values would require complete reform of the current university system.
Next:
The next segment (#21) is titled “Socialism in America.” All the excerpts are from the book Why You Should Be A Socialist by Nathan J. Robinson. He presents a case for America to become a socialist country.
Happy Learning,
Harley
NIHILISM: GOOD OR BAD? – SEGMENT 20
THE BREAKDOWN OF HIGHER EDUCATION – EXCERPTS
The excerpts in this segment are from The Breakdown of Higher Education by John M. Ellis (2020)
INTRODUCTION: It is some 30 years since we began to see books warning of the destructive direction that higher education was taking. In retrospect, it now appears to me that we were all writing to diagnose a developing problem and to persuade academic colleagues that the direction in which they were taking education would be disastrous. Radical politics was a rising force on the campuses, and we were trying to draw attention to the dangers in what was happening while there was still some chance of arresting it. It’s too late for warnings about what may happen because it has already happened: the corruption of the campuses by radical politics is now well advanced. Accordingly, this book is of a different kind. Its purpose is threefold: first, to explain exactly what happened and what made it possible; next, to describe the frightening extent of the damage that has been done to all levels of education, including K-12, as well as the equally serious damage that is now being done to our society as a result; and finally, to consider what can be done about this educational and societal catastrophe. Unlike those books of 30 years ago, this one is not addressed to professors, because they are now the locus of the problem. Instead, it is addressed to people outside the academy.
WHAT DO THOSE NEAR-RIOTS TELL US about THE STATE OF HIGHER EDUCATION? The most important issue that emerges in everyone is the way in which the academy now deals with political ideas. The traditional academy specialized in analyzing them: it examined the pros and cons, the strengths and weaknesses of any idea, and looked into what the historical record showed of the opportunities and dangers held. But what recent campus episodes demonstrate is that advocacy has now replaced analysis as the central concern of the campuses. Campus political advocacy is more than passionate. It is ferocious. It has no time for quibbles about pros and cons of different viewpoints but aims to stamp out all opposition to a campus orthodoxy. The same thing is happening all across the country, in public institutions as well as private ones, in small liberal arts colleges just as in large research-oriented campuses, in fairly obscure institutions just as in the nation’s most prestigious campuses. It’s no longer possible to deny that we are dealing with a pervasive nationwide campus culture.
Today’s students must have gotten those resolutely closed minds from somewhere, and it’s not hard to figure out the most likely source: their teachers – the heart of the problem on campuses. The sheer number of professors involved in radical politics showed that the betrayal of reasoned debate and scholarship was definitely not the work of a typical few. On the contrary, very large numbers of college teachers were now so politically obsessed and so bitterly intolerant of other political stances that they could never provide the careful analytical thought and research expected of professors.
The pattern that emerges is one we find again and again: the degradation of campus life has been concentrated mainly in the humanities and social sciences but has a 100% presence in the newer “Studies” departments devoted to race and gender. A controlling majority of the faculty vehemently oppose a wide spectrum of political ideas and will not tolerate them either in classrooms or in public places. Censorship of ideas that offend campus orthodoxy happens long before it becomes visible at public lectures by visiting speakers, and that is why students have learned to shout those ideas down. What has made this censorship feasible is a systemic pattern of one-party appointments to the faculty over many years. When the great majority of the faculty speak in only one way, an ever-smaller minority of the faculty speak in only one way, an ever-smaller minority become increasingly unwilling to risk persecution by speaking in opposition. The ideas that are protected by this censorship are those of the people who now dominate the campus.
Fascist, bigot, racist, sexist, white supremacist: these words are all designated to stop analytical thought before it can even begin. If one were to take them away from campus radicals, they would be helpless – yet our campuses are now largely controlled by such intellectually stunted people. There is no way to soften a judgement of all this: higher education is very sick indeed. Radical politics has poisoned it so completely that universities now behave like anti-universities.
WHO ARE THE PEOPLE DESTROYING OUR UNIVERSITIES? There is much well-documented evidence to show that the change in the faculty over the last 50 years has been profound, and destructive to a degree that no one could ever have imagined. In 1969, 45% of faculty had political views that were left of liberal, which 27% were middle-of-the road, and 28% either moderately or strongly conservative. A survey conducted in 2006 showed that the pace of change was speeding up. It took thirty years for the 45 to 28 left/right ratio to reach the much sharper 5 to 1, but it took only eight more years for it to reach an utterly disastrous 8 to 1. What explains this sudden acceleration? The answer is not difficult to find. By the time that the campus left had achieved a 5 to 1 numerical superiority it was in a position to dominate the hiring process completely, and it was taking full advantage of that power. Politically based hiring could proceed at full steam. But there was more bad news as one in five professors in the social sciences self-identified as “Marxist.” Astonishing as this statistic is, it almost certainly understates the matter. The word “Marxist” does not play at all well with the general public, and many whose mental framework has been largely formed by Marx’s ideas prefer to describe themselves as “socialists” or “progressives,” or simply “activists.” We can assume, therefore, that the real number of people motivated by Marx’s ideas among social science professors is higher – a good deal more than one in five.
The left/right party registration balance was 8 to 1 for full professors, but the figure for the two junior ranks taken together was an astonishing 49 to 1. There are a number of highly disturbing implications in these numbers. The first is that as older professors retire, they are being replaced by a group whose political tilt is much more extreme, essentially to the exclusion of one side of the political spectrum. The second implication, an exceptionally important one, is that since these are campus wide numbers, including science and technology departments, there will soon be no difference between various departments. People who want to pack their departments with ideological soulmates are political activists, not academics; genuine professors of politics would know that insulating themselves from their opponents is intellectual suicide. First, political motives will always stunt intellectual curiosity. Freedom of thought is constrained when its conclusion is fixed in advance by a political agenda. Students will never learn to think for themselves if their thought processes must always conclude by fitting into a predetermined belief system. Second, political activism will always value politically desirable results more than the process by which conclusions are reached. Third, political activism wants action, while academic thought seeks understanding. All these differences in mental habits, taken together, tell us that political activism will always undermine and corrupt academic thought.
HOW WAS IT POSSIBLE FOR THIS TO HAPPEN? In 1962 a very small group that had a well-formulated plan to do exactly what has now happened: they were known as the Students for a Democratic Society. They were largely college students who saw their own society as undemocratic and oppressive because they were attracted to the Marxist ideas that then reigned in the twenty or so Marxist dictatorships already known to be among the unhappiest countries on earth. The manifesto they adopted described a plant that is almost identical to what has now happened to our colleges and universities. The “Port Huron Statement” began by holding America to be morally responsible for poverty and malnutrition in the world, not the government of the relevant countries. It went on to argue that democracy in America was a sham. They wanted to use the universities preemptively to mold the attitudes of people even younger and more inexperienced than themselves. There is a rather unkind word for this: indoctrination. And so, a tiny group of extreme leftists decided that though they could never win at the ballot box, they could still get what they wanted by gaining control over the universities – which they eventually did. They were planning not to advance democracy but to subvert it. How could the radicals possibly hope to succeed, and could they in fact have succeeded in their plans for academia? The answer is that they had one stroke of good fortune after another.
SABOTAGING EDUCATION FOR CITIZENSHIP: American history as now taught is largely distorted and risible. Why this is so follows inexorably from what is always the first concern of political radicals: to make the case for radical social change. To make the case for change that will be drastic and far-reaching, they must paint as dark a picture of America as possible, for only if people are persuaded that something is completely rotten will they accept that it needs to be transformed into something different. Faculty radicals need a government big enough and powerful enough to fundamentally reshape society as they want it to be. You can’t go beyond equality of opportunity to engineer equality of outcomes with limited government. Nor can you redistribute wealth from some people to others with a government that is forbidden to make unreasonable searches and seizures. Big government with unlimited powers is vital for socialist schemes. That’s why campus radicals don’t want students to study the Constitution, and why the rest of us have a large stake in making sure they do.
THE DECLINE OF AN INFORMED CITIZENRY: If graduates show serious ignorance of the history and political institutions of the society in which they live, that is exactly what one should have expected when campus requirements in American history and institutions and in Western civilization were abolished, coupled with so much faculty hostility to such courses. All of which is certainly alarming. But the level of our alarm should rise even higher when we contemplate one simple fact: teachers in high schools and elementary schools are all trained in colleges and universities. This should suggest that we are likely to find a corresponding deterioration in teaching at those levels too. And we do. The rot of higher education has spread to the K-12 schools and now undermines our whole educational system. If public education is now seriously deficient in any aspect, the groups most harmed will be ethnic minorities.
THE WRETCHED STATE OF THE CAMPUSES:
Intimidation: A survey published by the Harvard Crimson found that “around two-thirds of students who were surveyed had ‘at some point chosen not to express an opinion in an academic setting out of fear that it would offend others.’”
Radicalization: White Privilege: Campus radical talk accusingly of “white privilege,” meaning that whites have unearned advantages which they enjoy at the expense of others, and “cultural imperialism,” meaning that whites disparage other cultures when they try to make everyone else read and study aspects of their culture.
Critical Legal Studies: Critical Legal Studies is an entire program of studies present on many campuses. It’s based on the notion that the law is a means by which the haves exploit and keep down the have-nots. In this view, the law is a system of oppression and social control. In the real world beyond the campus, however, the rule of law protects the powerless, while its absence makes tyranny possible.
Microaggressions: The term “social justice” has now become common throughout the campuses of the nation. The campus radicals who speak of social justice have a very clear sense of what it means their radical political agenda of redistribution and a vastly increased role for government.
Socialism: A Gallup poll published on August 13, 2018, found that in the Democratic Party a comfortable majority (57%) now have a positive view of socialism, and that they outnumber those with a positive view of capitalism by a full 10 percentage points. And there is no doubt that when campus radicals talk about socialism, what they mean is not the political system of Norway, for example, which is a free-market (thus capitalist) country with a well-developed social welfare system, but rather the kind of socialism rooted in the ideas of Karl Marx. These figures should really make us sit up and take notice: more than half of 18-to-29-year-olds now look favorably on a political system that has brought misery wherever it has been tried, while their own country has achieved remarkable success by avoiding that mistake.
Political Correctness: Another source of organized large-scale deceitfulness on campus is the radicals’ heavy investment in the idea that racism and sexism are everywhere, on campus as well as off. But college campuses are now the most politically correct places on earth. If a genuine incident of racism or sexism ever does occur there, the campus goes into a frenzy, with an orgy of demonstrations, demands for more diversity offices, groveling apologies from administrators, and so on.
WHAT CAN BE DONE TO RESTORE HIGHER EDUCATION? If we take all of this together it amounts to a national crisis of vast proportions. Excellence in higher education was one of the major reasons for this nation’s success, but we are now living off the college education that was received by people who are fifty and older. The first attempt to give us hope comes from people who point out that it’s still possible for students to find some worthwhile courses and some capable professors – the student simply has to look carefully and choose wisely. A second way of trying to minimize the extent of the disaster in higher education is to focus on STEM fields – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. These will remain strong, it is said, because the radicals can’t infiltrate and control them as they do in the humanities and social sciences. Any solution that does not directly address and attempt to correct the problem of an overwhelmingly one-party, radical activist professoriate is not more than wishful thinking. The problem is one of personnel, not the rules of guidance. Any proposal of real reform must take aim directly at this problem of a concentration of people who don’t really belong in academia but are now numerous enough there to control and to abuse it for their own selfish purposes, and effectively destroy it.
There is a reform mechanism that is already well known in academia: departments that are judged to be corrupt or dysfunctional are sometimes placed “in receivership.” A new department chair is then appointed with independent authority to make new hires in order to bring the department back to health. A legislature might well act similarly by imposing a new management team on a campus, with independent power to make thoroughgoing reforms. That power would have to include the ability to abolish departments 1) whose sole purpose always was political (for example, the notorious “Studies” departments, or 2) that openly proclaim their mission to be political, usually by invoking the need to work for “social justice,” or 3) that have become so completely subservient to radical politics that their proper academic mission has now been replaced almost entirely by a political one. The diversity bureaucracy should certainly be defunded and dismantled, to end its poisonous influence on the campus. These are extraordinary measures, and as such they may seem disturbing – but they are far less disturbing than the alternative of letting things go on as they are.
Ultimately, reform will depend on the people who demand it. It must include an end to the one-party faculty, the removal of radical activists who politicize classrooms, an end to condoning thuggish intolerance, the dismantling of the campus diversity apparatus, the reintroduction of knowledge of and respect for our history and our Constitution, the replacing of cowardly administrators with people who will maintain and protect the integrity of their campuses, and the appointment of trustees who are watchdogs and not lapdogs. In the end a citizenry that will not accept a thoroughly corrupt higher education must prevail.
Source: The Breakdown of Higher Education by John M. Ellis
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE BREAKDOWN OF HIGHER EDUCATION – EXCERPTS
The excerpts in this segment are from The Breakdown of Higher Education by John M. Ellis (2020)
INTRODUCTION: It is some 30 years since we began to see books warning of the destructive direction that higher education was taking. In retrospect, it now appears to me that we were all writing to diagnose a developing problem and to persuade academic colleagues that the direction in which they were taking education would be disastrous. Radical politics was a rising force on the campuses, and we were trying to draw attention to the dangers in what was happening while there was still some chance of arresting it. It’s too late for warnings about what may happen because it has already happened: the corruption of the campuses by radical politics is now well advanced. Accordingly, this book is of a different kind. Its purpose is threefold: first, to explain exactly what happened and what made it possible; next, to describe the frightening extent of the damage that has been done to all levels of education, including K-12, as well as the equally serious damage that is now being done to our society as a result; and finally, to consider what can be done about this educational and societal catastrophe. Unlike those books of 30 years ago, this one is not addressed to professors, because they are now the locus of the problem. Instead, it is addressed to people outside the academy.
WHAT DO THOSE NEAR-RIOTS TELL US about THE STATE OF HIGHER EDUCATION? The most important issue that emerges in everyone is the way in which the academy now deals with political ideas. The traditional academy specialized in analyzing them: it examined the pros and cons, the strengths and weaknesses of any idea, and looked into what the historical record showed of the opportunities and dangers held. But what recent campus episodes demonstrate is that advocacy has now replaced analysis as the central concern of the campuses. Campus political advocacy is more than passionate. It is ferocious. It has no time for quibbles about pros and cons of different viewpoints but aims to stamp out all opposition to a campus orthodoxy. The same thing is happening all across the country, in public institutions as well as private ones, in small liberal arts colleges just as in large research-oriented campuses, in fairly obscure institutions just as in the nation’s most prestigious campuses. It’s no longer possible to deny that we are dealing with a pervasive nationwide campus culture.
Today’s students must have gotten those resolutely closed minds from somewhere, and it’s not hard to figure out the most likely source: their teachers – the heart of the problem on campuses. The sheer number of professors involved in radical politics showed that the betrayal of reasoned debate and scholarship was definitely not the work of a typical few. On the contrary, very large numbers of college teachers were now so politically obsessed and so bitterly intolerant of other political stances that they could never provide the careful analytical thought and research expected of professors.
The pattern that emerges is one we find again and again: the degradation of campus life has been concentrated mainly in the humanities and social sciences but has a 100% presence in the newer “Studies” departments devoted to race and gender. A controlling majority of the faculty vehemently oppose a wide spectrum of political ideas and will not tolerate them either in classrooms or in public places. Censorship of ideas that offend campus orthodoxy happens long before it becomes visible at public lectures by visiting speakers, and that is why students have learned to shout those ideas down. What has made this censorship feasible is a systemic pattern of one-party appointments to the faculty over many years. When the great majority of the faculty speak in only one way, an ever-smaller minority of the faculty speak in only one way, an ever-smaller minority become increasingly unwilling to risk persecution by speaking in opposition. The ideas that are protected by this censorship are those of the people who now dominate the campus.
Fascist, bigot, racist, sexist, white supremacist: these words are all designated to stop analytical thought before it can even begin. If one were to take them away from campus radicals, they would be helpless – yet our campuses are now largely controlled by such intellectually stunted people. There is no way to soften a judgement of all this: higher education is very sick indeed. Radical politics has poisoned it so completely that universities now behave like anti-universities.
WHO ARE THE PEOPLE DESTROYING OUR UNIVERSITIES? There is much well-documented evidence to show that the change in the faculty over the last 50 years has been profound, and destructive to a degree that no one could ever have imagined. In 1969, 45% of faculty had political views that were left of liberal, which 27% were middle-of-the road, and 28% either moderately or strongly conservative. A survey conducted in 2006 showed that the pace of change was speeding up. It took thirty years for the 45 to 28 left/right ratio to reach the much sharper 5 to 1, but it took only eight more years for it to reach an utterly disastrous 8 to 1. What explains this sudden acceleration? The answer is not difficult to find. By the time that the campus left had achieved a 5 to 1 numerical superiority it was in a position to dominate the hiring process completely, and it was taking full advantage of that power. Politically based hiring could proceed at full steam. But there was more bad news as one in five professors in the social sciences self-identified as “Marxist.” Astonishing as this statistic is, it almost certainly understates the matter. The word “Marxist” does not play at all well with the general public, and many whose mental framework has been largely formed by Marx’s ideas prefer to describe themselves as “socialists” or “progressives,” or simply “activists.” We can assume, therefore, that the real number of people motivated by Marx’s ideas among social science professors is higher – a good deal more than one in five.
The left/right party registration balance was 8 to 1 for full professors, but the figure for the two junior ranks taken together was an astonishing 49 to 1. There are a number of highly disturbing implications in these numbers. The first is that as older professors retire, they are being replaced by a group whose political tilt is much more extreme, essentially to the exclusion of one side of the political spectrum. The second implication, an exceptionally important one, is that since these are campus wide numbers, including science and technology departments, there will soon be no difference between various departments. People who want to pack their departments with ideological soulmates are political activists, not academics; genuine professors of politics would know that insulating themselves from their opponents is intellectual suicide. First, political motives will always stunt intellectual curiosity. Freedom of thought is constrained when its conclusion is fixed in advance by a political agenda. Students will never learn to think for themselves if their thought processes must always conclude by fitting into a predetermined belief system. Second, political activism will always value politically desirable results more than the process by which conclusions are reached. Third, political activism wants action, while academic thought seeks understanding. All these differences in mental habits, taken together, tell us that political activism will always undermine and corrupt academic thought.
HOW WAS IT POSSIBLE FOR THIS TO HAPPEN? In 1962 a very small group that had a well-formulated plan to do exactly what has now happened: they were known as the Students for a Democratic Society. They were largely college students who saw their own society as undemocratic and oppressive because they were attracted to the Marxist ideas that then reigned in the twenty or so Marxist dictatorships already known to be among the unhappiest countries on earth. The manifesto they adopted described a plant that is almost identical to what has now happened to our colleges and universities. The “Port Huron Statement” began by holding America to be morally responsible for poverty and malnutrition in the world, not the government of the relevant countries. It went on to argue that democracy in America was a sham. They wanted to use the universities preemptively to mold the attitudes of people even younger and more inexperienced than themselves. There is a rather unkind word for this: indoctrination. And so, a tiny group of extreme leftists decided that though they could never win at the ballot box, they could still get what they wanted by gaining control over the universities – which they eventually did. They were planning not to advance democracy but to subvert it. How could the radicals possibly hope to succeed, and could they in fact have succeeded in their plans for academia? The answer is that they had one stroke of good fortune after another.
- The national unrest over the mishandling of the war in Vietnam by the political class.
- The sudden massive expansion of the universities at exactly the right, or rather, the wrong time – 1965 to 1975.
- The morphing of the civil rights movement into a powerful regime of identity politics.
- A 1978 Supreme Court decision which ruled that seeking diversity in the student body was a legitimate and lawful goal.
SABOTAGING EDUCATION FOR CITIZENSHIP: American history as now taught is largely distorted and risible. Why this is so follows inexorably from what is always the first concern of political radicals: to make the case for radical social change. To make the case for change that will be drastic and far-reaching, they must paint as dark a picture of America as possible, for only if people are persuaded that something is completely rotten will they accept that it needs to be transformed into something different. Faculty radicals need a government big enough and powerful enough to fundamentally reshape society as they want it to be. You can’t go beyond equality of opportunity to engineer equality of outcomes with limited government. Nor can you redistribute wealth from some people to others with a government that is forbidden to make unreasonable searches and seizures. Big government with unlimited powers is vital for socialist schemes. That’s why campus radicals don’t want students to study the Constitution, and why the rest of us have a large stake in making sure they do.
THE DECLINE OF AN INFORMED CITIZENRY: If graduates show serious ignorance of the history and political institutions of the society in which they live, that is exactly what one should have expected when campus requirements in American history and institutions and in Western civilization were abolished, coupled with so much faculty hostility to such courses. All of which is certainly alarming. But the level of our alarm should rise even higher when we contemplate one simple fact: teachers in high schools and elementary schools are all trained in colleges and universities. This should suggest that we are likely to find a corresponding deterioration in teaching at those levels too. And we do. The rot of higher education has spread to the K-12 schools and now undermines our whole educational system. If public education is now seriously deficient in any aspect, the groups most harmed will be ethnic minorities.
THE WRETCHED STATE OF THE CAMPUSES:
Intimidation: A survey published by the Harvard Crimson found that “around two-thirds of students who were surveyed had ‘at some point chosen not to express an opinion in an academic setting out of fear that it would offend others.’”
Radicalization: White Privilege: Campus radical talk accusingly of “white privilege,” meaning that whites have unearned advantages which they enjoy at the expense of others, and “cultural imperialism,” meaning that whites disparage other cultures when they try to make everyone else read and study aspects of their culture.
Critical Legal Studies: Critical Legal Studies is an entire program of studies present on many campuses. It’s based on the notion that the law is a means by which the haves exploit and keep down the have-nots. In this view, the law is a system of oppression and social control. In the real world beyond the campus, however, the rule of law protects the powerless, while its absence makes tyranny possible.
Microaggressions: The term “social justice” has now become common throughout the campuses of the nation. The campus radicals who speak of social justice have a very clear sense of what it means their radical political agenda of redistribution and a vastly increased role for government.
Socialism: A Gallup poll published on August 13, 2018, found that in the Democratic Party a comfortable majority (57%) now have a positive view of socialism, and that they outnumber those with a positive view of capitalism by a full 10 percentage points. And there is no doubt that when campus radicals talk about socialism, what they mean is not the political system of Norway, for example, which is a free-market (thus capitalist) country with a well-developed social welfare system, but rather the kind of socialism rooted in the ideas of Karl Marx. These figures should really make us sit up and take notice: more than half of 18-to-29-year-olds now look favorably on a political system that has brought misery wherever it has been tried, while their own country has achieved remarkable success by avoiding that mistake.
Political Correctness: Another source of organized large-scale deceitfulness on campus is the radicals’ heavy investment in the idea that racism and sexism are everywhere, on campus as well as off. But college campuses are now the most politically correct places on earth. If a genuine incident of racism or sexism ever does occur there, the campus goes into a frenzy, with an orgy of demonstrations, demands for more diversity offices, groveling apologies from administrators, and so on.
WHAT CAN BE DONE TO RESTORE HIGHER EDUCATION? If we take all of this together it amounts to a national crisis of vast proportions. Excellence in higher education was one of the major reasons for this nation’s success, but we are now living off the college education that was received by people who are fifty and older. The first attempt to give us hope comes from people who point out that it’s still possible for students to find some worthwhile courses and some capable professors – the student simply has to look carefully and choose wisely. A second way of trying to minimize the extent of the disaster in higher education is to focus on STEM fields – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. These will remain strong, it is said, because the radicals can’t infiltrate and control them as they do in the humanities and social sciences. Any solution that does not directly address and attempt to correct the problem of an overwhelmingly one-party, radical activist professoriate is not more than wishful thinking. The problem is one of personnel, not the rules of guidance. Any proposal of real reform must take aim directly at this problem of a concentration of people who don’t really belong in academia but are now numerous enough there to control and to abuse it for their own selfish purposes, and effectively destroy it.
There is a reform mechanism that is already well known in academia: departments that are judged to be corrupt or dysfunctional are sometimes placed “in receivership.” A new department chair is then appointed with independent authority to make new hires in order to bring the department back to health. A legislature might well act similarly by imposing a new management team on a campus, with independent power to make thoroughgoing reforms. That power would have to include the ability to abolish departments 1) whose sole purpose always was political (for example, the notorious “Studies” departments, or 2) that openly proclaim their mission to be political, usually by invoking the need to work for “social justice,” or 3) that have become so completely subservient to radical politics that their proper academic mission has now been replaced almost entirely by a political one. The diversity bureaucracy should certainly be defunded and dismantled, to end its poisonous influence on the campus. These are extraordinary measures, and as such they may seem disturbing – but they are far less disturbing than the alternative of letting things go on as they are.
Ultimately, reform will depend on the people who demand it. It must include an end to the one-party faculty, the removal of radical activists who politicize classrooms, an end to condoning thuggish intolerance, the dismantling of the campus diversity apparatus, the reintroduction of knowledge of and respect for our history and our Constitution, the replacing of cowardly administrators with people who will maintain and protect the integrity of their campuses, and the appointment of trustees who are watchdogs and not lapdogs. In the end a citizenry that will not accept a thoroughly corrupt higher education must prevail.
Source: The Breakdown of Higher Education by John M. Ellis
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 20_nihilism_higher_education_--_segment_20.pdf |