Can America Survive the Arrogant Elitist Imbeciles of Academia?
Universities are supposed to be places where genuine learning occurs, where the atmosphere of academic freedom abounds for intellectual stimulation, experimentation, inquiry, debate and speculation. In other words, universities are supposed to be portals to the universe of truth, knowledge and wisdom. We are not speaking here of the professional training one may get in, say, law, medicine, or one of the hard sciences. We are speaking here of the undergraduate university where one is supposed to ponder the central problems of philosophy and ethics, where one absorbs the quintessential and seminal lessons from the purely academic study of history, literature, mathematics, and the social and physical sciences, as distinct from professional and technical subjects, in other words, the Liberal Arts and Humanities. These are the basis of all true education and without them there can be no serious level of learning. There used to be a reasonable correlation between a degree from a famous educational institution and an excellent education. But correlation is not causation, as one saying goes. An Ivy League degree may be handsome, but, as another saying goes, Handsome is as handsome does. It may be true that a degree from a major institution makes it easier to find high paying jobs, but it is now questionable whether the actual education one obtains there is real.
The purpose of a university education is to provide the tools for an intellectual life, for an ongoing process of thought, ideation and self-learning, for constant and relentless inquiry and expansion of experience and knowledge. Indeed, these are bound to continue beyond a single lifespan, by virtue of the fact that one’s participation in the process contributes to a vast and ready repository of knowledge and wisdom as it is passed on to future generations and is ever added to by them. A university is NOT supposed to be a place where someone stuffs your head with propaganda and tells you not to examine it further or warns you not to crash its boundaries by questioning its highly questionable premises. But there is a danger that when the core disciplines are taught by professors whose minds and ideas are imbued with a bias, what they teach will also be biased, thus the student absorbs only one side of an argument.
Noam Chomsky has often called the US a terrorist country, which it clearly is not, despite what he presents as his “research.” Cornell West has preached an afro-centric line of academic-sounding racist drivel for years, attacking black Conservatives as “playing a dangerous game.”
Thomas Sowell, Ward Connerly, Michael Steele, Condoleeza Rice and J.C. Watts are not playing any kind of game, but Cornell West certainly is. He plays the “dangerous game” of Social-Liberal politics, while masquerading as an enlightened intellectual. Bill Ayers, who supported Barack Obama and helped engineer his Alinsky-inspired Marxism, recently said that Obama ought to be tried for war crimes. Chomsky, West and Ayers are academics who, at one time or other, have been affiliated with universities of high reputation. Not every university student comes under the direct influence of these particular academics, but the erosive mindset they represent too often replaces objective debate and the fostering of truly enlightened opinion on far too many US university campuses.
Further, the objectivity necessary to academic freedom is impossible when Political Correctness, an exclusive tool of the Left, is used to quash objective debate or challenge to its entrenched viewpoint, and no other interpretation of philosophic issues, social issues, or even lessons of history are tolerated. In a June 2013 article entitled “Political Correctness is About to Get Even Worse on College Campuses,” author David Masciotra put it plainly. “Higher educational institutions should function as fertilizers for the free exchange of ideas. Instead they are transforming into bloodless and boring breeding grounds for sensitivity captains who think the world’s biggest problems are flirtatious comments, jokes about cleavage, and books with pictures of scary people on the cover, and it is all done in the name of liberalism…” If a university atmosphere is heavily Left-Liberal, it is certain that the education provided at that university will also be Left-Liberal. And if Political Correctness is employed to stifle challenges to Left-Liberal thinking, there is no academic or intellectual freedom. There is instead, doctrinaire intellectual repression under which truth and its quest will die.
So why does this condition of tyrannical Social-Liberalism prevail on so many university campuses? Is it naivete in the face of an overwhelming mountain of evidence that Social Liberalism is insanity? Or is it that so many university campuses are populated by promoters of an insane ideology because they are insane themselves? It is a given that generational inbreeding leads to insanity and mental retardation with almost calculable certainty. This is as true with intellectual and academic inbreeding as it is with genetic inbreeding. The current situation on university campuses seems to prove this out with a vengeance. What is defined as Liberalism pervades with pandemic virulence the so-called institutions of higher learning. It is certain that decades of teaching and learning the same Leftist rot has created a massive number of academics and intellectuals who are incapable of any reaction to the philosophy of individual rights and liberty that is not knee-jerk (I would add, angrily, with emphasis on the jerk part).
The title of “Professor” credits one for being highly intelligent and association with the Ivory Tower of Academe has always carried with it a level of arrogance, presumably earned by ones intellectual achievements. But this can be deceptive in the case of Social Liberals. For, how can the promulgation of tired, old, failed notions prove ones intelligence? The greatest ideas on the planet that have been tested and proven to be gloriously successful are the very ones on which this nation was founded. They grew out of what was called “The Enlightenment” and were fashioned into the finest, most intelligently constructed set of documents that have ever existed in the history of mankind. Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and Madison were far seeing in a way that Karl Marx and those that pushed his ideology were not.
It is a fact that the ideas of our nation’s Founding Fathers, which espouse free enterprise and individual liberty, have led to the highest level of political, economic and social prosperity ever known in human history, while ideas that espouse collectivism and its concomitants of socialism, communism and social-liberalism, have led to political, economic and social degeneracy. If anyone earned the right to arrogance, it was the Founders of our republic and not the “professors” who disparage it and them. It is sadly ironic that Social Liberalism as a philosophy is nothing more than the dilution of the Founders’ philosophy with elements of socialism, serving only to weaken the Founders’ extraordinary success. Thus, Social-Liberals take a perfectly workable set of premises and weaken them with unworkable elements. They use freedom to impede freedom. Is this ironic or tragic? Is it brilliant or just stupid? Socialism in all its forms has proven to be an abject failure, thus it is clearly NOT enlightened. So why not throw it out and accept the one philosophy that is truly enlightened? Only the mentally retarded or insane would do such a thing and only the mentally retarded and insane would praise doing it.
Yet studies in recent years have shown that college faculties by large percentages continue to be staunchly and stubbornly Liberal in their thinking and support Political Correctness to enforce their views. Free speech seems to be a dying animal on college campuses and the promise of a true education is dying with it. In a 2005 article in the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz states, “By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative.” In another article on the same subject entitled “Should we care that US universities are ‘too liberal’” the author says, “America’s top universities seem to offer everything except conservative views. That’s not healthy for political debate.” In an article from October of 2012 entitled “Moving Further to the Left,” author Scott Laschik states, “Academics, on average, lean to the left. A survey being released today suggests that they are moving even more in that direction. Among full-time faculty members at four-year colleges and universities, the percentage identifying as ‘far left’ or liberal has increased notably in the last three years, while the percentage identifying in three other political categories has declined.’”
These represent only a small section of commentary on the situation. Leftist propaganda is so rampant in politics that it sometimes makes one’s senses dull to it. When yet another TV news clip appears with Charles Schumer on it, I change the channel in the hope of finding something more entertaining or enriching. This is at times amusing. But when we realize that the same degenerate propaganda spewed by Schumer and his ilk also forms the philosophic premises on which our children are being taught, it hits close enough to home that it ought to alarm us, every one. I should add that the use of the term “Philosophic” in reference to Charles Schumer is itself a ridiculous irony. He is nothing more than an opportunist politician and if I have accused him of having the brains to grasp the destructive nature of the very philosophy he embraces, I truly apologize to Mr. Schumer. Possessing an enlightened intellect is the last thing I’d accuse him of.
The destructive ideas of Leftist Social Liberalism come from somewhere and it is not directly from the politicians. Despite the repeated proven failure of Socialism over the better part of a century, its idea is being kept alive, like a brain floating in a jar of murky fluid, on university campuses, and the white coated “mad scientists” who are keeping its defunct cells alive are members of Leftist university faculties. Why? Because they themselves have been infected with the disease of Social-Liberalism and in the degenerate structure of their minds, the ghost still haunts, like the fumes of a corpse that will not lie down and die properly. In my opinion, this makes questionable whether one should expose one’s children to such an atmosphere. Would it be better just to buy many, many books and encourage them to read the lessons of history on their own? No, of course it wouldn’t. Higher education needs instruction and it is incumbent upon parents to find a way to keep their children from the infection of bad ideas. Moreover, the need of a university to keep its endowments full in order to remain viable comes before its desire to enable the Noam Chomskys, the Bill Ayerses and Cornell Wests to infect our children with their ideas. If that were their sole purpose, then universities would provide little or no hope for a true education and would eventually be forced to close their doors.
Is it possible, then, for all this to change and for a new flowering of true education on college campuses that is without the taint of a Social-Liberal slant and the pernicious tyranny of Political Correctness? Of course there is, because there has to be. Universities will have to find a way out of the present situation, because, if they don’t release themselves from the stranglehold of modern Social Liberalism and replace it with true academic and intellectual freedom, a new Dark Ages will descend. And a nation can die when its intellectual and academic roots rot. Social-Liberalism is dying already, anyway. It is eroding from within and will eventually collapse from its own decay and the universities will have to be ready for that eventuality. They may believe that they are safe for the moment, so long as the truth is not recognized by the public at large and an outcry against them does not develop. But the public is losing interest, at least in one way that may be difficult for universities to follow.
The proliferation of private and online schools, calling themselves universities and offering short-term, practical courses of study in business, the technical fields, education and the law are drawing large enrollments of students who have little or no interest in struggling through a four-year Liberal Arts program. But the shorter, more convenient approach they provide may not be the only reason they are becoming hugely popular. The atmosphere on university campuses may be too hostile for students for whom the term “education” equates more with practical immediacy and less with struggle and the spectre of Political Correctness. There is no sensitivity training required of accountants and computer specialists, at least on at University of Phoenix or DeVry University, and ITT does not offer a Black, Womens or Gay Studies major.
To be sure, Liberal Arts education is not dead, but it may be less and less inviting when the choice of a job is juxtaposed with what passes today for a university education. Universities will eventually realize that doctrinaire academics discourage the enthusiasm many people feel for paying enormous sums for the privilege of being indoctrinated. A degree from Harvard, Yale or Princeton is hardly necessary to get a job in teaching, finance or even law nowadays. Mostly, they are good for becoming yet another academic professor, and if the prevailing need seems to be for Social Liberal academic professors, then there will continue to be a market for their credentials, but market trends change even for university professors. Eventually, professors may have to jettison their Leftist bent and then what will they do when this is the basis of all their thinking?
Such change can be difficult and slow. It may take decades, but it will come with an outcry from the rational elements of the population demanding that their children be educated in an open environment, free of forced ideologies and without the imposition of Political Correctness, where free speech and free exchanges of ideas takes place without restriction. But whether or not this promises to happen in our lifetime remains open to question.
FJ Rocca
FJ Rocca is an independent, conservative writer/blogger of fiction and non-fiction, most interested in the philosophy of American Conservatism. Clarity is more important than eloquence, but truth is vital in human discourse.
