Leftists seek power over others, and their usual tactic is to declare that something is a terrible threat and, with control, they’ll eliminate that threat. For Marxists, “capitalism” was that threat. For many contemporary academics, it is the horror they call “neoliberalism.”
In today’s Martin Center article, Philip Magness and Robertas Bakula write about this imaginary threat.
The authors write, “Rather than tackling the bad incentive structures that create these problems, much of academia has chosen to place the blame on a poltergeist called ‘neoliberalism.’ A vast and growing academic literature—particularly in the humanities and Critical Theory journals—purports to have identified this ghostly troublemaker on campus. Like the havoc-wreaking spectres of horror films, the neoliberal poltergeist allegedly moved into the university system over the last 30 years and made a mess of things. Higher-education commentators now routinely call for full-blown exorcism rituals to drive ‘neoliberalism’ out of the university system.”
This poltergeist manifests itself in the pockets of academic support for freedom: a non-interventionist economic system, free trade, educational freedom, free speech, and so on. But leftists abhor such arguments and, rather than contend with them intellectually, prefer to stamp them out.
As Magness and Bakula point out, American higher education is saturated with illiberalism and the threat of “neoliberalism” is unreal.
They conclude, “Thus, even when the ills of higher ed are correctly identified, we don’t need to call Ghostbusters to hunt down a ‘neoliberal’ poltergeist. The cause is neither a secret conspiracy nor the nonexistent ‘profit’ motive or influx of private-sector concepts. Instead, a more real culprit is institutional designs that make regular people react to bad incentives, fostering bureaucratic growth accompanied by inefficiency.”