The student Left may be no more than a part of the American charivari, destined to expire of its own excesses. Meanwhile, by its antic insistence that universities must be politicized to death, it is a menace. The demand is that universities be “democratized” like trade unions, but with one significant difference: Instead of being handed over to their master craftsmen after the guild pattern, universities are to be delivered into the hands of their entered apprentices. As Charles Frankel has remarked, “designing a university is not, after all, a form of action-painting”; and this nonsense that students ought to be “in charge” of academic institutions, having had its day, ought to be laughed out of court.
Reign of Inequality
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