The maddening, intolerable reality dragging down public universities is the outrageous effrontery of faculty along with the third-rate cowardice of boards of trustees and governors. How did it happen the pedagogical lunatics are running the academic asylum? Is there any precedent for it in any society?
Actually, yes: under socialism and communism: syndicalism, the ownership of the means of production by the workers. Management takes a back seat under this Marxian construct — just as at colleges and universities today, where faculty thumbs its nose at chancellors, presidents and — by extension — the public, as represented by trustees and governors.
In the process, faculty have lost the adulation bestowed on them from the birth of the Western academy in ancient Greece and Alexandria to the mid-20th century. The professoriate doesn’t care. Who could tell them what to do or dislodge them from their ivy towers, given their tenure, sabbaticals, arrogance, and brick and stone fortresses that can withstand a modern siege?
Ensconced and secure behind the ramparts, no one dares tell them to cease manipulating their students with radical doctrines, especially using banal pop history to make preposterous points. An example stands out. A freshman seminar at UNC-Chapel Hill that blames American exceptionalism and success for the 9-11 attacks.
Before the radicals made a clean sweep of liberal arts faculty, perhaps junk history like this could be tolerated as an example of academic freedom, posing a contrary view to stimulate thought and debate. Instead, this course is a product of the new normal, the continuing attack on Western and American institutions and values by teachers and professors waging a continued Cold War by other means — and of their own making,
“Politically correct” and “multicultural” were once obscure doctrines born on college campuses in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Today, the terms are commonplace in society, even trumpeted during presidential debates.
Under Obama-style socialism, Americans know in their bones things ain’t right. They should place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the coddled and sinister regime on campus — and the failure of the craven Babbits on the boards of trustees who allowed it to happen.