I have been watching the sickening spectacle of — let’s call them what they are — Islamist Brownshirt mobs (and deluded fool hangers-on) at “elite” US campus.
Yes, I know that things are very different outside the Northeast. The Texas and Florida governors know what they are dealing with, and acted accordingly. (For once, I part company with FIRE’s director, even as I appreciate what he is doing and that his organization’s credibility leans on a reputation for even-handedness.)
But zooming out, this is just the most egregious example of decades of intellectual and moral corruption of the US academia. I left it for freer pastures abroad when I saw the writing on the wall over a decade ago (and a well-reputed institution—upon hearing I was “movable”—made me an offer). But I still kept hoping against hopes that things would turn around one day.
Instead, what we are seeing is Ernest Hemingway’s famous quote from “The Sun Also Rises”: bankruptcy arrived “at first gradually, then suddenly”. An inflection point has clearly been passed, and the rot runs much deeper than a resurgence of the oldest hatred — itself looking too well-orchestrated not to be coordinated from abroad.
I remember the late Liberal Party leader of Belgium, Jean Gol z”l saying (in French) that his country “souffre du SIDA politique au sens étymologique du mot” — suffers from political AIDS in the etymological sense of the word (i.e., Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome). I am afraid this is the case — both intellectually and morally — with American academia.
US academia broadly, and “elite” universities in particular, have been subject to hostile takeover by an administrative class for a few decades. Without any incentive to curb tuition costs, they run these places as money-making enterprises hiding behind nonprofit status. The more money flows in, the more they want — not to bankroll cutting-edge research, mind you, or offer a quality education (based on my experience with STEM graduate students, the ones who’d gone to small parochial colleges often had acquired more actual knowledge than the graduates of expensive big-name places). But: the better to empire-build, pour money into country club-level amenities and grandiose sports facilities that have zilch to do with education.
In about the last decade and a half, we’ve seen the first wave make an alliance of convenience with the second wave: radical “studies” graduates taking over branches like HR, and are obsessed with implementing their fauxversity, exclusion, and iniquity ideology at the expense of everything else (and hiring more of the same). They openly preach that past racism can only be remedied by present-day reverse racism. You see: when somebody is being electrocuted, the “remedy” is to reverse the polarity of the voltage.
Also, never mind that “white-adjacent” minorities like Asians are the “forgotten man” who ends up paying the bill for injustices to past generations that their own minority had zilch to do with. All because a group of talentless academic climbers — the ‘intellectual’ kin of the “Aryan Physics” movement in the Third Reich, which likewise wanted to “decolonize” science — see an opportunity to climb by pushing down others.
A third factor cannot go unmentioned. Foreign students — typically scions of rich families from China, Qatar, etc. — are a highly desired commodity for “elite” universities, as they tend to pay the ever more exorbitant tuition full-fare, without any discounts or financial aid. For them, the “elite” universities are finishing schools, pure and simple.
And like with any business, your best customers must be kept happy — be it by giving them easy “A”s or by letting them rampage and terrorize — not necessarily because you want them to do so, but because if you sic the police on them and they get arrested, they might lose their student visas.
I believe the question is no longer: can US academia be saved? But: does it even deserve to be?
When the rot in an edifice has proceeded beyond a certain point, remediation is no longer a realistic option. Instead, you tear down the house and rebuild it from the ground up — perhaps faithful to the original vision of the architect, if that’s worth preserving, but using construction materials and techniques that will prevent the rot from setting in again.
And what if the foundations are likewise rotten? Having taught the products of US public high schools, and having been shown by colleagues exam copy highlighting stunning ignorance of even the most basic facts, I can only conclude these schools were engaged in warehousing (with added indoctrination), and not in education at all. Sure, you always have the 15-20% or so self-motivated students who will learn despite the best efforts of the school to ruin them, and you have the increasingly large fraction of college students that should never have been admitted at all. But the rest of them have been extremly ill-served by 12 years of educational malpractice.
Replacing the rotten wood by the solid concrete foundation beams of a thorough HS education would reverberate much further than better-prepared college freshmen. Employers would no longer feel the need to hire college graduates for jobs that do not require actual college education, simply to have some assurance that they have skills one used to be able to expect of a HS graduate.[**]
And thus, a much leaner and hungrier higher education system would be brought back to its original core mission: teaching solid deep knowledge and carrying out frontier research that “boldly goes where none have gone before”.
[*] Jean Gol was actually a former Trotskyite who gained his spurs defending conscientious objectors in court. His doctoral thesis — laying out an alternative civilian service framework for draftees who had moral objections to serving in the military — ultimately was implemented in law with fairly minor modifications.
Then he saw some of the same people he had defended in court become supporters of PLO and PFLP terrorism — and got “mugged by reality”, becoming a mixture of Classical Liberal and “law-and-order” type. Within the Reformist Liberal Party which he headed, he was considered an exponent of the right wing.
[**] How was it possible for my undergrad college class to finish a joint B.Sc. and M.Sc. (including thesis!) degree in a mere four years total? In large measure because we had no “general subjects” worth speaking off — we got all of that in high school. Plus, we were worked so hard keeping up with material and labs that we would spend the meagre bits of spare time we had on socializing with friends and love interests — the few “activist” types we had usually had to drop out.
Spin, strangeness, and charm 