by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n I<\/span>f you have a child in college or are yourself a college graduate, university panhandlers are constantly pestering you for money. Public institutions have seen state-money diminish, and private schools are competing fiercely to offer students the frills and amenities that keep prestige \u2014 and the salaries of administrators \u2014 high. The solution for both is to hit up alumni and the parents of students for the extra money needed to fund expansionist ambitions.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the universities have failed miserably at doing what presumably justifies their taxpayer subsidies: teaching future generations the knowledge of our public values, history, and culture, and inculcating the critical skills that make people fit to be free and independent citizens. Instead, the politicized university has been hijacked by a discredited political ideology and a postmodern sensibility riddled with intellectual errors any clever sophomore can spot. This unholy alliance of leftover leftism and postmodern bunkum defines the modern university\u2019s rigid orthodoxy.<\/p>\n The evidence for the university\u2019s failure to foster intellectual diversity rather than a political agenda has been documented over and over. The fate of Lawrence Summers at Harvard is merely the latest example of how much power political correctness wields. The president of the richest and supposedly best university in the country was driven from his office like a whipped dog, his public groveling apologies and fistfuls of money scattered on his enemies of no avail. Summers had blasphemed against the feminist dogma, and so he had to go.<\/p>\n Or consider Columbia University, in the midst of a seven-year, $4 billion fund-raising campaign. At Columbia you can find the Edward Said Chair in Middle East Studies. If there is one person who personifies the corruption of the American university it is the late Said, a documented fraud who lied about his privileged past and invented a persona as a \u201cPalestinian refugee\u201d the better to con guilty American academics. His 1978\u00a0Orientalism<\/i>, a tissue of postmodern claptrap and outright historical lies, has shaped the perceptions of Western-Islamic relations for decades now. It established the received wisdom of Western and Israeli culpability for the Islamic world\u2019s dysfunction, thus crippling us in our response to Islamic jihad. The Chair itself was funded by people virulently anti-Israel and supportive of the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization, which is why Columbia tried to keep the identities of the donors secret. Its first recipient, Rashid Khalidi, is a notorious spokesman and apologist for Palestinian terrorism. But then, so is most of Columbia\u2019s Middle Eastern Studies Department (see Jonathan Calt Harris\u2019 article atNational Review Online<\/i>, http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/comment\/comment-harris041503.asp).<\/p>\n B<\/span>ut we know all this. We know that professors are overwhelmingly liberal-left, as evidenced by the dominance of registered Democrats among the faculty. We know that most campuses are hostile to Christianity, constantly attempting to marginalize people of faith and remind them that they are little better than superstitious primitives \u2014 unless, of course, they are radical Muslims, who get a free pass since they are oppressed \u201cothers\u201d and victims of Western colonialism. We know that colleges regularly trample on the First Amendment with their speech codes that criminalize as \u201chate speech\u201d any point of view not endorsed by the faculty. We know that anti-Americanism, hatred of Israel, fashionable guilt over presumed Western sins and crimes all are received wisdom on our campuses, the shibboleths that facilitate hiring, promotion, tenure, and the next rung up the administrative ladder.<\/p>\n For all their noisy assertions of their \u201ccommitment to diversity,\u201d then, most universities are monolithic in their politics, their \u201cdiversity\u201d an issue of skin color or an exotic surname. That\u2019s why our campuses are filled with Caucasian Hispanics whose last names can be parlayed into preferences reserved for people \u201cof color.\u201d<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not just ideology that explains the corruption of the university. Rank careerism, opportunism, and professional perks are also part of the story. The proliferation of administrative fiefdoms \u2014 many invented to service campus \u201cdiversity\u201d machinery \u2014 has provided many more offices for wannabe administrators. Teaching loads at \u201cresearch\u201d universities are ridiculously low \u2014 five courses a year at the University of California, though the actual number is lower on average because of release time from the classroom. And remember, that\u2019s for an eight-month year.<\/p>\n I<\/span>f you\u2019re curious about what taxpayers and parents are getting for their money, peruse the latest catalogue of any university press. You\u2019ll see book after unreadable book that will be purchased only by a library, and then never read except by a stray graduate student padding a bibliography.<\/p>\n But the academic on the make has other ways to get out of the classroom. It\u2019s a curious phenomenon that the most ambitious careerists on most campuses are self-styled leftists. Their slogan is \u201cFight the Power!\u201d \u2014 but as an administrator with a fat pension and a 401K. No one seems puzzled by the fact that self-styled \u201crevolutionaries\u201d and battlers against the \u201cestablishment\u201d are so eager themselves to become the establishment by taking jobs where a premium is put on groupthink, deference to authority, and kowtowing to the more powerful.<\/p>\n Once in office, these champions of the oppressed and challengers of authority are adept at manipulating the system for their own benefit. Take Denice Denton, Chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Once appointed, she arranged for her same-sex \u201cpartner\u201d to get a cushy six-figure job that was not announced or advertised. In addition, the couple received $120,000 in moving expenses\u2013\u2013for people with a combined salary of half a million dollars. All while the university\u2019s blue-collar workers hadn\u2019t received a raise in three years.<\/p>\n Throw in the overwhelming dominance of left-wing speakers invited to campus conferences, forums, lecture series, and commencement ceremonies, and you have not a space for the \u201cfree play of the mind on all subjects,\u201d as Matthew Arnold defined a liberal education, but an echo chamber in which the same tired, discredited leftist and postmodern clich\u00e9s are endlessly recycled. Meanwhile grade inflation, lowered expectations, and politicized curricula insure that students graduate from most colleges knowing less of real value than a high school student did fifty years ago \u2014 while tuition costs year after year increase at roughly twice the rate of inflation.<\/p>\n It takes a peculiar effrontery for an enterprise doing such a bad job to raise its costs so much and then solicit even more money from its graduates and students\u2019 parents, the very people it rips off. That\u2019s why all of us need to respond to such demands with informed questions about what the institution wants to do with our money. Ask the fund-raisers when they call why their faculty teach so little, why they publish so much useless junk, why over-paid administrators proliferate like mushrooms on a lawn, why the campus allows one political point of view to dominate, why religion is so disrespected, why intolerance and bigotry are allowed to flourish even as the university touts its\u00a0 \u201ccommitment to diversity.\u201d<\/p>\n Then tell them no, hang up, and send a check instead to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, or the National Association of Scholars, or anyone else committed to restoring higher education to its true purpose: teaching young people how to be free citizens with independent minds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Where the monies flow from university coffers. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers If you have a child in college or are yourself a college graduate, university panhandlers are constantly pestering you for money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,802],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1l8","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5278,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/fighting-for-free-speech\/","url_meta":{"origin":5154,"position":0},"title":"Fighting for Free Speech","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 9, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"FIRE's guide to defending student rights on campuses by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers If you have a child in college the most important book you both should read is available free of charge. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has just released on-line its\u00a0FIRE's Guide to Free\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5183,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/denial-of-the-truth\/","url_meta":{"origin":5154,"position":1},"title":"Denial of the Truth","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 23, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Is UCLAProfs end academic freedom or McCarthyism? by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The politicizing of the American university is a fact. Polls and surveys of faculty voter registration, commencement speakers, curricula, reading lists, on-campus lecturers, and public pronouncements of administrators consistently reveal that our colleges and universities are dominated\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":527,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-wasted-educational-crisis\/","url_meta":{"origin":5154,"position":2},"title":"A Wasted Educational Crisis","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton Pope Center\u00a0Commentaries As former White House Chief of Staff and now Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel famously said, \u201cYou never want to let a serious crisis to go to waste.\u201d The economic Armageddon facing the country\u2019s largest state university system, the 23-campus California State University, undoubtedly qualifies\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5316,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-shiv-in-the-back\/","url_meta":{"origin":5154,"position":3},"title":"A Shiv in the Back","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 6, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"How politicized college courses mangle education. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers A review of Ben Shapiro's\u00a0Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth. The small cadre of conservatives in the university often feel like the Trojan princess Cassandra, who spent ten years telling everyone Troy would be destroyed without anyone ever\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5170,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/nothing-nuanced\/","url_meta":{"origin":5154,"position":4},"title":"Nothing Nuanced","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 16, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Academic \"diversity\" speak gives pass to jihad, anti-Semitism and censorship. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Hats off to the\u00a0UC Riverside College Republicans. They recently hosted a program that contrasted the sort of vile anti-Semitic slander that saturates the Muslim media, with the cartoons of Mohammed that sparked riots throughout\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3127,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/mission-lost\/","url_meta":{"origin":5154,"position":5},"title":"Mission Lost","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 5, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton City Journal \u201cWe offer unlimited opportunities to help students achieve their goals,\u201ddeclares\u00a0the California State University system on its homepage. \u201cWe prepare graduates who go on to make a difference in the workforce. We engage in research and creative activities leading to scientific, technical, artistic and social\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5154"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5154"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5155,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5154\/revisions\/5155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}