Educators, like lawyers, seek to protect their rice bowls by building barriers against competition. The rationalization for preventing competition is that it protects the public from unqualified practitioners. When the profession thus insulated is also free of a self-cleaning mechanism and is further free of review by any entity outside the profession, a Mandarin class inevitably evolves.
Put another way, if the institution which exists inside these ramparts can rely on funding irrespective of whether or not it fulfills its classic role, it will become corrupt. Before the fall of the wall, the Poles used to say, "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." The entire Soviet Union disintegrated because there was no cleansing mechanism, no institutional checks or balances which identified and punished error and rewarded virtue and efficiency.
Today, the modern American university is analogous to the Soviet Union. They both contrived himto remove themselves from the marketplace. They both bloated to the point where the Soviet Union disintegrated, falling of its own weight, and our modern American universities are being abandoned by the free market. So long as the federal government pumps money into our universities without respect to producing a product which is accepted by the marketplace, the universities bloat.
It is not coincidental that the universities of today are reminiscent of the Soviet Union in their efforts to protect themselves by restricting free expression, free debate, and, of course, free criticism of the institution itself. The professors and the administrators have created a bubble which is very comfortable and cozy and, not at all incidentally, well-funded. But, Margaret Thatcher's Maxim now comes into play: socialism as grand until you run out of other people's money.
The reckoning cannot be long in coming and when it does it will be cataclysmic rather than gradual, just as happened to the Soviet Union.
Our universities require perestroika and certainly glasnost but are unlikely to reform themselves unless they are financially bankrupted. Obama will no doubt do everything in his power to protect these taxpayer subsidized socialist think tanks. The professors themselves had better start looking over their shoulders because they are likely to go the way of the American physician is going under Obamacare. Obama's siren will be exactly as he seduced the doctors and the insurance companies but his goal is to nationalize everything.
The threat for the health of the professors is their own ideology which is statist and which is reflexively opposed to the free market. They are ideologically predisposed to be seduced by Obama. The more they adhere to their ideology the more they must turn away from the ethos of the University as a oasis of inductive reasoning and revert to the Stalinist model of deductive protectionism and ruthlessly suppress freedom of thought. Thus they make certain their own demise.
