Shedding Light on Lumina and Its College Agenda

American higher education is struggling. Even before the coronavirus struck, schools all over the country were dealing with declining enrollment. In an effort to replace lost revenue they sought out international students, developed online degrees, and courted non-traditional students.

That helped for a while. But now many schools are back in trouble. Even before COVID-19, international enrollments were headed down and non-traditional students, who rarely want to live in dorms or buy a meal plan, were not the cash cows that everyone hoped.

Add to that concerns about student loan debt, reports that many graduates are unemployed or underemployed, and diminishing public confidence in academia, and you have some very worried college presidents.

Enter the Lumina Foundation. Boasting a $1.4 billion endowment, it seeks to take us to a point where 60 percent of Americans have a post-secondary credential of some sort by 2025. That would mean a 10 percent increase in the number of working-age Americans who have finished some sort of degree. (President Obama announced his determination to reach those goals early in his administration.)

That is music to the ears of financially strapped colleges, but how this benefits those additional 20 million students is less certain.

I recently returned to college to buff my degree collection. As expected, there is a significant degree of indoctrination in some of the classes. Social Justice and AGW claims are rampant, with cherry-picked events to promote social justice arguments and no actual scientific support for the AGW claims. Basically, it’s promoted the way a state religion would be - assume it’s true and ridicule any attempted counterargument. Fortunately, I know to avoid drawing attention to my non-PC perspective.

I am forced to the conclusion that there is a mandate to include this liberal indoctrination in each and every class. Fortunately I am currently majoring in math and it is really hard to crowbar most of that crap into a math class. They have to do it in the general education requirements (which is clearly why those exist - who really needs to take “Art Appreciation” unless they are struggling to survive academically while playing a sport for the school?) I took two required history classes; in the first it was all about slavery, and in the second it was all about progressivism. There was very little in the way of actual history except to cherry-pick specific events to “prove” that whites, especially white men, are all evil and to blame for all the world’s ills. Since I read history (real history) for fun, I knew the difference, but if that is the kind of crap they teach everywhere nowadays, no wonder the kids are in the streets.

I think the reason people without a college education heavily favor Trump is because they were either too smart to be indoctrinated and refused to deal with the new state religion or they simply didn’t need to go to college to do what they chose to do and thus avoided the indoctrination altogether.

And I think that is why they keep pushing this crap down to earlier and earlier, so they can catch the ones that would otherwise get away. Now they want to provide indoctrination camps, er, preschool for all kids starting at 3.

Hillary's flat-out merge with Bernie's Socialist agenda "outs" an oft-overlooked imperative for the Democrat Party's hard, unbending stand on abortion, as declared in the first paragraph of a late-1800's analysis of "The Impracticability of Socialism." In that paragraph, the writer's point seems to be that under Socialism, ordinary human population growth cannot be economically supported.

The following is quoted from the Liberty Fund Library "A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation," edited by Thomas Mackay (1849 - 1912), Chapter 1, final paragraphs from Edward Stanley Robertson's essay, "The Impracticability of Socialism":
Note the writer's emphasis that the "scheme of Socialism" requires what he calls "the power of restraining the increase in population"--long the essential and primary focus of the Democrat Party in the U. S.:
"I have suggested that the scheme of Socialism is wholly incomplete unless it includes a power of restraining the increase of population, which power is so unwelcome to Englishmen that the very mention of it seems to require an apology. I have showed that in France, where restraints on multiplication have been adopted into the popular code of morals, there is discontent on the one hand at the slow rate of increase, while on the other, there is still a 'proletariat,' and Socialism is still a power in politics.
I.44
"I have put the question, how Socialism would treat the residuum of the working class and of all classes—the class, not specially vicious, nor even necessarily idle, but below the average in power of will and in steadiness of purpose. I have intimated that such persons, if they belong to the upper or middle classes, are kept straight by the fear of falling out of class, and in the working class by positive fear of want. But since Socialism purposes to eliminate the fear of want, and since under Socialism the hierarchy of classes will either not exist at all or be wholly transformed, there remains for such persons no motive at all except physical coercion. Are we to imprison or flog all the 'ne'er-do-wells'?
I.45
"I began this paper by pointing out that there are inequalities and anomalies in the material world, some of which, like the obliquity of the ecliptic and the consequent inequality of the day's length, cannot be redressed at all. Others, like the caprices of sunshine and rainfall in different climates, can be mitigated, but must on the whole be endured. I am very far from asserting that the inequalities and anomalies of human society are strictly parallel with those of material nature. I fully admit that we are under an obligation to control nature so far as we can. But I think I have shown that the Socialist scheme cannot be relied upon to control nature, because it refuses to obey her. Socialism attempts to vanquish nature by a front attack. Individualism, on the contrary, is the recognition, in social politics, that nature has a beneficent as well as a malignant side. . . .
I.46
"Freedom is the most valuable of all human possessions, next after life itself. It is more valuable, in a manner, than even health. No human agency can secure health; but good laws, justly administered, can and do secure freedom. Freedom, indeed, is almost the only thing that law can secure. Law cannot secure equality, nor can it secure prosperity. In the direction of equality, all that law can do is to secure fair play, which is equality of rights but is not equality of conditions. In the direction of prosperity, all that law can do is to keep the road open. That is the Quintessence of Individualism, and it may fairly challenge comparison with that Quintessence of Socialism we have been discussing. Socialism, disguise it how we may, is the negation of Freedom. That it is so, and that it is also a scheme not capable of producing even material comfort in exchange for the abnegations of Freedom, I think the foregoing considerations amply prove." EDWARD STANLEY ROBERTSON

This November, isn't this the choice we must make--a path to tyranny or a possible path back to freedom in America?

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