Sheep No More: the Alumni Rise

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | October 27, 2021 | Jay Schalin

[karpov]

In my nearly 15 years as a higher education journalist and analyst, I have, unfortunately, witnessed too few victories for the reform movement. In that time, and certainly for several decades before, academia has continued moving in bad directions. On one hand, it has increasingly submitted to the “alphabet soup” mentality —CRT, DEI, AGW, LGBTQ…, and so on. On the other, its mission has incrementally crept toward Leviathan, as government, industry, and academia become one. The first dynamic is an assault on reason, the second diminishes our freedom. Both are an attack on our humanity, and together, they are making an institution that was formerly a source of enlightenment into a bastion of dogma and repression.

Even in those rare instances when the reform movement has gained a victory, it has often proven to be bittersweet. Budget cuts to state higher education systems intended to trim the fat and stall the mission creep, for the most part, are eventually made temporary. A few bad administrators are toppled, but are usually replaced with the same or worse. And when the North Carolina legislature passed a provision to give the University of North Carolina Board of Governors its own advisory staff member(s)—a badly needed reform that would end the ability of academics to dominate the system by controlling information—weak, timid legislators watered it down at the last minute by making it voluntary instead of mandatory. That rendered the provision to be ineffectual, since it requires board members—who are easily manipulated by their ignorance of their own duties by power-hungry administrators—to vote against the reality presented to them by the administration.

[WVNan]

Well somebody has said it out loud! Sadly this could be the only time or place we will hear from them. As an alumni with a Phd, it comes to me as an encouraging idea looking for money. These kinds of “movements” on paper become perpetual deposit centers You never hear much about what they have done with the $$. The only counter movements in resent history who actually put feet to the ground and changed things was the Free Republic and the Tea Party. So I believe FREE REPUBLIC has earned the right to ask for donations. DO IT !!