How have universities become so blind to their own leftist totalitarianism?
THey worship diversity but despise diversity of opinion.
Academic exists today to indoctrinate. Much like the communist reeducation camps.
They claim they’re there for the students success yet their actions prove otherwise while they sit in their ivory towers drawing six figure salaries and dictating policy that’s doomed to fail.
They have forgotten the face of the Father.
They seem to think that, if they can claim to be offended, then it is an “instant win”. If they can call you a racist, then you just lost. It’s simple.
From my perspective, I can play that game, and I can say that the statement “Black Lives Matter” is inherently racist and that the statement “All Lives Matter” is far superior. I am offended by BLM.
But, somehow, I don’t instantly win under these circumstances. It hardly seems fair.
History always repeats itself......
It’s not academia anymore it’s the god-less communist party
Yeah, I don’t often agree with American Thinker, but on this one, they’re not far off the mark. The problem I see isn’t the absence of a free market of ideas - that was always a starry-eyed fantasy - but the penetration of “woke” into serious, government- and corporate-funded research. If you go to Google Scholar and search Articles (it’s one of the selection buttons, down below the search input screen) and search race racism you will come up with a seemingly endless list of articles.
These articles are all or mostly produced by university professors, and nearly half of these professors (well, more than any other specialty) are in medical schools. Smaller numbers are in Sociology, Psychology and Education departments, and there are a LOT from other departments as well.
I think if you examine the abstracts of these articles you will find that common sense is not a salient feature. And that’s just wrong. Common sense should be the PRIMARY feature of university research. We shouldn’t be spending money on things we already know aren’t going to help. But we are. A lot of money. Discovering correlations between so called racist ideas and unevenly distributed medical outcomes. Doing meta-analyses of vast quantities of data, looking for needles in haystacks (and always, oddly, finding them).
I know Biden’s administration took a lot of heat for their so called Ministry of Truth. But epistemology is a serious issue. It ain’t for kids. And the epistemology of research design has swallowed woke hook line and sinker, and is causing our government and our corporations to waste tons of money on research that cannot help anyone.
All right, done ranting... sorry...
In the 50s academia in western nations still believed that their role was to permit a free market place of ideas.
Using that idea that decided that the Marxists and what they said and believed (and later what they did as “protestors”) should not be kept out of academia.
In time the Marxists gain control in academia in the westen world and as that control became secure then they started ending the idea of academia as a free marketplace of ideas.
The Marxists methods were standard Marx. Use western institutions, ideas and methods only for the purpose of gaining control of western institutions and once some level of control is reached, abandon western shiboleths about the purpose of their institutions and subvert/convert them to instruments of furthering Leftist agendas.
Depends, apparently, on what it means to “function.”
Academia has succumbed to the Decadence of Western Civilization.
The evil most fundamental to the Decadence is contempt for truth--truth for its own sake. Rejection of the free marketplace of ideas is part of the contempt for truth.
See: Herbert Marcuse and “repressive tolerance”.
I agree with the general idea of the closing down of academia to the market place of ideas by the radical leftist cliques now in-charge of its top and departmental leadership. It is indeed a dark age for these institutions. But, as in all things, eventually the tide will turn and when it does…
Think of what happened in Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell. Think of the visceral expressions of contempt for communist symbols, institutions and leadership. Think of the final Soviet Premier, Gorbachev, and the 70 years it took for him to emerge as the last in a chain of authoritarian leaders. Think of his wisdom to see the failure of state socialism/communism in theory and practice and to end it and the Cold War. He came from within the 70 year old establishment. But also think of Putin, who also came from within that same Soviet establishment. If Gorbachev represented a turn toward peace and good will, Putin represents a turn back towards a more sinister and xenophobic Russia of the past.
The struggle to right the badly listing ship of academia is worth the effort, just as forcefully and patiently resisting communism was and still is. If we decide to abandon academia, there is still an educational need to be met and the marketplace needs to start thinking about it. What are the alternatives to the hierarchy of institutions making up the academic establishment that will be need to be replaced in order meet the needs of primary and secondary education consumers. Just how would you train and certify a chemical engineer? And how would you deal with accessing basic writing skills and cultural knowledge created by liberal arts courses without becoming infected by the malignant wokeness found in most of today’s liberal arts colleges?
The article did have one line I would like to directly comment on.
“Every year, thousands of college students graduate and carry into society the same megalomaniacal confidence in their own righteousness that has turned campuses into zones of conformity.”
The author would have been well to have added a following sentence similar to this:
“Every year, hundreds of thousands, possibly over a million, college students graduate and carry into society their contempt and loathing for the “Woke” liberal philosophy and its advocates’ megalomaniacal confidence in their own righteousness that turned campuses into zones of conformity, intimidation, and indoctrination. They are joining a workforce of tens of millions who are equally fed up with Wokeness and its aggressive and unwelcome intrusion into every corner of corporate and private life. They are all waiting for the turn of the tide.”
“The only way to make a bad idea seem like a good idea is to silence the good idea that shows just how bad the bad idea really is”.....L.Star