Posted on 07/17/2018 4:53:04 PM PDT by Altura Ct.
Thirty-three years ago, when I entered college, left-wing ideologies dominated American universities, and especially the humanities and social sciences. But one still could get a fair, balanced education by consulting traditional canonical texts that countered the dogma. Free speech was alive on college campuses. There were hisses and boos, of course, but for the most part, hearing perspectives different from your own was considered essential to your education. Few of us lived in our own curated silos.
Today, after 22 years of being a college professor, and having traveled much of America to lecture, I am sad to say the situation is not the same. The core principles and foundations that keep the United States intact, that provide our citizens with their civic personalities and national identities, are being annihilated. The gravest internal threat to this country is not illegal aliens; it is leftist professors who are waging a war against America and teaching our young people to hate this country.
Our universities risk losing their status as learning sites and becoming national security threats. We need to defund them, disband and rebuild them with conservative principles - that is, values advocating individualism, capitalism, Americanism, free speech, self-reliance and the morality of wealth creation.
When the term "Western civilization" is equated with racism, cultural superiority and pervasive oppression, and students in my political philosophy class refuse to study the works of John Stuart Mill or John Locke (or any other white thinker) because they consider them white supremacists, there is no lower level of educational hell. The manifest destiny of the humanities and social science professoriat is to have politicized knowledge supersede truth, objectivity, facts and genuine learning.
There are many social ills taking place in the academy, but the cultural relativists who rule its turf would abolish reason, rational argument, appeal to traditional canonical texts as evidence for objective truths about our world, and belief in an objective reality. Too often, they deride reason as a Eurocentric creation used to rationalize the existence of colonialism, slavery and genocide of native peoples.
Ordinarily, the best way to counter an intellectual adversary is through a contest of rational faculties. The person with reality on his or her side, with the best relevant facts and strongest arguments, usually wins. But today's scholars in humanities and social sciences increasingly declare that modern argumentation is a white, Western form of domination and linguistic imperialism that silences racial and ethnic minorities and devalues their "lived experiences."
One cannot argue with such people. The only alternative is to shut them down.
Cultural Marxism, defined as anti-capitalist cultural critique, is the educational trope that mediates all forms of learning in today's universities - and it is simply a guise under which to politically indoctrinate students into becoming socialists who will do anything to prohibit freedom of speech on college campuses. We are witnessing a generation that will not tolerate other perspectives, students who will not hear opposing ideologies.
Socialism advocates vesting ownership and control of the means of production, capital and land in the community as a whole. Socialism is not a morally neutral system. Any system of governance presupposes an answer to the questions: Are you a sovereign entity who owns your life, work and mind? Is your mind something that can be nationalized and its material contents distributed by the state? Socialists think the answer is yes. They believe the products of one's efforts belong to the community; that the state and society have a moral and financial responsibility to care for other people's children; and that the most successful and productive people should be the most penalized
Educational systems that have become such propaganda machines should not be funded by taxpaying Americans. We have the spectacle of contemporary Africa, Venezuela and much of Latin America as evidence of the political calumny of socialism, and we have seen the brain drain of other Western countries that advocate socialism. In these countries, citizens resent the enormous financial costs to them in the form of taxation - and they come to the United States for fiscal relief.
Rejecting canonical texts and their alleged white supremacist authors is related to advancing socialism. Both appeal to a politics of victimology that purportedly only an emergent brand of post-colonial Marxism could solve. Identity politics, victimology and multiculturalism have reached such astronomical heights in U.S. universities that trigger warnings are issued for students who feel oppressed and traumatized because they have to read the writings of living or dead white men.
If elitist scholars infect the minds of our students with anti-Americanism, who will defend America when those who truly threaten us from the outside descend with intent of destroying our republic?
You who fund our universities do so with trust that intellectuals will act in your interest and reflect your pro-American values. You are wrong. Your hard work has been financing people who think they are better than your crass materialism, who think that you (but not they) are complicit in an evil system (capitalism).
Withdraw your support and leave them to fund themselves. Let them pit their wares on the free market, where they will be left homeless. The world you desired no longer exists in our universities. It lies elsewhere, in a philosophic system waiting to be discovered or created.
Jason D. Hill is honors distinguished professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. His areas of specialization include ethics, social and political philosophy, American foreign policy, cosmopolitanism and race theory.
Autodidacticism
I’d like to see online courses happen with pre-recorded lessons that can be audited for communism and radicalized leftism. Even radical right wing stuff.
The goal is to educate; not indoctrinate. There’s really no need for brick and mortar colleges anymore; at least not the kind currently being used to brain wash and indoctrinate.
I understand the Christian colleges don’t have that problem. Of course the left would say they are being indoctrinated into Christianity. I say if they were already Christian’s and grew up that way; what’s the problem? Besides; I’ve never seen Christian beliefs want to tear apart our country the way leftism does with the possible exception of right to life extremists.
France saved themselves in the end by shutting down the whole academic debacle nationwide until relative sanity could re-establish itself.
The US universities in the aggregate are approaching the boundaries of functionality, and we may need to close the state university systems across the country, disband administration and faculties, until a return to sanity can be effected.
Good post!
Progressives know the Achilles heel of republics is the education of the young.
Montesquieu wrote that the purpose of republican education is to imbue love of country. He’s right.
Destroy this natural love and republics will fall.
“I am a professor and this essay is correct.”
I am a retired professor of American History and Government. Spot on. Critical theory, postmodernism and pretentious fools with no life experience have created a hell of a mess.
I have proposed that same thing for our K-12th grade students.
Those schools should be shut down for a year.
Private groups should be invited to bid for providing services.
Those entities would do the hiring and firing. No unions allowed.
If a union set up a bidding process, the school would shut down and move. New staff would be hired at the new location.
I don’t know how to facilitate this to avoid labor law problems with this, but there must be a way.
Have all teachers sign an at will clause for employment, so they can quit any time they like and the employer can let them go any time the employer wants to.
Go over all books, interview all teachers, look at their records. Hire only the good ones back.
The first hint of Leftist ideology from any of them would be met with at will dismissals.
Kids need to come first.
I’d also drop all the social engineering stuff.
Do not let any Leftist groups on campus for any reason.
I agree. There is ZERO reason for universities to exist. We need institutions focused on JOB TRAINING only. And we have many for-profit companies already in that business. Shut ‘em down!
-—The gravest internal threat to this country is not illegal aliens; it is leftist professors who are waging a war against America and teaching our young people to hate this country.-—
Absolutely right. But don’t think this is limited to higher education. High schools and even Middle schools are in on the act.
And of course after high school, the steady drumbeat of: “Ya gotta go to college if ya wanna be somebody!!”. That guarantees a steady flow of indoctrinated useful idiots to send out into the world.
I was once proud to be a DePaul graduate...but that was over two decades ago, when they still offered a quality, rigorous education for a fairly-affordable tuition. I won’t even mention the place to others now.
The best way to achieve this goal is to cut off federal funding. That is to say no more public funds are to be used for any higher education whatsoever. No grants, no loans, no kidding.
No more state aid to any college, no taxes to be directed to any university.
Starve the beast.
Colleges will eventually price themselves out of business, but it won’t happen quickly as long as the government is subsidizing them. Eliminate gov’t money and the whole house of cards collapses.
check out his faculty page.
https://las.depaul.edu/academics/philosophy/faculty/Pages/jason-hill.aspx
it appears that he is a Jamaican immigrant, a poet, and obviously a philosopher. he is pioneering something called “cosmopolitanism” and i’ve never heard a philosopher ruminate on that topic. the point being. the guy sounds fascinating. he’s not some hick conservative (like me, for example... :0). but a serious intellectual with an interesting (ie, cosmopolitan) background and varied interests (ie cosmopolitan).
this guy seems to be the real deal. what academic “should” be about.
plus he started college the same year as I did...
As long as there is NCAA level college football and basketball and partying at school, there will always be traditional college.
After 16 years teaching at two different schools ,the second supposedly a fairly conservative, I was shown the door for being too conservative. I see this man’s point.
I love the story about that young man.
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I doubt it. Any member - willing or unwilling - of a “protected” group daring to speak out against protection and the protectors, is generally savaged and destroyed. Best of luck, Dr. Hill
I don’t completely agree...there’s plenty of value in an old-school university or college education if one’s up to it. (Emphasis on OLD SCHOOL...studying and discussing the Classics, Western Civilization, math, history, things like that). But, it should NOT be the debt-funded, Marxist, crap-laden “gatekeeper” to everyday employment that it’s become since the Supreme Court’s Griggs v. Duke Power decision, circa 1971. It should be optional, aimed at those who would truly gain something from it, and above all, affordable without debt.
Eliminating Federal guarantees of student loans, as well as reversing Griggs, would probably shut down a LOT of colleges and universities within a few years, and dump a lot of postmodernist BS artists, tenured and otherwise, out on the streets. Maybe *then* we can rebuild American higher education.
shutting down the money pipeline is the only way to end this leftist bastion.
no more government funded loans and let’s defund the state schools at the state level.
One answer, if at all possible, is to send your kids to local schools and keep them living at home, at least through undergrad. I suspect most of us live within driving distance of a decent university, maybe not Ivory League, but still good enough, and if a state school, much cheaper. On top of that, community college is an option for the first 2 years.
That was how we did it for our kids...they did great in community college (which isn’t surprising, since we didn’t let Big Education ‘teach’ them math and reading...we did it), and no problem getting into the local 4 year college, and then getting good degrees and great jobs.
I actually did go to one of those huge, highly respected, now-shithole colleges. Its now been several decades and I’m still waiting for them to blow off Leftism before I have never given them a dime (no matter how often they ask)...and, for some reason, I doubt that they’ll ever get anything from me.
It’s just REALLY SAD how many otherwise conservative people actually do donate to these s-holes, and how many send their kids there without any real preparation regarding what they’re going to enter...check that, it is simply NOT POSSIBLE to prepare kids for that - if they live on campus, you might as well write them off, once you finish unpacking the car at the dorm for their first semester. It’s over.
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