Posted on 07/08/2008 5:53:53 AM PDT by SJackson
One of the best ways to influence students, colleagues, and the citizenry at large is to hire, promote, and tenure only those people who agree with you.
It's August 1968. Anti-Vietnam War demonstrators have just wrecked the Democratic national convention in Chicago and ruined Hubert Humphrey's chances to become president. So what did these Marxists and their cohorts elsewhere do next?
They stayed in college. They sought out the easiest professors and the easiest courses. And they stayed in the top half of their class. This effectively deferred them from the military draft, a draft that discriminated against young men who didn't have the brains or the money to go to college. That draft also sparked the wave of grade inflation that still swamps our colleges. Vietnam-era faculty members lowered standards in order to help the "Hell No, We Won't Go" crowd.
In the 1970s, president Richard Nixon ended the war and Congress ended conscription. So the Marxist anti-war activists - activism is now a full-time profession - had to do something else. Most of them went to work in the real world. But a meaningful number remained in college and graduate school and opted for academia, especially for the humanities and the social sciences. If they got a Ph.D., they might even become university teachers, and many of them did. They then climbed academia's ladder, rising from instructor to assistant professor, from assistant professor to associate professor, and from associate professor to full professor. These last two ranks usually carry tenure, which means a guaranteed job until one decides to retire or is fired for raping little children in the streets.
Forty years have passed since that fateful Democratic national convention. During that time, American academia has been transformed into the most Marxist, postmodernist, know-nothing, anti-American, anti-military, and anti-capitalist institution in our society. It is now a bastion of situational ethics and moral relativism, and it teaches that there are no evil people in this world, only oppressed ones. American academia is now a very intolerant place. Ask Ann Coulter. She has been driven off more than one campus platform because of her conservative views. As she has knowledgeably put it, "There is free speech for thee, but not for me."
WHEN THE Soviet Union collapsed, Marxism collapsed with it. But it survived in Western Europe and in US and Israeli universities, where politically-correct feelings are now more important than knowledge, and where politically-correct emotions are now more important than critical thinking.
American students and graduates are usually well trained, but they are badly educated. Outside of what they must learn to make a living, most of them don't know very much. They do know, however, how to feel very sad, very angry, or very guilty about their country and its past. That lesson their professors taught them well.
In the main, our students and graduates, no matter where they went to school, don't understand that China, in return for Sudanese oil, is supplying the weapons used to commit genocide in Darfur. But they feel bad about the Darfurians. They don't now that the Palestinians have rejected every opportunity to have a state of their own. But they feel sorry for them, and they blame the Israelis for their plight. They aren't familiar with the Koranic verse "the Infidel is your inveterate enemy." But they keep searching for the elusive "root causes" of Muslim hatred, and many of them are convinced that Islamic terrorism is the result of what the United States and Israel - aren't they, not North Korea or Zimbabwe, the two worst countries on this planet? - do or do not do.
Deficient in history, geography, and economics, few of our college-trained citizens understand that all wealth, including money transferred to governments through taxes, is created by and in the private sector. They don't fathom that the main reasons for high gasoline prices are the speculation in oil futures and the continuing industrialization of Japan, China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and other countries. Instead, they blame the "greedy" oil companies, whose "obscene" profit margins are not nearly as high as most other industries. Nor do they understand that their simultaneous and illogical opposition to nuclear power, coal, liquified petroleum gas, on-shore and off-shore oil drilling, and new refineries ensures that we shall have energy shortages and high energy prices.
Professors don't make the big bucks in America. What they do earn, however, are huge psychological incomes in the form of power - the power to shape the minds of their students and the power to influence their colleagues who want raises, sabbaticals. grants, promotions, and tenure. One of the best ways to influence students, colleagues, and the citizenry at large is to hire, promote, and tenure only those people who agree with you. Duke University is a case in point. The chairman of one of its major departments was once asked in a radio interview if his department hired Republicans. He answered: "No. We don't hire Republicans because they are stupid and we are not. Why should we knowingly hire stupid professors?"
Since Temple is not pretentious, it would probably hire me again, but Duke wouldn't. You see, though once a Democrat, I am now a Republican. And in the so-called "prestigious" schools nothing can be more blasphemous than that.
The writer is a professor emeritus of political science at Temple University and author of Peaceful Conflictand Soldiers, Scholars, and Society.
stupid and evil people
run the world.
Liberals are the most bigoted people there are. They may preach ‘diversity’, but they don’t believe in diversity of ideas.
Bump for later reading to my baby sister, a conservative who thinks it would be a good thing to attend a certain leftist college.
Every word in this article is true, esp. where it concerns the Social sciences and Humanities programs. And those courses are mandated for every four year graduate under the guise of general education requirements or some such BS.
Jonah Goldberg cites a survey from 1987, indicating that 45% of adult respondents thought that the phrase “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” — a quote from Karl Marx — was in the Constitution.
April 24, 2007
JONAH GOLDBERG
The will of the uninformed
Pundits and politicians love to be on the side of the people, even if the people don’t have a clue.
HUGE NUMBERS of Americans don’t know jack about their government or politics. According to a Pew Research Center survey released last week, 31% of Americans don’t know who the vice president is, fewer than half are aware that Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House, a mere 29% can identify “Scooter” Libby as the convicted former chief of staff of the vice president, and only 15% can name Harry Reid when asked who is the Senate majority leader.
Also last week, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans believe that Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales’ firing of eight U.S. attorneys was “politically motivated.”
So, we are supposed to believe that two-thirds of Americans have studied the details of the U.S. attorney firings and come to an informed conclusion that they were politically motivated even when Senate Democrats agree that there is no actual evidence that Gonzales did anything improper. Are these the same people who couldn’t pick Pelosi out of a lineup? Or the 85% who couldn’t name the Senate majority leader? Are we to imagine that the 31% of the electorate who still after seven years of headlines and demonization can’t identify the vice president of the United States nonetheless have a studied opinion on the firing of New Mexico U.S. Atty. David Iglesias?
Oh, before we proceed, let me make clear: This isn’t a column defending Gonzales. This administration should have long ago sent him out of the bunker for a coffee-and-doughnut run and then changed the locks.
No, this is a column about how confused and at times idiotic the United States is about polls, public opinion and, well, democracy itself. We all love to tout the glories of democracy and denounce politicians who just follow the polls. Well, guess which politicians follow the polls? The popular ones, that’s who.
And guess why: Because the popular ones get elected. Bucking public opinion is the quickest way for a politician to expedite his or her transition to the private sector.
More to the point, Americans God bless ‘em are often quite ignorant about the stuff politicians and pundits think matters most. They may know piles about their own professions, hobbies and personal interests, but when it comes to basic civics, they just get their clocks cleaned on Fox’s “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”
Though examples are depressingly unnecessary, here are two of my favorites over the years. In 1987, 45% of adult respondents to one survey answered that the phrase “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” was in the Constitution (in fact, it’s a quote from Karl Marx). Then, in 1991, an American Bar Assn. study reported that a third of Americans did not know what the Bill of Rights was.
That the public mood is a poor compass for guiding the ship of state is an old lament. Here are two reasons why.
The first has to do with the laziness, spinelessness and vanity of political elites. Citing polls as proof you’re on the right side of an argument is often a symptom of intellectual cowardice. If the crowd says 2+2=7, that’s no reason to invoke the authority of the crowd. But pundits and pols know that if they align themselves with the latest Gallup findings, they don’t have to defend their position on the merits because “the people” are always right. Such is the seductiveness of populism. It means never being wrong. “The people of Nebraska are for free silver, and I am for free silver,” proclaimed William Jennings Bryan. “I will look up the arguments later.”
Which brings us to ideology. The days when politicians would actually defend small-r republicanism are gone. The answer to every problem in our democracy seems to be more democracy, as if any alternative spells more tyranny. Indeed, once more the “forces of progress” are trying to destroy the electoral college in the name of democracy. Their beachhead is Maryland, which was the first to approve an interstate compact promising its electors to whichever presidential candidate wins the national popular vote.
If these progressives have their way, we’ll soon see candidates ignoring small states and rural areas entirely because democracy means going where the votes are. The old notion that this is a republic in which minority communities have a say will suffer perhaps the final, fatal blow.
But that’s OK, because 70% of Americans say they’re for getting rid of the electoral college. And Lord knows, they must be right.
I once worked for a well known county hospital where the same thing had happened with gays. Simple - they infested the HR department and moved on from there. And that was back in the 80s.
Re college cumulative grades and grade inflation:
Their idea of diversity is like having many species of fish in a tank. They love to sit back and observe the diversity that they've created but they ain't about the get in the tank with them.
Yes. I have a relative who teaches at a major university. He says a grade of B is much below average.
Confirms my worst fears. Universities in the whole West changed that way in the late ‘60s. It’s not that much about Right or Left (after all, right-oriented folk welcome like-minded people with (sub)conscious glee too; it’s the bloody fact that Universities became politicized at all. Admitted: the left is more gullible in this respect than the right. Leftists are fond of ‘ad hominem’ argumentation and subtly shifting debate from objective scientific fact to something of a mutual admiration society. And if you were too rightist in your views, you’d better not express them (a scandalous plight in itself); or you’d be expelled after gossip, alleged adulterous tendencies, having visited escort ladies, what have you. Only Marxists were entitled to do those things, in the name of sexual liberation. A right-minded candidate might have looked admiringly at a left-leaning lady, and before you could cough, she’d have you in court for ‘sexual harassment’. With all the grave consequences that go with that. Group sex was (is?) for the left, and no sex was for the right. Boo.
This principle was also incorporated into the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Article 12. (1936)
Marx was indeed the person who popularized this principle, but many people mistakenly say it was in the Communist Manifesto. It actually appeared in a letter called Critique of the Gotha Program .
The NEA which dominates the primary and secondary school system provides the victims for this. The moral compass had been removed before Vietnam in the name of "Separation of Church and State." With the exception of religious colleges, there is no institution in America which can challenge liberal domination of the universities. The faculty members will go for Obama in large numbers. Harvard, Yale, and Columbia didn't just suddenly become centers of liberalism and secular humanism in 1968.
You still have people running around claiming moral relativism is mandated by the Constitution, throughout the society in every institution, as the official ideology of the country.
Bookmarked, a great read, thanks. Prof Glick has hit the nail on the head, so many good points. It seems to be fully entrenched and even when the 60’s draft dodgers retire, they seem to have ‘educated’ and put in position their desired replacements. I’m not sure how it can be ‘fixed’, as few even see the problem, so ensconced are we as a nation in feeling ‘guilty’ for our many ‘evils’. Sigh. I know I was taught this way in college, I started to buy into it, nearly became a Dem myself.
Here's one of the few that has the courage to define the problem:
".. Scientists are most effective when they provide sound, impartial advice, but their reputation for impartiality is severely compromised by the shocking lack of political diversity among American academics, who suffer from the kind of group-think that develops in cloistered cultures.
"Until this profound and well documented intellectual homogeneity changes, scientists will be suspected of constituting a leftist think tank."
"On the left, an argument emerged urging fellow scientists to deliberately exaggerate their findings so as to galvanize an apathetic public..."
"Conservatives have usually been strong supporters of nuclear power. .. Had it not been for green opposition, the United States today might derive most of its electricity from nuclear power, as does France; thus the environmentalists must accept a large measure of responsibility for today’s most critical environmental problem." ~ Kerry Emmanuel - MIT
Thanks for that clarification. bttt
Probably why I’ve seen the Humanities and Social Sciences get torn apart horribly by the Physical Science department. So much so that I’ve seen a Sociologist write a rebuttal calling the Social Sciences the Difficult Sciences as opposed to the hard sciences. This was at my old college, also I think Science Professors get paid more.
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