THE STATE OF ACADEMIA

THE SORRY STATE OF ACADEMIA: SOME LOOSE ENDS AND CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

  • AT LEAST FOR THE MOMENT

by

Ken Eliasberg

Setting aside the issues of either bias and/or competence in the hallowed halls of our universities’ humanity departments, there is the more fundamental question of whether our kids are learning anything—which, after all, is the bottom line of any inquiry into academic effectiveness. And the answer I’m afraid is that not only areour kids being propagandized by a bunch of Marxist lightweights, but they’re not learning very much to the bargain. In a very interesting article in The Chronicle Review (from the December 15,2006 issue) by Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, the good professor (and, from reading his article, I get the impression that he is indeed a good professor—good at least in the sense that he thinks clearly and reflects a degree of scholarship that is all too frequently absent today in the contribution of many of our alleged “scholars) makes the following observation in commenting on Michael Berube’s book, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education (W.W. Norton, 2006):

“In measuring the performance of teachers by his own

observation, Berube skips over the most significant conservative

criticism of higher education—not liberal bias but educational

outcomes. On the question of how much knowledge and

awareness students acquire in their semesters in class, the

evidence of a number of recent assessments of the liberal arts

runs against the teachers.”

There is no question but that this is true; we have dumbed down education to a very sorry point, and we have done this by patronizing the underclass. How? Rather than assist them in raising the level of their performance, we have chosen to lower the standards they are required to meet. In short, we have greatly diminished the standard of excellence by eliminating the notion of a meritocracy.

Now, to the professorial bias—what do these guys want from our society—SOCIALISM. They are at war with capitalism, which seems both strange (or stupid, depending on your perspective) on the one hand and self destructive on the other. It is strange (or stupid) because socialism is not working, has never worked, and will not work. Whether the country is small (e.g. Sweden, Argentina, Cuba, or Cambodia) - or large (e.g. Russia or China) socialism has been a tremendous failure. Moreover, well over 50 million people have died trying to put the system in place. The excuse of the left is always the same, we had the right idea; we just had the wrong locale, the wrong time, or the wrong people. Since socialism destroys the incentives that arise out of a capitalistic environment (see France and the immigrant problem or Sweden, where one out of 5 or 6 citizens are on the dole), it will never serve as a suitable substitute for what we have here in America, i.e. free enterprise. In this regard, I recommend the following 2 articles—Why do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism? By Robert Nozick, published in the Cato Policy Report of January/February 1998, and Why Intellectuals Still Support Socialism by Peter Klein (an economics instructor at the University of Missouri) posted on November 15, 2006 at www.mises.org/story/2318.

The approach is self destructive in that it is highly unlikely that any of these guys would make half the money they’re making now under a socialist form of government. Most of them make over $100,000.00 a year for putting in a modest amount of hours and having complete security in doing so. Then, why rock the boat? For guys who take almost no risk whatsoever, this seems like a pretty risky undertaking. This seems like more than just biting the hand that feeds you; it seems somewhat suicidal. What a great country America is—it pays you to undermine it. As Roger Scruton, a British writer and philospoher observed in a September 26, 2006 piece in Opinion Journal

on Noam Chomsky entitled Who Is Noam Chomsky?

“For Prof. Chomsky long ago cast off his academic gown and donned

the mantle of the prophet. For several decades now he has been devoting his energies to denouncing his native country, usually before packed halls of fans who couldn’t care a fig about the theory of syntax [Chomsky’s field of endeavor]. And many of his public appearances are in America: the only country in the whole world that rewards those who denounce it with the honors and opportunities that make denouncing it a rewarding way of life. It is proof of Prof. Chomsky’s success that his diatribes are distributed by his American publishers around the world, so as to end up in the hand’s of America critics everywhere - - Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez included.”

So what is it with these guys—they’re apparently not fond of their own country; they’re out of touch with the mainstream in this country (notwithstanding the results of the recent election); they support a form of government that is distinguished by its continuing to fail wherever the effort has been made to install it; and, finally, they would probably suffer more than most, economically, if the system of their choice were put in place??

The answer appears to be quite simple—our humanities professors are out of touch with humanity. They do not seem to have a very clear understanding of human nature, leading one to wonder what the hell have they learned from their study of history? No where is this more apparent than in their position on the current conflagration in the Middle East. They seem to have learned nothing from WWII, i.e. you cannot negotiate with a lunatic who is bent on your destruction, and, more to the point, that war is a bloody business, and the only way to win it is to crush the enemy, break his spirt, destroy his will to fight, and instill in him the awareness that to mess with the United States is a very dangerous business.

Again, how do you explain the degree to which these guys are so divorced from reality, giving rise to comments like those of Bill Buckley, i.e. I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book than the Harvard faculty. Or, those who can, do; those who can’t teach (and, as a former U.C.L.A. professor-friend of mine added, those who can’t teach, teach teachers). Another professor-friend, who seguied from the business sector into academia, explains it by noting that these guys (our humanities professors) have never had to meet a payroll (creating one, that is; they have been johnny on the spot to receive one all of their lives). That is why I early on realized that “book smarts” are desirable; “street smarts” are indispensable (and, unfortunately, most of our humanities professors are so completely out of touch with reality and so radically left-wing, that they might as well be operating on another planet).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 8:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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