The Radical Left's Infiltration of Academia Creating Generations of Ideological Robots

Anthony Daoud writes in the Post Millennial about the need for academic reform. He notes that students who identify as anything other than left wing have been silenced and made to feel uncomfortable. The left uses words like "fascist" and "bigot" as weapons to silence anyone who disagrees with its failed theories. The left's motives are control, power, opposition to freedom of speech, and failed socialist nostrums.

Dauod correctly notes that the left's policy menu is in "utter disarray." Despite the incoherence and absurdity of its policy proposals, though, universities have considerable power.  For example, Harvard University is in the top one percent of  contributors to politicians and the top 15 percent of spenders on lobbying. Penn State is in the top seven percent of contributors and the top 17 percent of spenders. Advocates of academic reform face a lobby no less powerful than the tobacco, gun, pharmaceutical, or banking lobbies. How can reform proceed given universities'  political power?

Heretofore, the Republican Party has failed to respond to the Democrats' illegal use of universities for political advocacy, lobbying, and propaganda.  The reason is that universities have been able to intimidate them through lobbying and contributions.  However, the Republicans need to face a hard reality about the academic corner of the deep state: The university system is training America's elite to vote against, to actively oppose, and to hate Republicans. If the Republican Party continues along its current  path of indifference, it will disappear.

Hopefully, Republicans' indifference will change. One way to start will be the validation of college programs.  Validation means that every academic program should be required to prove that it produces valuable results.  Validation is a best practice in the human resource field, and it is outrageous that government (not counting out-of-pocket tuition) spends $200 billion a year on higher education programs that are not validated, i.e., whose effects are unknown. The system is rife with fraud. Many programs promise that degrees will lead to jobs, but the promised jobs do not materialize.  Claims that a subject is being taught when the students learn next to nothing are common.

In this context, proximal validation involves general knowledge and field-specific examinations. Distal validation involves tracking of job and graduate school placement.  Programs that fail to place graduates in program-relevant jobs or admission to graduate school and that produce no or limited gains in general or field-specific knowledge and cognitive skills should not receive public support either in the form of tax exemption or of funding. 

Programs that focus on politics instead of knowledge building will produce graduates with weaker skills who are less able to find good jobs. Under scrutiny these programs will wither away.

As well, it is time for the IRS to start enforcing  existing rules against 501(c)(3) organizations' use of tax exempt money for political purposes.  The IRS ought to set up a qualification review process to determine whether course offerings conform to the requirements of Section 501(c)(3). This would be similar to the review process for pension and 401(k) plans, which leads to a qualification letter. Violation of the terms of the review would be criminalized as tax fraud.Part of the Republican Party's lackadaisical attitude toward anti-Republican discrimination and indoctrination in universities has been its willingness to let the IRS ignore the misuse of 501(c)(3) money. That needs to change.