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.

There is No Need to Reform Universities

How about letting universities function like any other voluntary institution--without public subsidization. Let them be held to ordinary standards of fraud and to the same standards of disclosure to which other private institutions are held. If that is done, there will be no need to reform universities. They will reflect the purposes of those who wish to learn in them and of those who wish to work in them. They will sharply diminish in number. Firms' current practice of dumping training costs on the public through invalidated education requirements will change. More efficient alternatives to university education, such as skills certifications, will evolve. Over time the percentage of the population that seeks university education will decline to perhaps five percent. The great talents of America's university faculty will then be put to productive use in fields for which there is legitimate, voluntary demand.

Need for Electoral College Reform

I have to get this off my chest. Many "progressives" argue for elimination of the Electoral College. This step would be in the long "democratic" tradition of "Progressivism" whereby direct popular vote replaces institutional safeguards against excessive crowd zeal. The Progressives established direct primaries, direct election of US Senators (previously they had been elected by state legislatures), and the referendum and recall in some states. The effect of these steps has been a reduction in freedom and a reduction in democracy. The reason is that the elite media finds it easier to manipulate mass opinion than it would find it to manipulate elected partisans. Direct democracy threatens freedom because the public can be easily bamboozled to support steps that further the aims of economic and social elites (Wall Street, college professors). Since the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank, the public has naively accepted inflationary policies that harm it; have quietly acquiesced in declining real wages because the media tells them it is the inevitable result of free markets (as opposed to inflation and wealth transfer imposed by the Federal Reserve Bank through monetary subsidies to Wall Street and commercial bankers).

The true roots of America are in the rural states. America was an agricultural country and the founders, especially Jefferson, believed in the physiocrat philosophy that farming is the most noble way of life and that the best society is one composed of free landholders. Moreover, the Red States are closest to the culture of the founders in terms of intuitive understanding of the American ideal and in terms of the love of freedom on which this country is based. Elitists and opportunists who know a lot of false economic theory but don't produce much and are alienated from the American dream dominate the urban "Blue" states.

I do believe the Electoral College needs to be reformed. The number of votes given to rural states needs to be doubled, and the number of votes given to urban states needs to be halved. Only with a redistributed electoral college can America enjoy freedom and liberty.

William Graham Sumner on Social Doctors

"The amateur social doctors are like amateur physicians--they always begin with the question of remedies, and they go at this without any diagnosis or any knowledge of the anatomy or physiology of society. They never have any doubt of the efficacy of their remedies. They never take account of any ulterior effects which may be apprehended from the remedy itself. It generally troubles them not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature. Against all such social quackery the obvious injunction to the quacks is to mind their own business.

"The social doctors enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to be more moral or more enlightened than their fellow-men. They are able to see what other men ought to do when the other men do not see it. An examination of the work of the social doctors, however, shows that they are only more ignorant and more presumptuous than other people. We have a great many social difficulties and hardships to contend with. Poverty, pain, disease, and misfortune surround our existence. We fight against them all the time. The individual is a centre of hopes, affections, desires and sufferings...But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling and blundering of social doctors in the past. These products of social quackery are now buttressed by habit, fashion, prejudice, platitudinarian thinking, and new quackery in political economy and social science...the greatest reforms which could now be accomplished would consist in undoing the work of statesmen in the past and the greatest difficulty in the way of reform is to find out how to undo their work without injury to what is natural and sound."

---William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, Originally published in 1883.