Paquette points out that universities seek grant money from the same investment banks that have benefited from Bush-and-Obama socialism. Politically correct, green university students are eager to work on Wall Street, while most are eager to condemn Charles Koch.
Paquette and I were lucky enough to hear Charles Koch speak, and I was impressed. At a time when academics were extolling Enron, Paul Krugman was collecting honoraria from Enron, Harvard Business School was selling case studies advancing Enron's philosophy, and Fortune was naming Enron the most creative firm, Koch rejected the advice of executives he had hired from Enron. He suggested that he had found their ideas to have been absurd, yet these were the ideas the American business academy had considered the nation's most creative. Koch is now the fourth-richest American, and Enron's former supporters now attack Koch because he does not adhere to their ideology, an ideology that was entirely consistent with the views of Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow.
Paquette makes the following point:
(T)hose who graduate (from Hamilton), precisely because of the
deficiencies and one-sidedness of their education, will prove defenseless in
articulating a thoughtful response to the caricatures of American and Western
history that now pass as gospel as precincts of the cultural left capture ever
more ground inside and outside the academy.
Paquette emphasizes that American history is neglected--even among history majors. This is an understatement, for even if American history were required, it would be taught in an ideologically slanted, uninformed way. Frederick Jackson Turner's nonsensical frontier thesis is presented as fact in Mickey Mouse history classes while ideologues in academic garb ignore T.S. Ashton's reasoned assessments of the industrial revolution.
Worse, American universities are purveyors of illiteracy. At Hamilton, which is an elite college, the students have been adequately prepared at the primary and secondary levels. In contrast, at public universities the students have been indoctrinated in public schools from their early years, but they have not been taught to read, write, or do basic mathematics. Academics are uninterested in teaching their half-literate students how to read, write, or do basic math because it is much more fun to indoctrinate them than to educate them.
Still worse, New York's public education system, and the American university system, are not just purveyors of ignorance, illiteracy and lack of historical knowledge. They are purveyors, along with its inventor--The New York Times--of holocaust denial.My students have never heard of the differences between Hamilton and Jefferson, but they also have never heard of the Gulag Archipelago, and they have never heard of the twentieth century's socialist mass murders. Their education has been silent with respect to the vicious bloodshed that the ideas of the academic left have caused, for they are taught that workers who voluntarily immigrated here are victims of the worst harm and discrimination in history.
Let us conclude with some certainty: American universities are a load of crap. They are purveyors of illiteracy, ignorance, and holcaust denial.
To see the history and origins of political correctness and its link to Wall Street, turn to the history of investment banking and George Peabody. Peabody was one of the earliest American international investment bankers, but his success at first was as a Baltimore merchant. After some success selling State of Maryland bonds, Peabody sold railroad bonds. Since the best market was in London, he moved and spent his mature years there.
On one of a handful of return trips to the United States from his home in London, when Peabody was already a famous philanthropist, he counseled another Baltimore merchant, Johns Hopkins, on how to establish a university. Johns Hopkins University relied on the Peabody Library for decades. Prior to his death, Peabody invited a partner, J.S. Morgan, to join his firm. J.P. Morgan, J.S.'s son, was a student at a German university and, in effect, worked as an intern at Peabody's firm. Peabody supported J.P. Morgan during his early business career.
After his death, at Peabody's request, the Peabody firm's name was changed to Morgan Grenfell. J.P. Morgan did not graduate college, but his son, J.P. Morgan Jr., graduated from Harvard in 1886. Morgan Sr. donated generously to the Harvard Medical School, whose transformation can be viewed as the most important historical step toward the modern university. Abraham Flexner's 1912 report on medical schools, which extolled the Johns Hopkins Medical School, established the Johns Hopkins model (which Harvard followed) as the basis not only of medical education, but of modern American education and the modern American research university. In effect, two Peabody pupils provided financing for the transformation of the religious American colleges of the nineteenth century into the modern university. The money trail extends further, for the Carnegie fortune, which was the source of the Carnegie Foundation's funding for Flexner's report, was crystallized through J.P. Morgan's acquisition of Carnegie Steel, and his creation of the steel trust--U.S. Steel. The university was linked to Progressivism and Wall Street from its beginning. Today, buildings at Harvard include the Peabody Museum (there is also one at Yale), Morgan Hall (Harvard Business School), Mellon Hall (Harvard Business School), Rockefeller Hall, and Lehman Hall.
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