"Tear it down and start over!"

Kurt Schlichter writes in Town Hall,

public education’s real goal is to provide jobs for Democrat constituencies.

Academia is similar. It exists to mass produce ignorant future elitists and to provide jobs for liberal indoctrinators fueled by our tax money. The state and private schools both take our dough directly as well as through guaranteed student loans. Student loans are a giant scam, of course. Students get grifted into chaining an anchor around their necks in exchange for credentials most don’t even need. Colleges can raise tuition as high as they like because the government will just back the loans these suckers take out. It’s a great system, if you’re an academic. Not so much if you are a student or a taxpayer.

Of course, the schools love the “free college” movement. Nothing costs as much as “free.” The only thing better than having the millennial dummies willing to borrow 200 grand for a degree in the feminist literature of Mongolia pay for it is to make you and me pay for it.

How about no?

Now, the college scam has insinuated itself into our culture like a malignancy, and cutting it out will be traumatic, but we need to do it or it will destroy us. First, we need to demand that high school do its job and turn out students who can do the basic things citizens must do without taking remedial courses in college so they can master See Spot Run. Outlawing teachers’ unions sounds like a great start, as well as refusing federal aid for any district that has more than a 1:1 teacher to administrator ratio.

Second, we need a cultural rethink of the concept of college itself. A four-year degree – as opposed to a four-year party – is not for everyone. It’s not even for most people. You know who do well today, who aren’t MFA grads yet making our coffee for us? People with skills. Plumbers. Electricians. Welders. Trades are the future.

And a four-year degree should not always be a prerequisite for a professional degree either. I did four years of undergrad, where I majored in beer and girls with a minor in 80s post-punk alternative music, then three years of law school (albeit interrupted by the Army). That seven years could have been condensed to five, maybe four. Same with med school; docs learn as on the job as residents. You should not have to spend nearly a decade taking classes to do the vast majority of jobs. I deal with other lawyers for a living. Most are quarter-wits aspiring to be half-wits.

...And beside all this, the universities as bastions of leftism and censorship. That needs to end too. President Trump’s free speech executive order is just the first step in defeating academic fascism.

Academia is a scam, as well as a campus gulag archipelago of hellholes of leftist oppression, and we need to tear it down and start over.

Read more here.

Calvin becomes an academic

Gobbldygook

hat tip Wolf Howling

"The United States of Stagnant Corruption"

al fin next level writes,

The United States of America is tentatively stepping back from an interminable gray future of Obamaesque stagnation and decline, courtesy of a national populist uprising at the voting polls. The corrupt ideological system of government-media-academia threatening to drown the US in a fecal flood of identity politics, apocalyptic climate cultism, corrupt green energy decay, fake and partisan mainstream news, and a defeatist malaise across all parts of society except the crony-elite — that system was chastised soundly in an election quake felt around the world.

...nations such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, etc. are doomed. They have chosen an almost total dependency on natural resource income, rather than to develop their human resources — which would be the only enduring source of wealth they could depend upon.

...The governments of the Obamas, Bushes, Clintons, and the rest of the inbred system attempt to use the tools of government to achieve their own particular ends. But even if we assume good intentions on their part, they are doomed to fail — because government does not create prosperity. Government can only — at its best — create an environment where “rule of law” prevails and a stable monetary system, protection from violence and fraud, and a few other limited and specific services are provided.

The United States of Stagnant Corruption has grown far beyond any reasonable size and scope of powers. The government is strangling innovation and opportunity, while promoting corrupt rent-seeking and widespread dependency on the state for subsistence. That path of ruin has been recognised since well before the days of President Reagan, but most of America’s elites have been too busy scooping up the spoils of corruption to concern themselves with the ultimate end of such behaviours.

...Peter Thiel — “the anti-George Soros” — has called for “all hands on deck” in a full-scale implementation of a Trumpian revolution of opportunity and slashing back on government overreach of all kinds. Whether such a thing is still possible in the age of elitist control of media, academia, foundations, and bureaucracies of both public and private nature, is yet to be determined.

Read more here.

The fine art of cultivating grievances

Jonah Goldberg writes,

Outside of the actual headquarters of the Democratic party itself, no major institution in America today is more thoroughly run and controlled by the Left than academia.

For several years now, whenever I’ve visited a college campus, I’ve tried to make the following point. It basically goes like this:

You kids think it is somehow rebellious to be liberal. So let me see if I get this right. The administrators at this school are liberal. The professors are liberal. Your high-school teachers were probably liberal. Your textbooks are, for the most part, liberal. Hollywood is liberal. The music industry is liberal. The fashion industry is liberal. Publishing is liberal. The mainstream media are liberal. Silicon Valley is liberal. Believe it or not, most corporations and the overwhelming majority of charitable foundations are liberal.

And yet, you think you’re sticking it to the man by agreeing with them?

...You see, there is precious little bigotry and prejudice on college campuses. But the bulk of what does exist is aimed almost entirely at the guys and gals chilling at the tailgate party. Pro-life Christians, Israel-supporting Jews, libertarian professors, conservative scholars, climate-change skeptics, traditionalists of every stripe including classical liberals, and, of course, people who can take a joke: These make up the bulk of the victims of campus bigotry and prejudice. I can’t tell you how many professors I’ve met who have to keep their conservatism secret, at least until tenure, if not forever. I’ve never met or heard of a faculty member who had to keep her Marxism on the down-low.

...If you can leave aside the threat to Western Civilization these little totalitarians pose, it’s a fascinating and glorious comeuppance these university staff are getting.

...Just as the “free speech movement” was never actually for free speech, the safe spacers aren’t really for spaces that are safe. They are for little moving zones of political absolutism, where their worldview and, yes, their privilege, are unquestioned and celebrated.

...By my rough count*, Yale offers 26 courses on African-American studies, 64 courses on “Ethnicity, Race and Migration,” and 41 courses under the heading of “Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.” I am probably low-balling the real numbers (they don’t include independent study) and the extent of the indoctrination, since you can be sure that many seemingly conventional courses are chock-a-block with left-wing treacle. How many courses are there on the Constitution? Well, from what I can tell: two (though one is actually taught by a conservative visiting professor, Steven Calabrisi). The History department offers three courses on the era of the Founding, all by a single professor.

...As for safe spaces, there is already an Afro-American Cultural Center, a Native American Cultural Center, an Asian American Cultural Center, La Casa Latino Cultural Center, and the Office of LGBTQ Resources. Included among the 80 or so official student organizations:

- A Learning and Interactive Vietnamese Experience
-Asian American Students Alliance
-Asian American Studies Task Force
-Association of Native Americans at Yale, Undergraduate Organization
-India at Yale
-IvyQ (as in “Queer”)
-Japanese Undergraduate Students at Yale
-Latina Women at Yale
-Liberal Party
-Reproductive Rights Action League at Yale
-Sex and Sexuality Week Planning Board
-Undergraduate First Generation Low Income Partnership
-Women in Physics
-Women’s Leadership Initiative at Yale
-Yale Queer+Asian
-Yale Urban Collective
-The Black Solidarity Conference at Yale
-The Yale Women’s Center
-Yale Southeast Asian Movement
-Q (again, as in Queer) Magazine
-Alliance for Southeast Asian Students
-Arab Students Association
-Association of Salvadoreñas at Yale Undergraduate
-Black Student Alliance at Yale
-Brazil Club
-Canadian Students’ Association at Yale [Talk about safe spaces!]
-Chinese American Students’ Association
-Chinese Undergraduate Students at Yale
-Club Colombia
-Club of Argentine Students at Yale
-Club of Romanian Students at Yale
-Cuban-American Undergraduate Students’ Association
-Despierta Boricua, the Puerto Rican Student Organization at Yale
-DisOrient
-Eritrean and Ethiopian Student Association at Yale
-In the Q[as in Queer]loset
-Japanese American Students Union
-Kasama: The Filipino Club at Yale
-Korean American Students at Yale
-La Revolucion
-La Societe Francaise
-Lo Stivale
-Malaysian and Singaporean Association
-Organization for Racial and Ethnic Openness
-Russian Cultural Club
-Sisters of All Nations
-South Asian Society
-Southeastern European Society
-Student Association of Thais at Yale
-Students of Nigeria
-Swiss Students and Affiliates at Yale
-Taiwanese American Society
-The German Society of Undergraduates at Yale University
-The Polish Students’ Society of Yale College
-Vietnamese Student Association
-Yale African Students Association
-Yale Black Women’s Coalition
-Yale British Undergraduates
-Yale Caribbean Students’ Organization
-Yale College Black Men’s Students Union
-Yale College Student Czech and Slovak Society
-Yale Dominican Student Association
-Yale European Undergraduates
-Yale Friends of Turkey
-Yale Hawaii Institute
-Yale Kala
-Yale LGBTQ Cooperative
-Yale Mexican Student Organization
-Yale Scandinavian Society
-Yale Undergraduate Portuguese Association
-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer+ Activism Collective
-Margin: Student Perspectives from the Left
-Middle Eastern Resolution through Education, Action & Dialogue
-Party of the Left
-Students for Justice in Palestine
-Yale NAACP

And the response from the activists? A loaded-diaper tantrum about how Yale is a hotbed of bigotry against people of color and women. And what will placate the mob? Why more institutions, courses, and faculty trained in the fine art of cultivating grievances.

Read more here.

An idea for wealthy conservatives to consider

Elizabeth Price Foley writes,

Yep, it’s the LIVs Low Information Voters) who fail to realize they are being brainwashed by mainstream media “journalists” and Marxist professors who keep this “us against them” tactic alive.

What is her solution?

Conservatives need to increase their ranks in the media and the academy, or none of this can change. If the Koch brothers or other wealthy libertarian/conservatives really wanted to help change things, they would start endowing some U.S. civic and history programs at the secondary school level, funding academic positions in universities for those who possess libertarian/conservative views, and buying major newspapers (and ensuring that its editorial board was not leftist). These investments would buy more bang for the buck than all the white papers in the world.

No!

Kurt Schlichter, writing at Town Hall, urges conservatives to unleash the awesome power of "No."