Ending campus fascism

By Bruce Walker
web posted October 22, 2001

While public opinion polls show astronomical support for
President Bush and America's actions in defense of freedom and
safety in the world, there is a conspicuous hold-out: Academia.
So while political groups that frantically opposed President Bush
last year -- AFL-CIO, NAACP, NOW, and others -- have
closed ranks, more or less, behind America, the Orwellian
lunacy of universities continues.

This should surprise no one. The animus against America and
freedom never came from the decent men and women who form
labor unions, the deeply religious black Americans, or even the
upper class housewives who form the core constituency of
NOW. The pampered bureaucracies that deal with the general
memberships of these sorts of organizations likewise must deal
with the real world frequently enough to know which way is up.

Not so, however, with the decadent, ghoulish nihilists of
Academia. The venomous and lazy creatures who inhabit the
pseudo-disciplines of psycho-babble, oppression theologies,
counter-rationalism, hoary and rancid Marxism, and the familiar
clutch of selfish, old, isolated fools recoil from Old Glory like
Dracula from a Cross. Their rage at hope and faith and courage
is born of ancient spite, and seems proof against all goodness
and light.

Even the new pseudo-Islamic crypto-Marxist Jihad against
equality, peace, justice, and joy seems less a threat to these
sullen bitter followers of Malice than any the blessings of
America, loving families, and faith in God. This should tell us all
something very important: Academia, as we have known it, is
terminally flawed. The information revolution has opened endless
vistas of study for any willing mind. The rigorous quasi-military
and quasi-religious organization of what we call "Higher
Education" has long since ceased to perform a useful service,
and now it is a drag on thought and opportunity which we can no
longer afford.

The message should be sent loudly and clearly, while the images
of dead Americans in New York is clear, that those destructive
and masochistic institutions called universities should be forced to
live completely within the free market of money, ideas, and
culture. No longer will taxpayers with money and soldiers with
blood subsidize the bizarre intellectual fetishes of boring and
nasty old ladies with scraps of paper given them by odd grouchy
administrators. No longer will these vacuous "college degrees"
be granted like medieval charters or Papal indulgences.

How can we measure the destruction these gnomes of nihilism
have caused during their decades of brutal domination of
universities? Think first of all the middle class parents who have
scrimped and saved so that their children have the lavish sums
required for a college diploma, but then think of all the lower
class parents who could not afford the luxury of these peacock
feathers for their children, and so had talented sons and
daughters kept down because the price of college was more than
they could afford. Think also of the students in these grotesque
institutions who had their years of intellectual curiosity wasted in
the dank dungeons of leftist dogma.

Think also of our society, feed as Gospel the vile propaganda of
those whose greatest pleasure if proving our misery. The
confounded and compounded lies which led women to hate men,
black and brown people to hate white people, taught the old to
fear the young and the young to mock the old, led peoples united
to view each other with suspicion. Think of how the world has
suffered from the ancient, curable maladies of poverty, hatred,
war, and slavery, while the most eminent physician for these
illnesses, America, lay too often in a sickbed caused by the
quackery of liberal druid priesthoods.

What can we do? First, revitalize academic freedom. Everyone
today has a "Bill of Rights" except for white or male or
conservative or religious students in publicly supported
universities. The ordeals of these poor souls -- I could write a
book of my own personal experiences- should be given voice in
the committee rooms of Congress and of the state legislatures
which fund these universities.

Congress and legislatures should create legal rights for these
oppressed peoples. When professors bully, they should be held
to account before a jury of ordinary citizens invested with the
power to award monetary damages against the professor and to
enjoin the "instructor" from teaching again (rather like we keep
convicted sex offenders from working in day care centers).
Create the right of a student to document through audio or even
audiovisual recording just what they Gauleiters of Higher
Education are saying and doing to our young people.

If a leftist hate-monger wishes to hold salons at their expense and
offer no marketable degree, they have that right. But not on our
nickel, and not when a college degree carries legally marketable
benefits. Let them compete, like us, in the free market -- and find
out the joys of selling ideas and information to consumers who
have other choices.

Require universities to allow opposing viewpoints in student
newspapers, radio stations, etc. and provide that space and
resources be allocated in direct proportion to the percentage of
students who support a particular position (i.e. introduce the
novelty of intellectual debate into this last stronghold of censored
thought). There are many ways to achieve this proportional
representation: proxies, vouchers, ratings -- but the key should
not be majority rule or administration decision, but market
principles that generate conflicting viewpoints on campus.

Remove the fig leaf of "learning" from the ideological boot camp
of college campuses. Students in most studies are not learning
anything at all, but worse, the students are being persuaded that
they are getting an education. Congress and legislatures can
remove that fig leaf by requiring for all federal and state jobs that
an individual take one or more standardized tests. The results of
these tests, rather than the grade fantasy, will determine what
level of education a person possess.

Thus, someone with a high school diploma might score within the
top one percent and be considered to have a doctoral degree for
a particular position, while someone with a meaningless scrap of
paper (e.g. Ph.D. in Humanities from Vassar) who scored in the
lower ten percentile would be considered to require a G.E.D.
before earning the right to a low level administrative position in
government.

Higher Education has been for thirty years the greatest scandal in
American culture. Now, clearly, it is the nursery of treason
against our very way of life. Like all corrupt machines -- like
Tammany Hall, Democrat and KKK control of the South, femi-
Nazism, ecoterrorism and related ideological industries -- truth is
the surest and purest tonic. The case is clear, and the danger of
inaction is real. Reform public schools sometime, but end the
untouchable power of that loose network of anti-Americanism
described by the curious oxymoron as "Higher Education" now.

Bruce Walker (feb6@enterstageright.com) is a senior writer with
Enter Stage Right. He is also a frequent contributor to The
Pragmatist and The Common Conservative.

Enter Stage Right - http://www.enterstageright.com