Ending campus fascism By Bruce Walker 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 is a senior writer with Enter Stage Right. He is also a frequent contributor to The Pragmatist and The Common Conservative.
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