6
0

Defund Academia


 invite response                
2020 Jun 19, 11:16pm   788 views  8 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

https://spectator.us/defund-colleges-not-cops/

Defund colleges, not cops

Police are not the root of our problems. Academia is.

I have an alternative. Now is the moment to defund the colleges. We should defund them because they are the root of the virulent anti-Americanism that feeds the riots, the looting and the learned helplessness that afflict the country. And they have been feeding the protest culture for generations. The chief lesson taught by our nation’s colleges and universities is soft disdain for our country and its forms of self-government. And the soft disdain ripens to outright antipathy for about a quarter of the graduates.

Defunding the police is a supposed cure for endemic racism and white supremacy. But America is not a racist country. To denounce America as racist is to accept a falsification of history and a wild distortion of the everyday reality experienced by Americans of every race. ...

Why are so many Americans at the moment willing to endorse such a manifestly false claim? Because so many Americans have been to colleges that marinate them in the brine of Howard Zinn-style Marxist polemics against America, feminist screeds against patriarchy, black victimization narratives and the whole gamut of identitarian, teeth-gnashing nonsense. The graduates then walk these messages across the street to jobs in media, entertainment and technology where the visceral hatred of American values has become the elevator key to the executive suite. America has a real problem not with racism but with miseducation. We can start fixing that problem by defunding the colleges.

How? By refusing to cut checks to annual alumni-giving campaigns and by enrolling our children in educational programs outside the reach of the Despise-America-First cabal that runs most of our colleges and universities. Then, by rolling back the massive subsidies that state and federal government put into higher education. The subsidies are a thick-shelled nut of special interests that won’t be easy to crack, but the private donations and tuition payments could stop this minute if Americans realized what their money actually pays for. ...

It turns out a disaster was waiting around the corner, just not the one so eagerly anticipated by the dystopian professoriate. The COVID-19 epidemic now appears far less dire than predicted in all respects except the panicked overreaction of officialdom, which turned a health alert into a mandate to shutter the economy and send everyone home — including the professors and some 19 million college students.

That storyline intersects with ‘Defund the Colleges’ in two ways. COVID is already defunding American higher education. Colleges and universities across the country are claiming shutdown-induced deficits in the tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars. The higher-ed sector received $14 billion as part of the CARES Act and the American Council on Education has been insisting it needs $46 billion more, without which some institutions and many programs will wither away. We can hope that’s true, but Congress no doubt will feel intense political pressure to ante up. But COVID is also steering colleges to another precipice. Enrollments were shrinking before the shutdown, but the virus-induced switchover to online instruction along with continuing fears of infection may deter many students from enrolling in the new academic year. Estimates run as high as 20 percent of the students detouring from college come this fall.

These are good tidings for those of us who think college has been oversold to Americans and that it has abused its authority by beckoning students into political activism. Any doubts about that should have been put to rest by how higher education has responded to the recent protests-cum-riots.

Last week I collected about 100 published statements from colleges decrying the killing of George Floyd. These statements differed from one another as much as one masked antifa rioter differs from the next. The essentials were the same: horror at the killing of Floyd, recognition that COVID-19 has been hard on everyone but especially the black community, and avowal that the college will henceforth align itself even more fervently to anti-racism in the midst of our profoundly racist society. ...

I remember this music from the first weeks of my freshman year at Haverford in 1971, when the administration of the college similarly collapsed in bathos when a cohort of underprepared black students protested that the college wasn’t fulfilling its commitment to educate them. Forty-nine years later, the brook is still babbling the same guilt–ridden platitudes.

Read five or 10 or 50 such statements, and it is clear that American higher education is in the hands of a clerisy, the members of which apparently all went to the same seminary and worship the same color-coded god, Lord Diversity, and his attendants, Black Resentment and White Guilt. ...

Let me acknowledge that cops are not angels. I’ve known some bad ones, and cops have authority and a license to use force, which is all too easily corrupted. That said, most cops do a hard job reasonably well; the vast majority are honest, and most Americans are grateful they are on the job.

I would not want to live in an America without them. ...

We would, I submit, be on a path to a better, more enlightened society if we defunded the colleges instead. The colleges that survive the coming debacle will be the stronger for it. Propping them up in their hour of weakness will simply help a malignant force in our culture continue to erode our national confidence and self-respect. Real higher education will emerge in new and healthier forms. And we won’t be training up yet another generation to loathe our civic institutions. It’s time to follow Andrew Cuomo’s counsel and put alma mater in the nursing home with the other COVID victims.

Comments 1 - 8 of 8        Search these comments

1   Patrick   2020 Jun 20, 11:09am  

The graffiti of "Defund Cops" absolutely begs to have people write over the u with an e to make "Defend Cops".

Totally going to do that the first chance I get.
2   HeadSet   2020 Jun 20, 11:15am  

Patrick says
The graffiti of "Defund Cops" absolutely begs to have people write over the u with an e to make "Defend Cops".

Totally going to do that the first chance I get.



Now watch all those pols that said "Defund Police" now claim they were "misheard," and really said "Defend Police."
3   MisdemeanorRebel   2020 Jun 20, 1:42pm  

We're literally paying people to undermine the USA.

One great idea: Create a Federal Database of College Majors, and cut off the descriptions for Liberal Arts/Social Science at 1980 average.

Anything else is labelled "Other - Not qualified" and cannot be used to get a Federal Student Loan, Pell Grant, or qualify for a Gov Job.

So English might get you a clerk job in a Gov Office, but not Black Trans Oppression Studies, for which you could get no loan, no grant, and would not count as a 4-year degree when applying for Government Jobs.

Great little nasty way to get rid of the Diversity Industry, while keeping Communists out of Government.
4   Bd6r   2020 Jun 20, 1:47pm  

NoCoupForYou says
We're literally paying people to undermine the USA.

One great idea: Create a Federal Database of College Majors, and cut off the descriptions for Liberal Arts/Social Science at 1980 average.

Anything else is labelled "Other - Not qualified" and cannot be used to get a Federal Student Loan, Pell Grant, or qualify for a Gov Job.

So English might get you a clerk job in a Gov Office, but not Black Trans Oppression Studies, for which you could get no loan, no grant, and would not count as a 4-year degree when applying for Government Jobs.


Allow only 2-5% of college funds to be used for anything other than non-teaching purposes (administration, sports).
Cancel degree plans that produce unemployed degree holders
Cancel ethnic and womyns studies, education, and assorted other social justice nonsense (do not provide ANY federal and state funding for students who want to study these)
Mandate that average grade in class should be a C to avoid grade inflation.

Ain't gonna happen though.
5   Hircus   2020 Jun 20, 1:47pm  

NoCoupForYou says
One great idea: Create a Federal Database of College Majors, and cut off the descriptions for Liberal Arts/Social Science at 1980 average.


I've wanted this for a while. I think these junk majors that don't lead people to gainful careers w/ a decent salary should get much reduced, if any, financial aid.

There is zero reason why the tax payer should fund someone to get a job in Lesbian Dance Theory, or hell, in any of the "Critical Theory" discipline majors.
6   Bd6r   2020 Jun 20, 3:42pm  

Some other countries are being rational.

Australia:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-20/study-arts-and-humanities-government-fees-tertiary-education/12374124

If you want to study arts and humanities, you will simply have to pay for it yourself.

Education Minister Dan Tehan says the Government want to steer people away from humanities into "job-ready" STEM fields
For someone studying humanities, the cost of their contribution to the degree is now almost exactly equal to the cost of teaching the degree

Romania:
7   PeopleUnited   2020 Jun 20, 4:47pm  

Between the AmSoc (American socialist) agenda and the minor league college sports racket where “student” athletes are exploited by colleges and pro sports by proxy to work for no pay, every publicly funded college is a threat to society (including all private colleges that accept students with government guaranteed loans).
8   MisdemeanorRebel   2020 Jun 26, 10:21pm  

rd6B says
Some other countries are being rational.

Australia:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-20/study-arts-and-humanities-government-fees-tertiary-education/12374124

If you want to study arts and humanities, you will simply have to pay for it yourself.


This is great news.

We are funding the destruction of America, and is has already spread to K-12, including before the 1619 Rubbish which is rejected by the lead scholars in the fields of World History, US Colonial, and Civil War History.

Please register to comment:

api   best comments   contact   latest images   memes   one year ago   random   suggestions