I suppose there are some people eager to read what Oliver North and his co-authors have to say about the current state of American higher education. After all, we're told on the dust jacket of American Gulags: Marxist Tyranny in Higher Education and What to Do About It that, collectively, they've authored more than 109 books, some of them bestsellers. I have to confess that this is my first encounter with their oeuvre, and I'm not sure that I'd look forward to a second.
In a word, the book is a disappointment. Released in late May by Fidelis Publishing, American Gulags' title leads us to expect a fresh, if somewhat overwrought, perspective on one of the principal fronts in today's culture wars. We've all read first-person accounts of cancel culture, progressive professorial pontification, and Kafkaesque administrative proceedings, and we've all heard about the blowback, working its way through various red-state legislatures. To be sure, as many have observed, the plural of anecdote is not data, but there is data for those who are interested. Our authors seem not to have consulted it. Indeed, if I had to judge on the basis of the dated character of many of their anecdotes and references, this latest book is a relatively hasty update of Liberal Tyranny in Higher Education, published by co-authors Goetsch and Jones in 2009.
What seems new is, in the first place, the substitution of "Marxist" for "liberal." While I didn't count the number of times the former adjective appears in the book, I did keep track of the references to "Marxist professors," "Marxist faculty," and "Marxist faculty and administrators." For the record, those expressions appear 50 times—that is, roughly once every three pages. But saying something frequently doesn't make it true. A more fair-minded characterization of the professoriate would describe it as overwhelmingly left-leaning but not Marxist, at least not if the latter term is to be deployed with any precision. While we perhaps shouldn't demand too much accuracy in a book not written for an academic audience (about which more shortly), connecting "Marxist tyranny" with "Gulags" in a title does call for some responsibility and care on the part of the authors.
Read more>>
.png)
.jpg)
3 comments:
Like with many things, turning off the money spigot will largely "fix higher ed". At least in public universities.
The budgets of universities are set annually, and under the control of state legislatures. Just cut the budget by a painful amount, and let university officials decide how to spend the reduced amount of money they'll be getting. Meaning what the core teaching of a university ought to be. I think they will decide to cut bullshit and fluff like "Gender Studies".
Same with the FBI and other out of control agencies of the Executive Branch. Just cut the FBI's budget by 30%, and let them decide what their core functions are, and how to carry them out. Congress can audit them to see how things are going: what they are doing, how they are spending the money. If abuse continues, cut another 10%. Etc.
Guaranteed: ordinary Americans will not notice AT ALL if the FBI's budget is cut.
See how easy that is?
Since when have "conservatives" won such policy battles with liberals? They do not have a good track record, and societal momentum is not on their side.
Just cut the funding.
The is why "conservatives" are such losers. They can never see the obvious thing to do. Or if they do see it, they cannot bring themselves to actually take that action.
NO! No one can fix it. Doomed forever. Big broom sweep fixed, phoenix rises from the ashes.
"Just cut the funding."
The same thing would help greatly to rein in "gender affirming" medical practices. Prohibit insurance from covering it. Dry up the money.
Post a Comment