Dear KMAG: 20190902 Open Topic

I was just reading that and saw you had posted the link. Brilliant insights as always.
Reading it coined in my mind this phrase: “The Woke-Industrial Complex”. That’s my term, not VDH’s, for the unholy relationship between Academia, Non-Profits, Media, and Government to agitate for radical leftist causes.
[“Radical” in my usage meaning the leftist programme of destruction, anti-institutional, anti-American causes – anything that destroys what VDH identified as “traditional elements of American society and culture—the family, church, community, and government”]
You are right that Universities are at the point of being profit-making enterprises that should be taxed.
It’s not just that they should be taxed. The weak point of leftist academia is MONEY. Their supply of cash (not used for education or scholarship but for indoctrination and faculty busy-work) must be completely cut off.
Government funding must be curbed. Trump putting long-overdue strings on the money is one step in the right direction. Why should the government fund a University that actively undermines First Amendment protections of student’s free speech?
Government funding eliminates accountability.
In the early 1800s Universities were funded by denominational churches. The primary goal of the University was to train ministers and develop character.
In the late 1800s, Carnegie and others took control of the Universities by funding them with grants that stipulated they could only be granted to “non-sectarian” (not religiously affiliated) institutions. Many Universities dropped their religious affiliation overnight. The primary purpose of the university under the German seminar model became to create well trained worker bees that big business could put to work.
The G.I. Bill was a great boon to the United States but it perpetuated the myth of creating worker bees and added the concept of social and economic mobility into the mix. No doubt economic mobility is a valuable benefit of an education, but it is still a perversion of original intents.
The other result of the G.I. Bill era was the notion of a partnership between academia and government. Grants from the government flourished during this time. Universities slowly became uncoupled from accountability – which previously had been to denominational institutions or to business interests.
Of course, large endowments played into this, in the instances where the endowments were managed by the institution or by sympathetic parties who held the same leftist goals.
Another source of funding is also key: Student Loans. Individual students are powerless to hold Universities accountable once they’ve taken the bait and are hooked into the system. The loan bank scam deserves its own story, but will the banks ever hold Universities accountable? Oh hell no – they don’t care that they are swimming in bad debt. Their business model assumes and expects a massive government loan bailout!
MONEY is the WEAK SPOT of the entire vile system. Choke the money and we will choke off the beast.
It can be done. I think the logical starting point is the state level, individual states need to cut funds and demand much more stringent accountability of the institutions they fund.

As a companion to VDH’s recollections, I HIGHLY recommend a commentary from a university professor that was first published in the 1980s.

In “The Closing of the American Mind” Dr. Bloom decries the loss of classical education – in 1987. From one of the reviews:
“Okay in all honesty I expected this book to be a shallow polemic along the lines of some of the “popular” authors today, pushing an agenda and setting up straw man arguments, to provide an illusion of balance. Bloom, never backs down or even bother to set up “illusory” counter theses to further his, he just piles on the examples, historical as well as contemporary to nail his indictment of the vapidness of modern “Higher Education.”
His thesis that the university today, reflects the general detachment of American society from the Puritan moral values that were paramount throughout American history, is conclusion that I would not have put together.
Is this book dated? When I started reading it I would ha e said yes, but as I digest the matter I have just completed, I see in myself the same sins of “culture” and value relativism that he sees as the symptom of the deconstruction of a Liberal education. As a engineering graduate, I hear in my own thoughts of a “superior” education that had very little of the messy humanities as part of my experience. I see that attitude as a shortcoming after reading Bloom, and one that sadly will be difficult to correct. Not that I am going to give up my technical high-paying career to become a philosopher, but I will now be forced to read and reread the very authors that Bloom uses to bolster his argument that it is those questions about values and the role of Man in relation to everything else that is important.”
DP comment: while I am not a Puritan by any means (too Catholic for that), the loss of any sort of shame and consequence of mistakes is a real problem in the US. I remember being struck by that when reading this book.

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