Batshit crazy Universities

Fellow-to-faculty programs have seeded academia with activists.

In the days after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Jemma Decristo, a UC Davis professor, took to social media to express support for the violent energies that had erupted in the Middle East. “HELL YEAH,” Decristo wrote on X, responding to a report that protesters had set fire to the Israeli embassy in Jordan. Reposting news of protests at the United States embassy in Lebanon, Decristo added, “[fire icon] to the US embassy. US out of everywhere. US GO HOME. US GO HOME.”

Is bloat a problem in our universities? It is sometimes suggested that universities’ workforces have grown exponentially and haphazardly, generating costs on a scale that creates financial risk. They have certainly grown, outpacing the communities of scholars that they once were, to become large, bureaucratic institutions with administrative and support personnel to match. They have also become heavily regulated by governments and have many employees to manage their newly regulated spheres and activities.

There has been a spate of articles written lately — and indeed of books — by academics who have become disaffected by the happenings in our much-vaunted institutions of higher education. The most vocal and well-known of these include luminaries such as Jonathan Haidt, at Columbia, Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, and Steven Pinker, at Harvard. In Canada, Gad Saad at Concordia is likely the most effective and well-known of such critics, although Bruce Pardy, David Haskell, Julie Ponesse and Janice Fiamengo also spring quickly to mind. Many others currently operate and communicate behind the scenes, and in an increasingly organized manner.

Universities increasingly furnish a worrying case study in the disintegration of the Canadian public sector. Including that instead of beacons of intelligent thought on this and other problems, they’ve become bastions of dogmatic ineptitude. And that we aren’t even vaguely surprised at the muddled incompetence.

Harsh words? Well, consider the facts, starting with this Toronto Sun story: “Cap on student visas could wreak financial havoc on Ontario universities, says rep.” The gist of which is that Canada’s collapsed immigration policy, which helped cause the collapse of our housing policy, is now causing a collapse of our post-secondary education policy and the proposed solution is more inept meddling.

This year, I am celebrating my 30th year as a professor. During those three decades, I have witnessed the proliferation of several parasitic ideas that are fully decoupled from reality, common sense, reason, logic and science, which led to my 2020 book, “The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.” As George Orwell famously noted, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” Each of these ideas were spawned on university campuses, originally in the humanities and the social sciences, but as I predicted long ago, they have infiltrated the natural sciences, and now can be found in all areas of our culture.

Universities offered students in the U.S. the opportunity to enroll in many courses that push gender ideology and left-wing activism during the 2023-2024 school year.

Princeton University offered a class titled “Black + Queer in Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture” in the Spring 2023 semester, according to the university’s course catalog. The class will survey black BDSM culture via research available in libraries and individuals involved in the groups that participate in the culture.

In November, the Florida Board of Governors voted to remove the “Principles of Sociology” from the state’s list of approved general-education courses for public-college students. Sociology professors across the state and in the American Sociological Association (ASA) have argued that the decision will prevent Florida students from learning about social structures and their effects on human behavior. Those critics are wrong. Sadly, academic sociology has devolved into a field of ideologues and activists promoting critical race theory and radical gender ideology. Florida should not include it among its general-education requirements.

Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge from censorship and crime to antisemitism.

America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism.

Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radical political activists.

One professor is urging Americans to break the educational “cycle of failure,” offering practical solutions to fight the “anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-western” ideology poisoning U.S. students’ minds.

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher urged students not to go to elite colleges because doing so “just makes you stupid” and that these elite schools are “a North Korean re-education camp” that are racist towards Asian applicants that don’t teach history and “if ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market.”

If ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market. pic.twitter.com/BKDBUZbcZm

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) October 21, 2023