AMERICA, WE HAD A GOOD RUN Part II

Increasingly, America is ruled by two tribes of lunatics, snapping their fingers, ready to break into a dance fight at any moment. While Trump has indeed cranked it to 11, he is but the cherry on top of the banana split. How did we go so wrong?

West Side Story

American education was once the best in the world but as early as 1948, Richard Weaver wrote “…we have lost our grasp of the nature of knowledge...” Schools have become “social centers…where teachers, living in fear of constituents, dare not enforce scholarship, and endeavor to turn classes into democratic forums…” And, while knowledge alone will not make citizens more moral or kind or refined, a nation cannot be great without great schools. The 2015 ranking from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which includes countries like Tunisia and Kazakhstan, puts the U.S. at #39 in math, 24 in reading, and 25 in science.

One problem is the deep resistance to reform embedded in teachers’ unions. Unions tell us that teachers are the bedrock of society. But if that’s true, wouldn’t it be important to have good teachers? And to have good teachers, shouldn’t we be able to fire bad ones? In California, where fruit and common sense are stopped at the border, one teacher fed semen-laced cookies to his students. Several victims now have eating disorders but the district had to pay him $40,000 to quit due to the arcane steps required to fire someone. In 2014, a California judge ruled the state’s lax teacher tenure violated students’ civil rights. He was overturned.

Yet, dangerous as general mediocrity is, perhaps the bigger danger to the republic is the pervasive indoctrination that saturates everything from English to Home Economics. “Ohhh, Omnipotentblog. Isn’t that just another whiny conservative trope disproved by this Huffpo piece I read the other day?” asked a friend, a professor at an elite university while sipping cherry Kool-Aid. (True story.) Well, the liberal Atlantic disagrees. In “Admit It, American Colleges Do Indoctrinate Students”, Conor Friedersdorf argues that it does happen but it’s generally a good thing.

Gresham’s law in education states that content that leads to credentials more easily will replace that which is more difficult but has higher intrinsic value. With the advent of Gender, Ethnic and other grievance-oriented programs as well as the infiltration of those values in most other subjects, the bad replaces the good. This material naturally displaces traditional education not only because it is favored by instructors but because time and resources are limited. And when you have a society to indoctrinate, American History and Shakespeare must go.

If you approach two random professors sipping lattes while complaining about the Nixonian conservatism of that imperialist dog Leon Trotsky, they would likely have difficulty naming a Republican colleague. According to one recent study, the ratio of liberal to conservative professors is almost 12 to 1. Economics, the most conservative profession is a mere 4.5 to 1 but in history, the ratio is over 33 to 1. What’s shocking is how these numbers have shifted in the last 50 years. A 1968 study put the ratio in history departments at just 2.7 to 1. As recent as 2004, liberal history professors outnumbered conservatives by as little as 9 to 1. One recent study from Stanford found that conservative-leaning law professors face overt discrimination in promotions and hiring. Another study of social psychology professors noted 37% would not hire a conservative and 44% thought their peers would not. 37% also believed their peers would discriminate on a grant review. My defensive friend points out that STEM professors are generally not communists. While true, STEM students are less than 40% of all graduates, which means the overall ratio for non-STEM fields is far higher than 12 to 1. Primary and secondary education are no better as 85% of elementary and 87% of High School teachers identify as liberal.

Is there evidence students are brainwashed? In a slightly dated study, two researchers found only “slight shifts” in ideology.

But when analyzing the numbers, the “slight shifts” are rather striking. “Far left” students more than doubled while the “far right” cohort dropped nearly a third. Conservatives dropped by 10% while liberals enjoyed a 25% bump. This is hardly insignificant.

How did education drift so far from the broader culture? The social ferment of the 60’s did lasting damage to the nation and education was not spared. In 1969, armed, militant black students, angry over Cornell University’s pervasive “racist attitudes” and “irrelevant curriculum”, seized control of a dormitory. Death threats were phoned to professors who had previously opposed them. Thomas Sowell, a black economist and Cornell professor until 1968, did not experience the alleged mass racism on campus but he did have harsh words for the president at the time, James Perkins, whom he described as “a veritable weathervane, following the shifting cross-current of campus politics…the quintessential appeaser and dispenser of pious rhetoric”. With their demands happily met, the militants walked free.

Another Cornell professor at the time, Allan Bloom, wrote in “The Closing of the American Mind”, that “universities gave way under the pressure of mass movements and did so in large measure because they thought those measures possessed a moral truth...” Perkins “had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time…(he) thought he was engaged in a great moral work.”

In 2018, on American campuses, leftists now feel empowered to threaten violence, physically assault conservatives and journalists, rip posters out of teenaged hands, shout down speeches, riot, and commit an extraordinary number of other fascist and violent acts. This happens because the ideological progeny of James Perkins support it.

Jonah Goldberg describes the 1930’s as a “fascist moment”. A world-wide depression had shaken confidence that democracy could solve problems and there was great affection, fawning in fact, over movers and shakers like Mussolini and Hitler. WWII changed this, of course, but that doesn’t erase the fact that there was a time when many viewed the Bill of Rights as crusty and stale. Is Western Civilization having another “fascist moment”? The left has made serious attacks on the 1^st, 2^nd, 4^th, and 10^th amendments and many on the right embrace a president that, while unfairly slandered as fascist, appears thoroughly annoyed he has any restraints at all.

When an entire generation expresses fondness for socialism but can’t even define it, it’s time to admit our schools have failed. Fixing education would be a daunting task. Perhaps when Millenials start running everything and really making a mess of it, panic will ensue and a correction will begin. When that time comes, God willing, maybe we should start with the teachers and school books first.