Coercion Meets Its Match

Mar 22, 2019

Clusterfuck Nation
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Like the fabled spring zephyr came news that the Golden Golem of Greatness, (a.k.a. President Trump) signed an executive order that would withhold federal funding from colleges and universities that do not demonstrate support for free speech. It has been an amazement to behold the appalling, hypocritical suppression of the first amendment on campuses across the nation, with their ignoble speech codes, asinine safe spaces, sinister kangaroo courts, and racist anti-whiteness crusades.

Most wondrous of all has been the failure of college presidents, deans, trustees, and faculty chairs to assert their authority and do the right thing — namely, take a stand against the arrant muzzling of free expression by campus Stalinists. Their craven passivity is a symptom of what future historians will identify as the epic institutional collapse of higher education, which first made itself into an industry like any other moneygrubbing business, and then became a titanic racketeering operation. And now it is all coming to grief.

In the years ahead, you will see colleges go out of business at a shocking rate and the contagion will spread to the giant state systems around the country. In my little region alone, several colleges have published their own obituaries in the last few months: Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont; Southern Vermont College in Bennington; and Hampshire College over in Amherst, MA (which is desperately searching for a buyout). That’s just the beginning of a wave of closures that will send tens of thousands of academic hierophants flooding the unemployment offices while sleeping in their cars.

It’s not hard to see how this fiasco developed and blossomed. In the 1960s, when I was in college, Marxism offered a neat, pre-engineered template for opposing the odious Establishment that blundered into the Vietnam War. Students then at least had skin in the game: the threat of getting drafted into the army and shipped over to die in the jungle for a senseless conflict. In fact, many young men unsuited for college took refuge there to evade the military. Then, with a bull market in Boomer Generation PhDs, the faculties were soon filled with the former Sixties radicals.

Many were Boomer women, who set out to explain and correct the evolving relations of men and women in the office workplace of the day. By then the war was over. The sick economy of the 1970s put an end to the ability of men to support a family and more women were forced to enter the office environment. Meanwhile radical progressivism needed an ever-fresh supply of new aggrieved parties to justify its agitation against the old Marxist bugbears of bourgeois values and structural oppression — and incidentally fuel academic careers. Hence, the multiplication of victims into handy intersectional categories.

By the 1980s, it also became evident that 60s civil rights legislation to end Jim Crow laws had not solved the quandaries of race in America, and that disappointment refreshed the progressive crusade to heal the world of injustice and inequality. Every other effort to produce equal outcomes for different categories of people had also proved disappointing, so now progressives resort to plain coercion to force equal outcomes at all costs, and nowhere is that behavior more overt than on campus the past decade.

The delusion that everybody must have a college education finally turned Higher Ed into a racket, when the federal government decided to guarantee college loans — which only prompted colleges to ramp up tuitions way beyond the official inflation rate and undertake massive expansion programs in the competition for the expanding base of student customer-borrowers. Almost all colleges acted as facilitators to this loan racket, though with federal guarantees they had no skin in that game. Now, outstanding student loan debt is $1.5 trillion, and about 40 percent of it is nonperforming, in euphemistic banker jargon. The student borrowers have been fleeced, many of them financially destroyed for life, and they have only begun to express themselves politically.

The anxiety and remorse behind that dastardly financial behavior, and the prospect of coming institutional ruin, is probably a big factor behind the engineered social justice hysterias that paradoxically made college campuses the most intellectually unfree — and intellectually unsafe! —places in the land. And turned all those college presidents into cowards and cravens. Since coercion is the only behavior modification college administrators understand these days, it’s reasonable that Mr. Trump use federal grant largesse as a lever to end the structural despotism of campus culture. The stumbling economy will take care of the rest.

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