For years, many of us have been writing about the decline in viewpoint diversity and the rise of an academic orthodoxy in higher education. It is one of the focuses of my new book, The Indispensable Right. Despite the calls for greater tolerance, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) just elected a new president who has been criticized for being overtly hostile to conservative viewpoints and candidates. Todd Wolfson, a Rutgers University anthropologist, is an ally for those who continue to oppose intellectual diversity in favor of ideological orthodoxy in higher education.Wolfson is the author of “Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left.”Given the hostile environment faced by conservatives, Republicans, and libertarians today, one would think that anyone contemplating this position would strive to project neutrality and tolerance. That does not appear to be the style of Professor Wolfson.Instead, he immediately fulfilled the stereotype laid out by Vance:
“With Vance, American Far-Right authoritarians have succeeded in elevating a fascist who vows to ‘aggressively attack universities in this country’ to within striking distance of their goal: the annihilation of American higher education as we know it.”
He added:
Vance’s labeling of professors as “the enemy” and his praise of Hungarian dictator Viktor Orbán’s seizure of state universities as “the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with leftwing domination of universities” are unambiguous. Should he and the dark-money funders backing him gain power, they aim to take control of American higher education and bend it to their will. Ironically, they would use fear and misinformation to turn colleges and universities into what the Far Right has for years falsely accused them of being: ideological indoctrination centers. …
While attacks on American higher education are nothing new, the scope of the Project 2025 blueprint for a Trump-Vance presidency offers a frightening glimpse into an authoritarian future that would transform American colleges and universities into thought-control factories by stifling ideas, silencing debate, and destroying autonomy. Project 2025 would roll back decades of progress on access to higher education, eliminate protections for LGBTQ+ students and sexual assault survivors, privatize student loans, end loan forgiveness, and, if we take its authors at their word, abolish the Department of Education entirely. We cannot afford to let this happen.
So in one statement, Wolfson not only officially opposed the Republican ticket as an existential threat to higher education but made defeating such views an objective of the organization.
There is not a single line recognizing the lack of diversity of viewpoints at most universities or polling showing that both students and faculty are now engaging in widespread self-censorship under administrators and academics like himself.
A survey conducted by the Harvard Crimson shows that more than three-quarters of Harvard Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences faculty respondents identified as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Only 2.5% identified as “conservative,” and only 0.4% as “very conservative.”
Likewise, a study by Georgetown University’s Kevin Tobia and MIT’s Eric Martinez found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools. Notably, a 2017 study found 15 percent of faculties were conservative. Another study found that 33 out of 65 departments lacked a single conservative faculty member.
Some sites like Above the Law have supported the exclusion of conservative faculty. Senior Editor Joe Patrice defended “predominantly liberal faculties” by arguing that hiring a conservative law professor is akin to allowing a believer in geocentrism to teach at a university. So the views of roughly half of the judiciary and half of the country are treated as legitimately excluded as intellectually invalid.
Given this hostility, it is hardly surprising that polls show faculty and students are less comfortable discussing their views or values in higher education.
The study shows that 70 percent of students “believe that speech can be as damaging as physical violence.” It also shows the impact of speech codes and regulations with two out of three students reporting that they “self-censor” during classroom discussions.
Not surprisingly, Republican students are the most likely to self-censor given the purging of conservative faculty and the viewpoint intolerance shown on most campuses.
Some 49 percent of Republican students report self-censoring on three or more topics. Independents are the second most likely at 40 percent. Some 38 percent of Democrats admit to self-censuring.
These surveys and studies on the reduction of conservative or libertarian faculty show that the far left has achieved precisely what Wolfson describes as a successful effort “to take control of American higher education and bend it to their will.”
This was an opportunity for Wolfson and the AAUP to reassure the many conservative and libertarian students and faculty. In the face of dwindling numbers of conservative and libertarian faculty, they could have voiced a commitment to resist ideological agendas from either the left or the right. It was a chance to push back on the hyperbole while acknowledging that work must be done to regain the lost trust in academia, which is now at record lows.
Instead, Wolfson has doubled down on political language and orthodox policies. That could hardly come as a surprise for the faculty who elected him. Wolfson told Inside Higher Ed he wants to make AAUP “a fighting organization.”
Wolfson’s response is reminiscent of how the AAUP has solicited papers on conservative intolerance in higher education while omitting liberal intolerance. It was an almost laughable agenda given the purging or dramatic reduction of conservatives from most faculties over the last couple decades.
As my book discusses, the AAUP was once the bastion of free speech and academic integrity values. It opposed the invasion of politics into higher education. However, it has become captured by the same forces that have converted our campuses into intolerance spaces for many faculty and students.
Wolfson has been widely criticized for the move by AAUP to reverse its long-standing opposition to academic boycotts, a move that is viewed as targeting Israeli institutions. It is clearly part of his move to make AAUP even more of a “fighting organization” and he has insisted that “collective action of all sorts does not necessarily come into and undermine academic freedom.”
Wolfson’s election shows how the objections of so many at the lack of intellectual diversity and tolerance are having little impact on faculty. When elected officials threaten reductions in support, these same academics are outraged by the attacks on higher education. Many offer perfunctory commitments to intellectual diversity while doing little to achieve it. As shown here, they are continuing to maintain and expand the culture that is suffocating our scholastic programs on every level.
Here is his faculty bio:
“Todd Wolfson’s research focuses on the intersection of new media and contemporary social movements and he is author of “Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left” and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, “Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements.” Wolfson believes in the importance of engaged scholarship that leads to tangible action in the world, and to that end, he is a co-founder of the Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) based in Philadelphia, PA. MMP is an award-winning organization that aims is to use new media and communications to build a movement of poor and working people, united across color lines. MMP’s work has been supported by the Knight Foundation, Ford Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, Media and Democracy Coalition, and Media Democracy Fund amongst others.”
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster).
Comrade Stalin would be very proud of Mr. Wolfson.
J
That dastardly word, “colonialism,” is no longer the stigma of scapegoated American interests. We are living through an era of global colonialism.
It works by forcing its view and ideology on all of us, -academically indoctrinating and converting our youth, boycotting non-compliants, censoring or neutralizing all opposition, controlling the dissemination and content of information, -and reducing all (contributors/meritorious accomplishers along with non-contributors and gimme gimme takers) to the lowest common denominator– then redistributing to everyone equally, without regard to merit, contribution, or deservance.
Thanks to the good professor, we can vent our concern here every week, but who has a plan to control its metastasis?
Chocolate milk and humor can only carry us so far.
@lin
Oh, absolutely. Things like uber-gentrification, overtaxation, forced ideology, even things like net zero and green new deal – they are all modern day colonialism, and all are tenets of the modern left’s agenda (they don’t have policy. They have an agenda). For them to pretend they are anything other than a regime bearing absolute guilt and culpability for all that they project onto others is absolutely hysterical at this point.
The most deeply indoctrinated among these younger cohorts are virtually indistinguishable from foot soldiers, cultists, or the religious zealots of old. I don’t know what we are going to do with them other than try to contain them through marginalization until they age out. The next couple of decades are going to be real interesting, as the damage is already done and very difficult to reverse.
Todd Wolfson should stick to the science of anthropology, or at least step outside the echo chamber of his ultra liberal friends once in awhile. His lack of self-awareness is breathtaking.
“Todd Wolfson should stick to the science of anthropology”
Are you assuming he has anything of real value to provide, even in that discipline? The bio that Turley linked to claims that Wolfson is “an anthropologist by training” but goes on to state “His research is a mixture of traditional and cyber-based ethnography”. “Ethnography” is further defined as “a type of social research that involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members’ own interpretation of such behavior.” Sounds like a prime example of made-up clap-trap (uncertain that initial “l” shouldn’t be an “r”) masquerading as science. He is also listed as “Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies” which seems like just so much more soft BS. I must admit, however, that he appears quite simian in his photo, so there may be some innate talent in the anthropological arena.
*SENATOR KEELEY
Wolfson must be a humdinger of an an anthropologist.
Whose dinger has he been humming?
Congratulations, Professor Turley, for bringing these issues and numbers to light!
Thank you!
“he immediately fulfilled the stereotype laid out by Vance” I’m not surprised by his response. a fine example of knee-jerking. What frightens me is that this professor and others of his ilk are infecting the mushy minds of 18-21 year olds with their nonsense
If Dan Quayle or W Bush said “price gauging” instead of price gouging they would have never heard the end of it, but when a moronic Dem does it it doesn’t get mentioned.
Harris hid for 25 days and when she deigned to grace us with an actual police she comes out against price “gauging”.
But… “You probably complained about the song the band was playing as the Titanic slipped under the water.”
Perhaps that “slip of the tongue” was actually intentional. To gauge something is to measure it. Therefore price gauging is the act of measuring prices – increases and declines, in other words inflation. So maybe VP Harris has struck upon the interesting approach of fighting inflation by not measuring it. Then no one can complain. Problem solved – sort of. Unless one then realizes that there are economic realities that, measurement or not, actually do matter.
Well, “price gauging” could be interpreted to mean objectively determining what the market will pay for a product, and “price gouging” seems clearly to be how socialists, Marxists, and other collectivists define the setting of prices to a level that the market is willing to pay 🙂
Wolfson is an activist. Activists act, they do not think.
Acting without thinking is the definition of stupid.
The problem with academia is stupid people are professors.
Polling of Voters have shown College Educated Voters tend Left…..go figure!
With an environment clearly described by Professor Turley it should be no surprise why that is so.
All those years of being brainwashed by an educational system that has been overtaken by useful idiots we see yet another generation of them being churned out by the American Educational System. As bad as McCarthy was….he was right. The Communists have infiltrated and finally have control of our children and are using the schools to indoctrinate the students at every turn.
That must be dealt with or the Great Experiment shall come to an inglorious end.
Look at the Harris policies she is vaguely discussing and making grandiose promises that shall never be fulfilled….at least in a world based upon truth, facts, and commonsense any way.
Only KamaLaLa can save us from OrangeManBad!
That would be like your kid being saved from a neighborhood bully by John Wayne Gacey.
Dear Mr. Turley, as in years past, these hate mongers like the one you have mentioned usually do not last very long. They will spout their hatred for a while. Then something happens and their “friends” will turn on them, chew them up and spit them out. History is replete with examples of this very thing. The latest example of this very thing is Mr. Biden and Mrs. Pelosi.
Quite possibly, but look at the cost to this nation while good citizens sat on their hands a let it happen!
We simply cannot afford another four years of this Marxist-Socialist-Anarchist ideological policy destroying this nation!
And I am sick and tired of the old excuse that conservatives work and Liberals don’t! That’s a myth!
All the more reason (as if any more were necessary) for anyone who has money or investments set aside for the education of their children or grandchildren to NOT allow that money to be spent on useless indoctrination programs at thoroughly discredited institutions of “learning”. Instead, identify educational or training opportunities that will enhance your descendants abilities to adequately support themselves and their families, and insist that your funds are expended accordingly. This is a “win-win” – it has a far higher probability of accomplishing what you originally intended with those funds, and it starves these irrational, destructive, illegitimate offspring of wandering canines of the wherewithal they require to sow the seeds of chaos.
Universities should also start reviewing the papers put out by their faculty and students. You ask why do I say that? The Covid pandemic was a watershed to me in reviewing papers that came out. I did that reviewing for 200 medical providers in my community so they could deal with the pandemic and I read papers both reviewed and unreviewed so they did not have to because they were so busy. Unfortunately there was a lot of information that was poorly written, studies atrociously set up, numerous small studies that had no statistical significance, a tremendous amount of conjecture with little thought or proof and on and on.
The worst thing, I thought, were papers being published that had not been peer reviewed. This just added a tremendous amount of noise and confusion.
Sort of like setting up the mandates for masks and distancing with no real evidence like Dr (I am Science) Fauci. But thats another story.
Academia is so far gone that rehabilitation is a ridiculous idea. The indoctrination of students begins as children watch TV while eating their Cheerios in their high chairs. It continues in kindergarten and elementary school as they are bombarded with Progressive social messaging. By the time they graduate and go on to college, they are already programmed with twelve to fourteen years of liberal social propaganda and have never been exposed to philosophy, genuine history, civics or economics. They are carefully crafted empty vessels waiting to be filled with the pseudo intellectual garbage they will receive at a university. The American education system is an assembly line process designed for one purpose, to create drones who are convinced that they are intellectually competent while having a singular viewpoint that has been imprinted upon their minds. Any rehabilitation or restructuring will have to begin in the home at the high chair and Cheerio stage. It will have to continue with parents taking control over local school boards, curriculum and teaching materials and content. That done, simply require all institutions of higher learning to adhere to the essence of the First Amendment by allowing freedom of thought and expression in order to qualify for taxpayer assistance. It would be a long term battle, but it’s our only chance.
@Clarke
I would have written essentially the same thing. It has to start at home, which means more parents must wake up. There is no level of education that hasn’t been impacted at this point. I have mentioned my wife is an educator, and believe me, it is all having an impact, society-wide. The suggestion to very carefully research and invest money in your children’s future is not a good idea – at this juncture, it is critical.
There is no longer any such thing as simply ‘sending the kids to college’. It is unfortunate that it has become so complicated, but that is the reality.
It is going to take time and massive effort to restructure it all, and eliminating DEI and critical studies would be a great start, so would tossing endowments and not paying tuition.
The time to act on all of this is now or it might be never, we are already several generations in, and people like the fool in the article are not even a third as intelligent as they’d like to think, just spoiled, prejudiced, and privileged (really. Have a conversation with one of them sometime. Their minds have often literally been programmed).
If anything, the statements of the esteemed Professor Wolfson is a full throated cry to the far left and its minions in the Democratic Party. It would appear to be a written cry out of the democratic (far left) platform in the upcoming election with all the right buzz words. Particularly its cry about the Heritage Institute’s most recent wet dream, Project 2025. Frankly the only time I have heard anything about project 2025 is when democrats have cried about it.
You can tell that the academics, politicians and otherwise thought leaders of the far left (or progressive-another wet dream) all drink at the same poisoned well. Virtually every statement is the same. In the past I would say that the drums of the mimeograph machines were smoking as the far left manifesto was printed out by the millions. Now though I can only say that the printer cartridges are piling up in heaps like Pickett’s division at the stone wall in the Union Center on that 3rd day in Pennsylvania.
Since this Professor plies his trade and propaganda machine in New Jersey, I expect little to happen there. One can take hope that there were will be a counter assault like what occurred with Columbia, Harvard and some of the other Ivies as Presidents started falling like 10 pins.
To stage a counter revolution one must take over the credentialing organizations (maybe at the federal level) and then camp out in state legislatures and call university Boards of Directors to heel and get them more actively involved in recruiting. It can be done but sometimes you have to fire some people to make a point and let people know you are serious.
There also needs to be reforms in tenure, sort of like those term limits that have the democrats so enamored now. Also automatic refusal of the term intersection in any paper or title.
Want to facilitate change? Alumni, especially those conservative alumni with deep pockets, should stop donating to these schools. Money talks even for progressives, but maybe especially for progressives.
Going after the Dept of Education, although a great idea, isn’t going to change any of this. Neither will ending financial aid to colleges. Universities are either state schools, ie. controlled by the State, or they are private universities. State university boards can be changed by the governor overnight. DeSantis did it in FL, pretty much overnight. While private universities receive some federal funding, their endowments are usually more than enough to cover their needs. In many cases, multiple times what they need. To gain control of a private university and stop this madness, you need to go after their board of trustees’. These are the people that make the real decisions. They hire the president, he in turn, sets the tone for the university. Facility hiring, DEI, you name it, the university president can control it. But its the board that really has all of the power. They control the money. These boards are made up of leftists. If you are wondering why or how beer company execs can green light a transsexual ad campaign (and keep their jobs), or give millions to BLM, its because their boards have become overrun with leftists. These boards are made up of tech company execs, blackrock and fidelity gurus (who manages their endowment funds), banking and oil folks, and defense industry bigwigs. THAT is what you are up against. These folks are beholden to the left and their companies need the left to survive, they also need the Chinese market. I believe that if you peel back the onion far enough, you will find in most cases, that China is the cause of most of our county’s problems.
I beg to differ – some things are already occuring. Businesses are finding that Woke students from elite schools are less productive, and that is resulting from increased hiring from 2nd and 3rd tier schools.
Free markets work. Even slightly free markets work. We are seeing major donors to elite universities starting to leverage their contributions to end this woke nonsense.
Regardless, the job of universities is to make students more productive. They are increasingly failing to do so and there are only so many government jobs for unproductive highly educated elites.
Rising standard of living is driven by rising productivity.
Lots of those on the left like to talk about late capitalism. The Fact is that we are in the midst of late Wokism or left leftism or late socialism.
This stuff does not work. We can see accross the world that rising standards of living strongly correlate to freedom.
We forget that for 99.99999% of human history rates of growth of 1%/ century or 1%/milenia were the norm.
Today we see that the greater the statism – it does not matter what ideology drives bigger government – the lower the rate of increase in standard of living.
The west defeated the USSR and first wave socialism by being more productive. Since we are seeing the failure of “democrtatic socialism”
For the same reason – it is less productive. Europe has had decades of sub 1% growth. The US which has greater freedom than Europe has been teetering below 2% through the 21st century – in the 20th century 3.5% was the norm, in the 19th century 7% was the norm.
Bush II averaged 2%, Obama started in a recession which should have meant several years of strong growth – only managed to average 1.48% Trump was averaging 3% prior to Covid, which brought his average down to 2%. Biden inherited high growth exiting covid, but is now seeing Obama numbers of 1.4%
As bad as these are – they are better than Europe has seen in decades.
If you want rising standard of living you need an education system that focuses on productivity – that means Merit.
Musk has been emphasizing the importance of merit. ESG, DEI, Wokeness, The left generally, Socialsm are all bad because they de-emphasize merit and therefore always result in lower productivity and lower rates of increase in standard of living.
As Europe shows – the pathetic 1.5% that the US is often seeing is not itself certain. We can easily decline to 0.5% which is much worse than the numbers indicate. Nor is 0.5% the bottom. There is no reason that growth can not drop to zero or even go negative.
Far too many have been under the delusion that technology drives growth – to some extent that is true – but improving technology requires ever more productive, ever brighter people and we have expected colleges to produce them.
With sufficient freedom in the market – if colleges do not – then they will come from elsewhere.
Right now lower tier colleges – the non Ivy’s those not drowning in the nonsense of the left have a great opportunity.
The top tier of schools can not deliver students that a growing economy needs. Those colleges that can deliver will over many years overtake the most elite schools – unless those schools too adjust.
I don’t believe that we are simply going to grow our way out of this problem. The problems are getting nearly insurmountable. Business’s may be struggling to find good employees, but leftist are still in charge of hiring. Hiring decisions in corporate America are handled by a very small group of people that are dedicated to DEI. Will this change? Maybe, but I don’t see the catalyst for it. The US post WWII policy has been about fighting communism, everywhere in the world. Both parties agreed with this idea. Then the line got blurred. Suddenly, we needed communism and China became something that we could live with, as long as their markets were open to us, and they weren’t causing us any major problems. A lot of politicians and CEOs made a ton of money under this idea and rather than weakening communism through capitalism and free trade, the idea for all of this, the opposite became true. China became extremely strong, we lost our manufacturing base, our national debt has soared to an unsustainable level, and now we are so deeply in debt that we no long really have the tools to fix our economic problems. Trump’s ideas are vastly superior to the alternative, but we are in deep trouble. Not just on the international stage, but domestically too. Every city in the US is controlled by the left. From the mayor to the “Soros” DAs to the police. Outside money is pouring into these cities, not to help people, but to firm up the left’s power. After Biden, the left now realizes that it can get a ham sandwich elected President. There is no way that the poling should be a toss up right now. That’s how bad things are. And as bad as all of this, Europe is a lost cause. They were never in a strong position because of their lack of oil and gas, but now they seem to be embracing policies that are far to the left of us. Unrestricted open borders have or will destroy the European economies. The EU has taken away any autonomy they might have had, and any power to fix their own problems.
The problem with hiring in corporate America started with Jack Welch when he was GE’s CEO and stated that the HR department is the most important one. His statement created a following that elevated the HR Dept. to predominant status within many corporate conglomerates and inclusion in the C-suite. I worked for a Fortune 50 company and in 2008 HR declared a hiring moratorium because of the economic downturn. Several subsidiaries were involved in the production of military equipment and needs more personnel but were unable to overcome the dictate of the HR executive who had no experience or knowledge of economics, nor common sense. At the same time, they announced a traveling ban to lower costs. Again, this was HR. I was involved in a tax dispute and argued to travel overseas to negotiate with the tax authorities but that was disallowed as the travel ban was a mandate with no room for exceptions. My travel bill would have been around $1,000 and I was negotiating $7 MM in taxes!
When I worked for a Big 4 firm as a practice leader partner, all hiring decisions were taken by the practice partners and I had the ultimate say. HR was certainly involved in a facilitating role, and that is all HR should be. Welch was wrong!
“elevated the HR Dept. to predominant status within many corporate conglomerates and inclusion in the C-suite”
When I began my professional career, in most companies, HR was an adjunct of the Payroll Dept. In many examples, it was a function that the payroll employees did when they weren’t busy calculating payroll or printing checks. Then, as you say, internal and external forces caused it to mushroom out of control. Not inconsiderable among those forces were intrusive Fedgov programs such as affirmative action. I could possibly see some justification for it becoming somewhat more important than it originally was, but nothing like the monster it grew up to be.
Capitalism itself has set up a mass production factory to produce legions of mindless but dangerous leftoids? You don’t say!
You’re not totally correct here. Ivy League universities receive billions in annual grants from the federal government. Between 2018-2022, the top 10 received $33 billion of which Stanford, a private university, received the lion’s share with $7 billion, almost an entire year’s budget.
Double Dutch, thanks for the budget info.
” . . . the annihilation of American higher education *as we know it*.” (Wolfson, emphasis added)
Given academia’s nearly impenetrable, decades-long anti-Americanism, the “annihilation” of those ideas would be a good thing for America.
It’s the cycle of life in politics. Organizations within a closed system become ever more polarized until they are unsustainable. Then they disintegrate. For the AAUP and similar organizations, their actions have become so predictable, their positions are known/surmised even before they take them. So, what good are they?
This has actually been a good year in academia, with the most radical, globalist leftists igniting a schism over Gaza.
The left is underging a seriously fracture. You will witness it next week in Chicago. The orthodoxy, conformism and militant tactics of the left planted the seeds of its own fragmentation years ago. They are primed and ready to pounce on each other.
The worst mental mistake conservatives can make at this point is to continue believing the left is a monolith. Rather, the way forward is recognizing and taking advantage of the split. This requires mature, sophisticated political intelligence — moving from “us vs. them” drawn along strictly left vs right to separation by moderate vs. radical-fanatical, and aligning around shared appreciation for rationality, meritocratic competition with civility, elevating candor over virtue-signaling and oppo-branding, and renunciation of militancy and infowarfare.
Leftists have always devoured themselves. No liberal will ever have to worry about an attack from their right flank. This attack on Israel, using Gaza as the club, is designed to tie us up in a middle east conflict and to put Israel in box. Its absurd that we’re even talking about aid packages while they are holding American hostages. I feel that this still traces back to China. China needs to have the US tied up somewhere all the time, so we don’t focus on them. The Russia/Ukraine war, China is the only beneficiary that I can see. The West spends money to “help” Ukraine, that it has to print or borrow…ultimately from China, and China gets to buy Russian oil, at a big discount, because there aren’t many other places they can sell to.
Pbinca-I agree with much of what you say but waiting around right now is not a good action plan. It is a little too optimistic. Sort of like the German Industrialists who thought if they supported Hitler, they could control and manipulate him. That turned out poorly.
We need to supply a push whenever and wherever the opportunity arises. The left is unrelenting and you must remove their funding, use the legislature and get the state schools in line. The Private schools will be another matter but there you can quit your giving and motivate prior graduates to send their money and their children elsewhere.
Also push the federal government away from grants to very rich leftist private schools and push it to state schools or demand that federal grants go to a State University System but through a central clearing house and then the state disperse the funds or have the state review all grants from the feds to a state school or one of it’s departments. You got to grab the money.
*SENATOR KEELEY
Grab the money , GEB says. There’s more than money involved. There’s a sinister if not diabolical cruelty involved, as well.
7:00 A.M. – the comments on topic . Check back later.
–7:00 A.M. – the comments on topic . Check back later.’-
‘Puppet Watch’ is Back!
*SENATOR KEELEY
8:16 A.M. on topic
*SENATOR KEELEY
10:02 A.M. all ok, mostly on topic.
It is a Saturday.
*SENATOR KEELEY
11:22 A.M. The trolls have rolled out of bed ,arrived weeded, cracked and drunked. The name calling off topic begins.
It appears conservatives are up and running earlier than the libertines.
A tip * go to older comments after 11:00 A.M.
Unfortunately, this is just one of many many battles taking place. I agree that sitting around is a poor strategy but passing legislation is going to fix the problem. Leftists come in many shapes and sizes. There are a lot of politicians in both parties that are in it for the power and to make money. I would say that most of them are. They will make more money on the leftist and “globalist” side of things. Globalists and neo-cons on the right want more military intervention and free trade with China. This mostly benefits China, the leftists are happy with this too. The left is firmly in control of our DOJ, alphabet agencies, and bureaucracy. That is why most corporations are firmly on the left. It doesn’t pay to be anywhere else.
*SENATOR KEELEY
Opportunists rely on numbers. The right or conservatives are outnumbered.
The alarming thing is the sinister spirit of it. The left has a malspirit component and as it grows it attracts only the malspirit as the good in spirit flees.
Greed and power are common frailties. Self interest, personal gain as seen in Wolfson is common.
* flee. Tsk tsk
Time to end federal aid to colleges along with cities, states and non profits
Not just end Federal aid but, in addition, remove their tax exemptions. The era when we thought universities were working for the common good is definitely over. They are the intellectual stormtroopers for the Blue/Red party so let the Blues fund them.
Hello proofreader!! Good morning!! Title should read “doubles down” and not “double downs!!” C’mon, man!
You probably complained about the song the band was playing as the Titanic slipped under the water.
When Trump is elected, he MUST work to end the Dept of Education and MUST work to end financial aid, direct or indirect, to colleges. It will be a start back to curtailing the power of the thought controllers on American campuses.
It’s worse. This pinhead complained that one note was off key.
Gentlemen, gentlemen, really! If we don’t have good grammer, what do we have left? One must draw the line somewhere!
“. . . good grammer [sic] . . .”
Please tell me that was intentional.
“When Trump is elected, he MUST work to end the Dept of Education and MUST work to end financial aid, direct or indirect, to colleges.”
Agree. Another poster claimed that the Dept Ed is far from the sole source of these problems, and that is true enough. However, the Dept Ed appears to have been at the nexus of all of this developing, and also appears to be the main linchpin holding it all together. Pull the linchpin, let the structure come tumbling down, and let us deal with the rest piecemeal. That hopefully can be done. My fear here is that Trump will (again) listen to people who posture against the Deep State, but, in reality, are heavily invested in some parts of it, and will act behind his back to maintain the hierarchy that he nominally seeks to tear down.
While I agree with ending the Department of Education – it is pure waste, and education is no where in the constitution the role of the federal government, at the same time the Department of education is tiny overall, and though under democrats its impact is bad, it is not a core problem.
We should get rid of much of the federal govenrment as unnecescary and wasteful, and even counter productive.
We should get rid of it because it costs money we do not have and has negative value – but that can be said of most of the federal government.
The most important thing Trump can do is unshackle free markets EVERYWHERE. He did a SMALL amount of that in his first term to great success.
More is better – we need not regulate wokeness out of existence – that is stupid and counter productive – we must compete it out of existence.
We are already seeing quiet revolutions in business, in education – because this nonsense does not work.
I would note the WORSE that top colleges get the greater the demand for productive graduates from elsewhere will be.
This is a great idea, but I see absolutely no evidence that any of this happening. And barring a Trump presidency, and a R house and senate, it is purely fantasy that it will ever happen. The greatest thing that Trump did was to cut red tape. He streamlined oil and gas production and it was a great idea. However, as far a seeing any anti- woke revolution taking place in business or academia. I don’t see it. Some of the silliness like BLM is fading away, mostly due to its own corruption, but academia and corporate america are easy targets for leftists. They always have been. Its not hard to for leftist to get corporations to fall in line. They simply show their leaders that its much easier and far more profitable to fall in line than to push back. They don’t need to make threats, the CEOs already know what powers they have. Every totalitarian regime in history has had no trouble getting corporations to fall in line. The govt controls huge aspects of business, from oil leases, exploration, permits, and tax policy, to labor relations, through the DOJ, they control anti-trust, you name it. Part of what they were showing us all with the Trump prosecutions is that, we can get you if we want to. We can bring your corporations down, we can take out your CEOs, if want to. We control the DOJ, the FBI, and the IRS. We control a large large part of the federal bench, and all of the state courts in every major city. We can use the press, hell you have a presidential candidate telling everyone that we can simple seize your patents. This recent SC ruling about presidential immunity might have helped Trump, but it will give the next leftist in the Whitehouse carte blanche to do anything they want. How “productive” a college grad might be, is purely in the eye of the beholder. And don’t expect any help from the shareholders because they really don’t exist any longer. Corporations are owned by pension funds, mutual funds, and ETFs. Blackrock and Fidelity are the voters, not the little folks that own these shares in their 401k’s.
Mr Mahl, it’s a game of ping pong because there aren’t shared principles. The constitution is just a set of principles like truth, justice and the American way, it’s the law.
It’s quite safe to say the left is lawless.
Universities are a business, like any other. If they cannot sustain themselves by selling their educational services and research, then their business is not viable and they should close doors. No need for state subsidies at all. It would also help if universities were forced to become lean by cutting costs, such as spending on useless DEI administrators, etc. It is remarkable that hiring is not focused on quality faculty (who produce the research and educational output) but on administrators.
“hiring is not focused on quality faculty (who produce the research and educational output)”
I ma not convinced that even research should be a primary product of colleges. Let them stick to their knitting (“educational output”) and leave at least most of the research to other private enterprises.
They’re not really like any other business. Private universities, in most cases, have enormous endowments that are so large, that they really couldn’t spend a fraction of the money, even if they wanted to. In most cases, the endowments are so large that tuition wouldn’t even be necessary. They just choose not to spend it. Major universities are not cash strapped by any means. There are two kinds of college degrees, the handful that open doors for you, and the ones that are probably not worth much more than the paper their printed on. The ones that open doors for you aren’t hard to figure out, they’re the ones used by the rich, the famous, and politicians. Did you ever wonder what the chances could be that every politician can get their kid into an ivy school? Was Hunter Biden really ivy league material, Barbara Bush, Chelsey Clinton, Al Gore? You name them, both parties. Degrees from these places are a rocket ship ride to the top. You won’t even get an interview to a top bank/law firm/corporation without one on your resume. They’re incubators for the future leaders of America.