Americans are shocked at revelations of the vile rot dominating much of academe. Hiding behind green ivy, shiny buildings and glossy brochures is a mass of cultural festering filth.
Think of American academia as the swamp’s vast leftist incubator and intellectual nursery for raising properly indoctrinated cupcakes and wokists. (RELATED: ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Read The Letter Harvard’s Student Paper Won’t Publish)
This sorry state was brought to the fore by the horrific testimony of the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania. In the aftermath, Harvard’s Board of Trustees quickly affirmed how deep the rot seeps by backing one of the vilest of the vile, President Claudine Gay. And, no, she’s not vile because she’s black.
Some took comfort when Penn’s president, Liz Magill, quickly resigned. It should be a small comfort.
Penn’s next president will surely, if squeamishly, affirm that a policy of killing Jews anywhere and everywhere is unacceptable, but otherwise their views will be indistinguishable from Magill’s. Why? Because Magill and her successor perfectly reflect their institution’s core beliefs. Gay kept her job in part because 650 Harvard faculty signed a letter in her defense.
American academia didn’t come to this wretched state overnight and so reclamation will take time. Step one is identifying the essential problem, which is not the ivory tower but the vast defensive walls surrounding it to ensure no contrary thoughts or influences sneak past. Culturally, academia has effectively divorced itself from the greater society. Time to get re-acquainted, big time.
Community colleges provide excellent counterexamples that prove the point. They thrive when embedded into their local communities, providing the education and training the community needs.
Their professors are overwhelmingly people who love their subjects and love to teach, full stop. They may not offer the same depth as the robed darlings of Berkeley or Princeton, but their motivations are pure and their results good. Otherwise, the community wouldn’t tolerate and support them.
Reclamation begins with the abolition of tenure, which serves primarily to isolate faculty from society? Please, let no one raise the banner of academic freedom in defense of tenure as this virtue has long since disappeared. Exposed to the insecurities the rest of us face, faculty arrogance would dissipate while productivity improved.
Taking a lengthy sabbatical is another relic to be tossed. Imagine you told your boss, “I need to take a year off to think and recharge my batteries, but I expect to be paid full salary while I’m gone.” Give me a break. (RELATED: CHLOE SPARWATH: Breaking The Generational Curse Of Antisemitism Must Begin On College Campuses)
Many institutions isolate themselves through their financial independence by building massive tax-exempt endowments. Harvard’s endowment tops $50 billion. That’s a lot of protection money.
A clever fellow looking at its budget once referred to the U.S. Army as a health insurance company that happened to have rifles. Harvard is really large hedge fund with term papers.
Hedge funds are taxable. College and university endowments should likewise be taxed as for-profits once their endowments exceed a modest sum. Ohio Senator J.D. Vance tried to tax endowments like hedge funds and, no surprise, Democrats opposed. One might take this a step further by reducing the extent of the tax deduction enjoyed by donors.
Along the same lines, institutions should be barred from accepting money from foreign governments or the fronts of foreign governments. The only justification for such funding, whether by Arab states, China, or anyone else is to indoctrinate the community to support these governments against American interests while ensuring their national applicants get favored treatment.
Campus protests in favor of Palestinian freedom from the river to the sea demonstrate how effective and dangerous this funding can be.
How does one bring such changes about? Cut off federal funding, not for students, but for the rot. No federal research grants to the schools or faculty until the school makes the necessary reforms.
The left has used the threat of cutting off funding to force its will for years. Lamentable, but it works. What’s good for the goose…
JD Foster is the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and former chief economist and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He now resides in relative freedom in the hills of Idaho.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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