Time for the University lifeboat drill

By Ayn Honymous

A lengthy lament in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “The Campus Cold War: Faculty vs. Administrators” is remarkable for its cluelessness. Like many Chronicle articles these days, it’s an inside-baseball compendium of pathetic sob stories depicting selfless and noble educators as victims in an unjust holy war. The author appears oblivious to the dramatic cultural shift that shook America after Elon Musk broke the stranglehold of legacy media.

What is happening in higher education is a stark example of disasters that strike when Boards of Directors, in this case university trustees, allow lunatics to run the asylum.

Mobs of progressive professors deeply infected by the Woke Mind Virus went entirely off the deep end. At the same time, thunderous herds of administrators deeply infected by the Woke Mind Virus also went entirely off the deep end. In the process, they drove a generation of impressionable young students stark raving mad. (Queers for Palestine? Really?)

They all got fat feeding from a cornucopia of taxpayer grants, loans, and indirect overhead payments. When these were suddenly cut off, impotent panic ensued.

Meanwhile, the public woke up to the damage “college for everyone” has done to the country. We spent a trillion dollars creating a generation of deeply indebted, innumerate, illiterate, fragile, entitled airheads. Most are only fit to be Starbucks baristas, wailing and gnashing their teeth wondering why their college diplomas didn’t turn into tickets to the good life.

Employers are pulling their hair out now that most diplomas don’t mean anything anymore. I’m so glad I’m retired and don’t have to manage these arrested adolescents.

Demographics and financial reality demand that half of the colleges in America must be shut down. Period, full stop. Foreign students are not going to bail colleges out, and we can do without the “activists” who come to America to burn the place down.

Here is the new digital reality that should terrify academics.

Most of what many colleges teach, and many things they should teach but don’t, are available for free over the Internet. I got a liberal arts education AFTER graduating from engineering school. As an adult. On my own. Over the course of decades. History, philosophy, psychology, religion, art, economics, anthropology, and archeology are all truly fascinating subjects. I even learned how to appreciate opera. Italian opera, anyway. (To my unsophisticated ear, German opera still sounds like barking dogs chewing gravel.)

Without taking a single writing course in college, which was a shame as I sure could have used one, I even learned how to write regular magazine columns for good money. The going rate for columnists that had insights to share about the tech revolution we were unleashing was a buck fifty a word. Not bad for a side gig. These columns, nestled between $40,000 display ads, were read by a quarter-million readers. That was back in the roaring nineties before the web wiped out the controlled-circulation technology trade magazines.

The same kind of creative destruction is now bearing down on colleges. Today, anyone anywhere can give themselves a liberal arts education without having to choke on exorbitant tuition bills. And they can educate themselves at night while working at a productive job that pays the rent and lets them climb the first rungs of their career ladder.

Young people that are unsuited, uninterested, or unable to benefit from a college education – and let’s face it, that’s the majority of them – need to learn a trade. Plenty of useful trades and service jobs will never be done by robots and can’t be stolen by cheap labor in third world countries.

Society needs to respect the people who perform these jobs, without whom our lives would be miserable. (Cue Mike Rowe.) To enable such a cultural revival, we must mercilessly mock the effete intellectual snobs and media handmaidens who denigrate people who work with their hands. “Hey, egghead! My plumber makes a heckuva lot more money than you adjunct professors.”

What’s a person to do that doesn’t have a dog in the fight over academia’s future? Sit back, let Trumpolini starve the beast, and watch superannuated faculty and redundant administrators claw each other’s eyes out as they fight over a shrinking pie. The Chronicle of Higher Education will tell you all about it.

BUT … something must be done to save STEM.

Society can flourish without gender studies, literary criticism, and theater majors. Anyone can read the Great Books and learn to appreciate Shakespeare and Aristotle without going to college. And if reading is not your thing, there is an exploding universe of podcasts and audiobooks that can be listened to while commuting to work or working out in the gym.

Training scientists and engineers still requires a more old-fashioned process.

First, candidates must be sieved through a strict talent filter, skin color and sex organs be damned. STEM universities should bring back all-day entrance exams like the old Cooper Union. Those that make the cut must survive the baptism by fire we all experienced, grinding through a rigorous and grueling curriculum that progressively builds problem-solving expertise, layer upon layer. All under the tutelage of skilled and demanding teachers willing to flunk out nonperformers.

That’s how you build scientists and engineers.

This takes money. Fortunately, a good deal of what passes for Big Science is of questionable utility and can be safely defunded. Like String Theory, high-energy supercolliders, and almost all of the so-called social sciences. But basic pre-commercial scientific research that promises to unlock tomorrow’s medical and engineering advances still needs to be supported somehow, somewhere. That’s the baby we can’t afford to throw out with the bathwater.

If you’re going to fight for something in higher education, fight for that. Not saving the jobs of DEI deans and Critical Race Theory indoctrinators.