One does not make them with one’s enemies. Conservatives never get that. Tom Dilorenzo explains the rot:
Niall Ferguson ends his op-ed with a call for a “Nonconformist Academic Treaty” among university faculty and administrators who still defend freedom of speech. The communistic academic censors must be confronted with “massive retaliation,” just as the Soviet Union was threatened with such by NATO during the Cold War, he says. This is what he means when he says that “we” must hang together or hang separately.
Such a “treaty” would likely garner very few signatures because of the fact that, with few exceptions, American academe is a socialist institution. Almost every last college and university is partly or totally funded by government, and with government funding comes government control of the means of production, the very definition of socialism. Almost all university professors are therefore essentially government bureaucrats and, like all bureaucrats, they understand that the way to survive is to never, ever, break the rules or rock the boat, no matter how rotten the rules may be. They understand that if they do, the Red Army of Mediocrities will take its revenge, fire them if possible, or at least never again give them a merit pay raise. They may also end up being assigned an 8 A.M. class on the main campus along with an evening class at one of the far-away branch campuses on the same day as an added touch of petty revenge.
University boards of trustees are mostly useless since they are easily bamboozled, lied to, or intimidated by academic administrators. Many of them remain quiet, for to complain and not be asked back as a trustee may harm their social lives. (At my own place of employment alumnus Tom Clancy, the famous author, once complained at a trustee meeting that the tuition was so high that the son of a mailman like himself could never afford it. He was dropped from the board the next year). There are no shareholders since universities are either government bureaucracies or “nonprofit” institutions, so there is no shareholder pressure either. It is even confusing as to who the real “consumers” are since the students who sit in the classrooms are rarely the ones paying the extortionate tuition bills – at least until they graduate and are confronted with mountains of government-guaranteed student-loan debt.
If you’re reading The Substitute, then know that, in the end, Tom relocates to a small private college and from it opens the ultimate classically-based private prep school. Small schools. Private schools. Homeschools. Big Ed, Inc. is really no better than the “public” K-12 mess. Get out.
