Critical theory was a Marxist philosophy brought to the United States by the so-called Frankfurt School. It posited that all of cultural, governmental, and academic institutions had been shaped by a legacy of capitalism. In order for Marxism to flourish, therefore, the current structure had to be torn down from within through incessant criticism—hence the term “critical theory.” Critical theory is the foundation for political correctness as well as the ethnic studies movements on campuses across America.
When the Nazis took control in Europe, these Frankfurt School Marxists realized they had best get out of town. Fortunately for them, liberals at Columbia University were ready and willing to open their door. Most of them ended up as professors at major universities. And there they began to apply and teach critical theory.
Critical theory quickly morphed into critical studies—studies that were designed to dismantle the teaching of American history and philosophy, which were considered bourgeois and capitalist subjects. The stuff Adams and Jefferson and Washington wanted taught was thrown out in favor of Black Studies, LGBT Studies, and—well—basically any kind of study that broke us down into special interest groups.
Political correctness also began with the Marxists who took over the universities. Mao actually invented the term; the philosophical friends of the Frankfurt School brought it to our shores. And so students today learn about “Zombies in Popular Media” rather than founding philosophy.
And while it’s possible that nobody is offended, it’s a near certainty that nobody is learning anything.
DIVERSITY OF OPINION: LEFT AND FAR LEFT
If we fast-forward almost a century it’s easy to see what “critical theory” and similar concepts have done to colleges and universities. A recent survey to members of various prestigious American associations (like the American Economic Association, the American Historical Association, etc.) revealed the extent of the damage:
Democrats dominate the social sciences and humanities. Of the fields we sampled, anthropology and sociology are the most lopsided, with Democratic:Republican ratios upwards of 20:1, and economics is the least lopsided, about 3:1. Among social-science and humanities professors up through age 70, the overall Democrat:Republican ratio is probably about 8:1.
In some cases, there isn’t even one Republican for every eight or twenty Democrats on the faculty. There are none. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Nonexistent. The history department at the University of Iowa had twenty-two registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans. The one at Duke University had thirty-two registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans.
But, let’s be fair: lots of people don’t identify themselves through a political party, so what if we instead asked professors if they identified themselves as “liberal” or “conservative” instead of Republican or Democrat? In that case, “Only 19.7 percent of respondents identify themselves as any shade of conservative, as compared to 62.2 percent who identify themselves as any shade of liberal.”
That compares to a general population of American adults that, at the time, was 31.9 percent conservative and 23.3 percent self-identified liberal.
Another, more recent, survey, shows a similar split: around 72 percent of professors teaching at American universities describe themselves as liberal and only 15 percent as conservative, according to a study published by professors at George Mason University a few years back. In elite schools, 87 percent of the faculty referred to themselves as liberal and only 13 percent as conservative.
Okay, but even some self-identified liberals may prefer capitalism to socialism, so let’s broaden the question even further. In that case, 24 percent of social sciences professors identified themselves as “radical,” and 17.6 percent described themselves as “Marxist.” (Unfortunately, the survey doesn’t specify how many of the radicals were Marxists, or how many of the Marxists were radicals.)
MY RADICAL IDEA TO TAKE ON THE RADICALS
Before World War II, the German university system was a breeding ground for Nazism. In 1933, Nazi students started burning books, many times with the active help of their professors. Jewish professors and students were ousted, and intellectuals like Martin Heidegger (a forerunner of deconstruction, an offshoot of critical theory) joined up with the Nazis.
After World War II, the Allies had to figure out a way to change the universities in Germany back into places of learning rather than hotbeds of fascism. In the end, they shut down many of the universities completely and rooted out the Nazi influences. Only after the schools had been completely reformed were they allowed to reopen.
I hate to say it, but someone has to: that’s exactly what needs to happen to our public universities now.
While there are many good professors, there are also many evil ones. The problem is that the two groups have become so intertwined that it would be impossible to root out only those who have put their ideologies in front of their responsibilities. The only real way to do that is to simply start over.
Why should we allow our universities to not only tolerate, but also celebrate, domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers (who has been barred from entering Canada on several occasions) and Bernardine Dohrn and allow them to mentor young people? Why should we allow our universities to consider Ward Churchill (he of the “little Eichmanns” on 9/11) a legitimate scholar? Why should we allow our universities to treat Noam Chomsky’s political musings as anything other than the ravings of a Marxist madman? Why should we allow our universities to provide homes and insanely high pay to philosophers of destruction like Frances Fox Piven, the political science professor who suggested a strategy for the “have-nots” to kill the American system of government by overloading government welfare services? And why should we allow our universities to create havens for ideological apologists for communism and socialism to virtually spit on our flag and then hide behind their tenure when asked to defend their actions or speech?
One economist estimated that Princeton University (endowment: $17 billion) received a federal subsidy of approximately $54,000 per student last year.
These professors and administrators are the real “fat cats” in America, the real one percent. They often produce nothing but a crop of students who leave their classroom hating America, hating capitalism, and apologizing for our history. They’ve been in bed with the government and the radical left to delegitimize individual rights and freedoms. They’re destroying us. It’s that simple. And, worst of all, we’re paying them millions of dollars to do it. We’re paying them to destroy us.
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Indoctrination Centers
Frances Fox Piven, a professor at the City University of New York, and those like her often use their posts to promote their political views to students. Piven recently wrote: “The challenge to educators, and especially to university educators, seems to me clear. We have both an opportunity and responsibility to try to deal with public-policy issues and fill in the blank space that endangers democracy.”
Actually, you have a responsibility to force your students to think for themselves. You don’t “fill in the blank space” with your views, you fill it in by giving students an ability to think critically, to understand both sides of an argument and make up their own minds. You don’t teach them what to think, you teach them how to think. Oh, by the way, the piece she wrote in which that quote appeared was titled “Crazy Talk and American Politics: or, My Glenn Beck Story.”
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And we’re paying them an awful lot of money. The average professor at a public institution of higher education with a doctoral program pulls down in excess of $115,000 per year; at private institutions, they average $151,000. At Harvard the average professor makes almost $200,000; longtime professors with tenure can make much more. Other top universities pay similar salaries: UCLA pays its professors an average of more than $144,000; Berkeley pays nearly that much; so do the universities of North Carolina, Michigan, and Maryland, along with many others.
The problem with those salaries is that virtually all
of these colleges collect federal funding, even though some of them also have enormous private endowments. Harvard, for example, has a $32 billion endowment (it increased by $4.4 billion in fiscal 2011 alone), but they have lots of company: the University of Chicago has $6.3 billion, Notre Dame has $7.3 billion, MIT has $10 billion, Princeton has $17 billion, and Yale has $19 billion.
That is an unfathomable amount of cash. In fact, even at a rate of $51,000 per year for tuition, room, and board, and assuming no growth in their endowment, Harvard could pay the entire cost of education for every student they admit . . . for the next thirty years. Instead, the upper middle class subsidizes everybody else while Harvard professors get rich and the endowment gets fatter . . . and the college takes in hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding every year. And that’s just the private schools—state schools get tons of taxpayer cash, of course, even though they charge students an arm and a leg to attend.
LESSONS IN PRACTICAL ECONOMICS
While private universities receive most of their public funding via research grants, meaning that most public funding isn’t directly tied to what goes on in the classroom, public universities are a different story.
Most public schools are state supported with billions of dollars. But when states’ budgets are in disarray from spending too much money on education with too little to show, they don’t cut spending—they look to the federal government instead to fix their problem. And that, of course, means that education becomes even more centralized, at the same level that destroyed elementary and secondary public school education. “Individual states are making these individual decisions,” lamented former University of Washington president Mark Emmert, “but across the whole country all of a sudden, this amazing asset that we have is eroding rapidly, and there’s no one looking at it from a systemic level at the national level.” According to the Associated Press, “He compared the situation to individual states deciding they no longer want to maintain highways within their borders, but the whole country needs that interstate highway system.”
Oh, how wrong he is.
The federal government is looking at this state problem with greedy eyes. That’s why President Obama is pushing further and further into federal funding of educational loans.
But that also gives us the opportunity to fight back. We can’t control what happens at Harvard so long as they’re not using taxpayer dollars. But we can control what happens at our universities if we’re paying for them. And as states begin to cut funding, and as the feds start to step in to fill the gap, we can step in with them and demand the sort of change we want to see: a return to teaching of real American history and literature; higher standards in math and science; real progress in breaking the monopoly of progressive thought. We can return power to local communities by using the power of the purse.
BRAVE COWARDS
It’s kind of ironic that some of the things that are doing the most damage to our society actually began with good intentions. For example, the idea of giving “lifetime tenure” to professors was based on the same rationale used to justify lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices: if you want people to be free to pursue real inquiry then you’ve got to ensure that they are insulated from political attacks. We don’t want professors afraid for their jobs if they examine certain controversial subjects in a classroom.
But there’s a problem with this logic and we’ve seen it firsthand with the Supreme Court: If people feel insulated from all pressure, they stop acting rationally. They start living in the realm of theories instead of realities.
America comes with both rights and responsibilities. You have, for example, the right to free speech, but you have the responsibility to not yell “fire” in a crowded theater. If you don’t live up to that responsibility, you face certain consequences. It’s a simple but effective formula. Unfortunately, tenured professors are completely insulated from it. They can scream fire in their classrooms all they want—and then hide behind their tenure if anyone questions them on it.
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Theories and Facts
A few months ago, scientists from CERN, the Switzerland home of the Large Hadron Collider, began challenging Einstein’s theory of special relativity. The science community was stunned—but the reality is that Einstein’s theory was just that: a theory. Unfortunately, many professors don’t teach that way. In their classrooms there are no such thing as theories, only absolutes. It’s kind of ironic that the greatest thinkers of all time worked to ensure that their ideas were constantly challenged and debated, yet those same ideas are now taken as gospel inside many classrooms.
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I don’t know about you but I’m sick of it. You know what, professor? If you really believe in what you’re saying, then put your job on the line like the rest of us. What is there to be afraid of—aside from the fact that one day a student will call you out on your lies?
The truth is that you don’t really believe in freedom of speech—you only believe in freedom of your speech. If you believed in real freedom of speech—the idea that a person can stand on a soapbox in the town square and shout his opinions—then you would be willing to take the same risk that every other person does.
Tenured professors don’t have to be cautious about their arguments or back them up with facts—whatever they say in the classroom is magically the truth. Americans have a “right” to a home? Yep, that’s exactly what the Founders wanted. Higher taxes create jobs? Sure, why not. America is a bloodthirsty animal intent on destroying the Middle East so that we can secure their oil? It’s all the truth in the ivory tower that is the American university classroom.
PARENTAL SUPERVISION
Progressives have spent the better part of a hundred years pushing their agenda—and they’ve hijacked everything from our kindergartens to our colleges to do it. The more “educated” we get, the dumber we become. And that has always been the goal. There’s a reason that slave masters wanted to keep their slaves illiterate: they understood that true education makes people long for freedom and liberty. Today’s slave masters are the professors and unions and bureaucrats in Washington who run our education system.
We need to clean out the system, top to bottom. That means investigating and firing teachers who don’t teach our kids, decertifying the teachers unions, cutting off federal funding to institutions with huge endowments, and driving down tuition payments through open competition. It means start-up educational institutions and universities, and new homeschooling and private school options that focus on apprenticeships and hands-on learning.
But most of all (and I can’t believe I even have to write this), it means getting parents more involved in the education of their children.
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Stomachs or Brains?
It’s gotten so bad that schools are now fighting against parents packing their own kids’ school lunches. State inspectors in North Carolina actually forced a four-year-old to turn over her lunch for not being sufficiently nutritious. If the schools care so much about what they put in our kids’ bodies, they should care just as much about what they put into our kids’ heads.
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Take control of your kids’ future. Don’t be passive. Don’t just go to parent/teacher conferences and accept what’s said. Dig in, question with boldness. These are our children. We can never forget that. Despite what some say, no one will ever care about their future more than we do. Not their teachers, not their principals, and certainly not those who run the unions.
“I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones . . . but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system.”
—Kevin D. Williamson, deputy managing editor of National Review
GIVEN THE WAY our formal education system has been hijacked, it almost makes sense that our kids come out pulling the lever for Democ
rats without giving it another thought. It’s frustrating and it’s got to change, but at least it’s understandable. What I can’t understand, however, is how we’re losing the capitalism argument. I know why we’re losing it—our kids are being brainwashed by a bunch of washed-up, stuck-in-the-sixties, tweed-jacket-wearing professors into feeling guilty for being successful—but I still don’t get how we’re losing it.
My daughter is in college right now and every time I go to visit her campus I’m floored by what I see: smartphones stuffed into the pockets of designer jeans; Xboxes and PlayStations connected to flat-screen high-definition televisions; MacBook Airs or iPads in almost all dorm rooms.
College students don’t have to leave their dorm rooms or even use a telephone to order pizza or burgers anymore; they can do it via online delivery companies like Seamless. They don’t have to go to the mall for jeans or sneakers; they can just go online, comparison-shop for the best price, order, and a few days later they show up at their door. They don’t have to go to a theater to catch a movie, or even to a video store; they can just stream them over Netflix.
In other words, college students aren’t senior citizens collecting Social Security checks while rocking their way through the afternoon nap on the porch. They’re active consumers—and are some of the most cutting-edge in the world. They’re the ones we ask about the newest fashion trends, which movie to see, or which phones have the best features, or which place to eat has the best food. They love to shop. They love to spend money.