Works for me
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Learn to code, sucker
Kurt Schlicter: This is a great opportunity to destroy academia
Never let a good crisis go to waste, which in the current crisis means we must use the fact that our universities have shown themselves to be petri dishes swimming with anti-American ideologies, combined with pre-existing trends, to lance this particular cultural boil.
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Why should we do that? We have no moral obligation to subsidize a generation of brats.
Now, the only thing really keeping academia attached to the body politic like the institutional deer tick that it is was the widespread and baseless belief that our universities are somehow our culture’s crucial repositories of knowledge and learning. But it’s kind of hard to argue that when it belches forth graduates who decide to show that black lives matter by toppling statues of Abe Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
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On the plus side, I like my chances in a revolution sparked by a generation that thinks words can be violence. And since none of them ever heard of Ft. Sumter, because that’s actual history instead of grievance tallying, none of them are hip to the fact that Democrats are already 0-1 on starting fights over their bizarre and repellant racist dogmas.
This decision to use academia’s institutional credibility as a cultural chamber pot comes at just the wrong time. Video and computer technology was already making the old giant lecture hall model obsolete even before the bat soup flu. You get the same level of loving personal attention staring at a iPad in your house as you do staring at the TA 100 yards away from you in a behemoth lecture hall, and you don’t have to breath in either the viruses or the scent of old Pabst wafting off of the unwashed bodies of your fellow students.
And adding insult to insult is the idea that you have to pay upwards of $50,000 or more a year for the “college experience.” The Porsche experience is nice, but most people still choose the Chevy experience. You get there either way – just the latter way you aren’t impoverished for the rest of your life.
Of course, because it’s the Ivy League – that same institution that brought us the Wall Street collapse, Iraq, and a society where the nonsense scribbled down in White Fragility is not immediately laughed out of polite company – we have now Harvard demanding full tuition for the 2020-2021 academic year conducted completely by video learning. It’s basically a public confession that the whole point of the place is getting admitted – as long as at the end of a few years you get a diploma reading “HARVARD,” who cares what goes on during them?
Over-priced, inefficient, and not merely useless but actively detrimental to society – yeah, I’m sold on academia as currently constituted. So, let’s take this opportunity to burst this societal pimple.
First, defund the universities. All the kids love the defunding, right? Let the schools compete in the market. Sure, some marquee schools will flourish – there are always going to be rich daddies willing to pay the premium to send Kaden or Ashleigh to a four-year party on some leafy campus. But it’s going to force the other schools to provide value or die. Good riddance.
Second, tax the endowments. The Ivy League is really a bunch of hedge funds pretending to be schools anyway. Now, it would be tempting to redistribute the endowments to schools that have less money and watch these people scamper away from the socialism they pretend to love like roaches from a kitchen light – shouldn’t they pay their fair share? The problem is that it would be a lifeline to the colleges that will fail, and we want them to die. The taxed money can go to buy weapons to sink ChiCom subs.
Third, student loans need to come from the school and to be dischargeable in bankruptcy. A school is going to be a lot less eager to say, “Sure, go ahead and major in Norwegian Feminist Dance Theory” if they are on the hook when their ardent young scholar can’t get a gig that can pay back the sticker price.
Fourth, enforce not merely free speech on campus but ideological diversity. Diversity is good, right? Okay, in a country where half of it thinks Trump rocks and more than half dig Jesus, having a faculty and administration where literally no one publicly confesses to doing either is UNSAT.
And fifth, we need to stop falling for the notion that our colleges occupy some sort of intellectual, and even moral, high ground. They don’t. They are populated by greedy, malevolent, and stupid people who have done incalculable damage to their students morally, intellectually, and financially, and we should hold them in contempt.
Somehow, along the way, we were sold the impression that college was the gateway to a special caste to which we should aspire. We need to reject that condescending and pretentious notion, and tell academia to kiss our aspirations.
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This is our chance to undo one of America’s biggest mistakes in the last century, allowing academia to metastasize into the societal tumor that it has become. Technology and economics were already gut-punching this flabby punk before both the double-strike combo of the pangolin pandemic panic and the woke insurrection revealed that not only did the emperor have no clothes but he wasn’t packing much to speak of besides.
