Academia should burn

Photo by Chris Karidis on Unsplash

Can academia be saved? Can the universities and colleges of the United States be turned into something beneficial for America, instead of the source of so much insanity that has infested our nation?

Hypothetically, sure. There are ways that, if you’re willing to play the long game, academia can be put back on track, but it would take a lot of people willing to keep their heads down for years, even decades, pretending to be something they’re not, all so they can get in a position to change the status quo, and that’s not something most are willing to endure.

Instead, we get an academia that is so sure of its own righteousness they can’t help but continue to push leftism as an unequivocal good.

Let’s start with an example that seeks to train college students to engage in criminal behavior in the name of doing good.

No, that’s not hyperbole. It’s obstruction of justice.

The University of Minnesota is reportedly investigating accounts that an education professor ran an “ICE drill” in class. According to Alpha News, Professor Blanca Caldas used her “Culture, Power, and Education” class to have students practice shielding other students from ICE.

…

According to a student, Caldas had students stand up and move to a corner of the room as she acted out the trauma of ICE appearing in the classroom. She allegedly pretended to confront an ICE agent and then joined the students to tell them that they had to use their bodies to shield other students being sought by ICE. Then, “she ended the drill by having us look around our peers and our fellow students within the classroom and identify specifically the people that would appear to be the targets.”

The student objected to the racial element of the drill and said that many felt “uncomfortable,” but “essentially went along,” with Caldas’ instructions, she added.

This course is required for a degree in elementary education. In other words, she’s indoctrinating students to obstruct federal law enforcement officers as part of their training to become teachers.

Is it any wonder that there are so many leftist teachers out there, and they feel nothing at all about espousing their leftist beliefs in the classroom?

But here, at least, we can see the University of Minnesota saying that it’s just one teacher, that she has academic freedom to teach her class the way she wants, and that she’s not representative of the university itself. It’s likely total BS, of course, but they can try it.

After all, we already know how academia rolls.

Last year, the Trump administration moved to put an end to DEI at America’s universities. After all, contrary to what it claims to be, it’s a racist policy that seeks to exclude many from various programs simply because of their race, sex, religion, or some other characteristic, all while pretending to oppose it.

Yet we now see that at least one university is carrying it on, just under a new name.

The University of Kentucky says it is “fully” complying with a state ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion after two undercover videos exposed employees suggesting the ideology is still being taught at the public institution.

However, the leader of the investigative group behind the videos – and other past reports exposing continued DEI practices in higher education – told The College Fix that the University of Kentucky is “one of the worst we’ve seen.”

“I think it’s overwhelmingly clear that the law means nothing to the radicals who run higher education,” Adam Guillette, president of Accuracy in Media, said in a phone interview Monday. “This isn’t an instance of one or two bad apples, but rather a completely broken system with universities focused almost exclusively on activism rather than education.”

His investigative group published two undercover videos, one Monday, and another last week, that suggest DEI is still being taught surreptitiously at the public university.

In the video Monday, Tamra Nowitzki, manager of the Department of Psychology, tells an undercover journalist that “most” faculty members are progressive, and the anti-DEI “environment frustrates all of us.”

Nowitzki also suggests the department is still teaching DEI and “antiracism” but disguises it with different wording.

“We can’t actually use those words because, you know, people are dumb,” she says. “But yeah, we still teach all of that.”

In other words, regardless of what the Trump administration said with regard to education funding at these universities, they’re carrying out teaching racial grievances just the same. They changed the words the use to describe it, but they’re not even pretending it’s anything different.

This is the insidiousness of the progressive mind worm in action. Once it takes hold, it doesn’t let go. The only way to get people like these to move aside in time is for them to know that the next person will carry on “the work.”

That’s why any return to normality would have to happen via subterfuge. Academics would have to lie about literally everything, for decades, to move into these roles and kill this kind of thinking with fire, acid, and a stake to the heart.

And that’s not feasible, really. That’s a lot to ask of anyone, and since I don’t figure I could do it, I can’t ask anyone else to do it, either. Not these days.

Appearing neutral isn’t enough, either, because too many people have come to interpret that as right-leaning, and probably not without some valid reasons, so you’d have to pretend to be a rabid leftist until you don’t have to anymore.

Seriously, that’s too much to ask of anyone.

That means the best option is to burn the whole damn thing to the ground. Kill all federal funding for all universities except for the service academies like Annapolis and West Point. Kill all federal funding for research that doesn’t directly benefit federal agencies. Kill every bit of support for academia built into the federal bureaucracy and watch the spiral begin.

Yes, that means an end to Pell Grants and federal student loans. That means forcing people to pony up their own money to cover college, or to take out personal loans that lending institutions will view with a degree of risk assessment incoming students have been exempted from for decades.

When the flood of students at universities stops, the schools themselves will scream and cry, but ultimately, they’ll contract. If they’re smart, they’ll start with teachers like Caldas and Nowitzki, but I’m not sure they’re smart enough to see that as a possible way to mitigate the damage.

Schools will close forever as they burn through their endowments. Some wealthy alumni will try to help, but those pockets only go so deep, and sooner or later, more and more of the colleges will shutter their doors forever.

What remains won’t be academia as we currently know it. State colleges might survive, depending on the state, but even they will come under fire for supporting progressive politics over the actual search for knowledge or simply educating younger Americans.

From the ashes, though, maybe we can rebuild something better. It’ll have to be explicitly hostile to progressive politics, though, because any institution that isn’t is doomed to become progressive. The long march through the institution never ends; they just move to new institutions, which is why walls need to be built to keep the huns out forever.

Until then, just burning the whole damn thing to the ground would do wonders for the American people. It would even help the American workforce, who will no longer be forced to get college degrees for jobs that don’t really need it.

Hell, maybe we can bring back apprenticeships for professions like accounting and architecture.

Anything, so long as these vile pieces of filth masquerading as educators can never again use our tax dollars to fund their attempts at indoctrinating people with mind rot.

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