If it seems to you that there has been something quite odd going on college campuses the last ten years or so, then you need a history lesson: something has been quite odd on college campuses for about sixty years. The radical Left – not the Democrat Party or moderate socialists or agnostic scientists – but the radical Left has been systematically taking over what are comically called institutions of higher learning for six decades.
If it seems to you that there has been something quite odd going on college campuses the last ten years or so, then you need a history lesson: something has been quite odd on college campuses for about sixty years. The radical Left – not the Democrat Party or moderate socialists or agnostic scientists – but the radical Left has been systematically taking over what are comically called institutions of higher learning for six decades.
Perhaps we should call colleges what they really are: institutions of higher inquisition. Eugene Lyon, an apostate Marxist journalist who spent his adult life as a senior editor at Reader’s Digest warning the world of the very real dangers of communism, wrote in his 1941 masterpiece, The Red Decade, about how campaigns of vicious personal destruction were waged against anyone in academia who deviated from the party line. A few lines from his book tell it all:
“The Young Communist units among the students and adult communists among the professors often caucused together. In many schools, they were the real power beyond the throne. Where they could not cajole an administration into toeing the party line, they resorted to browbeating, campus pickets, organized vituperation of faculty leadership, deans, and presidents” and “The whole story of that terror has not yet been told…President of Brooklyn College, Dr. Harry D. Gideonse has told of efforts that…marked him for fantastic campaigns of picketing, a war of nerves by means of night-time telephone calls and personal insults.” I wonder if any of this sounds familiar to Lawrence Summers at Harvard? It was written sixty-five years ago.
Recall that all of this was more than twenty years before the Radical Sixties, when we presume that the young people like David Horowitz, Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden were transforming American universities from upstanding, patriotic fora of free and unintimidated discourse into what would forty years later become the pseudo-intellectual Stalinist gulags of today. That was, of course, not what was happening at all during the 1960s.
Genuine voices of reason had long since been driven out of academia by the time of the infamous Berkeley “Free Speech Movement” and the overrunning of university administration offices. Genuine voices of courage were already tenured professors, hanging on by virtue of some achievements or patronage or happy isolation from the Orwellian obliteration of thought which had already become the American university. The “students” of the 1960s were exposed to nothing but fantastic propaganda about the incurable wickedness of America and the promise of earthly paradise when American and the notions of our Founding Fathers were ground into dust.
The saturation of hate, so clear sixty-five years ago and never once checked or reversed or even reviewed seriously from within, has now mutated into a macabre monster which has no value other than in a freak show. Stated simply, academia serves no purpose in any civilized society anymore. The reason for our winsome attachment to it is confusion of academia with thought, research, study or knowledge.
Through universal literacy, vast libraries, the internet, general affluence, the opening of priceless archives (like the Kremlin archives and the Venona decryptions), anyone who wishes to become as wise as the wisest professor can easily do so – much more easily, much more efficiently, and much more cheaply – without ever stepping foot inside a university or enrolling for a single class. Learning now is easy and free. Yet those who control the Institutions of Higher Learning (the ultimate oxymoron) must press their perverse claim for a monopoly on lifelong education.
Why? What is it in for them? What is always in it for every Leftist? What is in it for the administration, the faculty and the pampered, flattered and ignorant Nazi students of Columbia University and other totalitarian organs is power. Power. They care about nothing but power.
This power is more than a leisurely life at Totalitarian U. It is the power which society haplessly surrenders to these priests of credentials. A college degree is needed for almost anything anymore, even though it is good for almost nothing anymore. Scolding middle class parents into debt so that their children can have the benefits of a four year stint in the Hitler Jugend, requires convincing the parents and indulged children that somehow, someway, something useful was obtained. Really, though, everyone decent loses. It is a tragedy, but like all tragedies of the Left, it is a calculated and deliberate tragedy. So do not be surprised. The worst is yet to come.
Bruce Walker has been a published author in print and in electronic media since 1990. He is a regular contributor to WebCommentary, Conservative Truth, American Daily, Enter Stage Right, Intellectual Conservative, NewsByUs and MenŐs News Daily. His first book, Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie by Outskirts Press was published in January 2006.
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