What's It Really Like in the Academy?

We’ve all heard the horror stories about the intellectual left-wing terrorism in the nation’s
universities, but still wonder: Is it really like that?
Writer Steve Salerno
has just left the academy after a sojourn teaching magazine
journalism, and he should know.

What is it really like? It’s more sad that bad, with minds stuck in the past and mindless
protection of the status quo. Money graf:

Contrary to popular opinion, a surprising degree of free speech flourishes
on today’s campuses. Trouble is...
Faculty have few qualms about socio-political evangelism — which, put more bluntly, means they’re
not sheepish about bullying any skeptical students into submission. I met a number of professors
in political science, history, and the so-called “diversity disciplines” who upheld their private
beliefs as empirical truths. Therefore, they felt entitled to grade based at least in part on the
degree to which a given student accepted their wisdom. (After all, students who oppose affirmative
action or U.S. “imperialism” can’t be thinking very clearly, can they?) The spirit of open inquiry
that scholars like to tout in their self-congratulatory journals simply did not exist on the campuses
where I worked. A student who tilted right,
or failed to tilt visibly left, invited academic reprisals.

If I were an academic, I’d be worried. Not because I feared that some day evil Republicans
would come and take my job away and put a stop to all this, but because this sort of in-bred producer cartel is death to creativity
and life, and it is a short ride to irrelevance.

For over two hundred years, people everywhere have accepted that a youth spent in formal
education is the sine quo non of a productive life. But is it? Books like The Power of
Productivity by William W. Lewis suggest that education may be a lot less important than we imagine. Illiterate
Mexican construction workers in Houston are still four times as productive as illiterate Brazilian
construction workers in Sao Paolo.

Suppose
we reduced education to the basic work of literacy and numeracy and put kids to work instead of
institutionalizing them from K thru whenever? We could, you know. The reason we have laws
against child labor is that adults don’t want to have to compete against children. And if
we pruned the education system we could save, out of the total education bill of $750 billion...
well what? $250 billion? $500 billion? And, that wouldn’t be the full extent of the savings.
The kids would be working for a living, paying taxes, and all.

And best of all, we wouldn’t have as many Angry Left professors eating their heads off on our dime.