After the Left University, What Then?

In an important article in The Weekly Standard, James Piereson, longtime director of the James M. Olin Foundation, takes a look at The Left University and what to do about it.

American universities have gone through three stages, according to Piereson. The first stage was the British model: universities founded by Protestant denominations and designed

to transmit knowledge and right principles to the young in order to prepare them for vocations in teaching, the ministry, and, often, the law. Few thought of these institutions as places where new knowledge might be generated or where original research might be conducted.

In England, as in America, research and discovery were sponsored by nonacademic institutions like the Royal Society in London or the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the latter founded by Benjamin Franklin.

It is significant to note that the great figures of nineteenth century America, businessmen like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Pullman, not to mention politicians like Jackson and Lincoln, “had little formal education at all.”

But all that changed when the Germans invented the research university. Conforming to Kant’s idea that you could never know the thing-in-itself, they founded the University of Berlin, “based on the idea that truth is not something known and passed on, but the subject of persistent inquiry and continuous revision.” The research model placed the faculty, not the students, at the center of the institution.

The model of the German research university spread rapidly in the United States in the decades after the Civil War, inaugurated by the founding of Johns Hopkins University in 1876 as our first institution organized around graduate research studies. The late scholar Edward Shils referred to this as "the most decisive single event in the history of learning in the Western hemisphere."

The men of the research university brought a different culture to the public square, inspiring the Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century and bringing “experts and expert knowledge into the political process.” What we may call the liberal university grew in size and prestige until the 1960s.

Then, in a single tumultous decade, the liberal university was replaced by the left university. Suddenly, the open, tolerant liberal university, dedicated to an optimistic vision of progress through knowledge, was shattered and in its place grew an altogether different institution, the university dedicated to “identity politics, group rights, and diversity.”

Ever since, the university has been radically out of step with reality and out of step with America. It has been wrong about the fall of Communism, wrong about the convergence between the Communist and capitalist systems, wrong that “welfare programs were in no way implicated in urban poverty, crime, family breakup, and teen pregnancy.” And the university research that once fed into the political process during the age of the liberal university is now done by independent think tanks like the “Manhattan
Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution,” and Piereson’s own Olin Foundation.

What is to be done? Piereson does not offer too much, except a recitation of reforms initiated by trustees and philanthropists. Which is fine, as far as it goes. But here is a more radical Three Point plan.

First, end university tenure. If there is one thing we have learned over the last half-century it is that people guaranteed a job are unhappy, cramped people, dogs-in-a-manger obsessed by their rights and utterly unlikely to serve the community. The university should be the great public square in which young people get to experience the great and the good as they visit the university for a season.

Second, prune back the research model. Some areas of the university lend themselves to the research concept, particularly in the hard sciences. But many do not. Is research in English literature a good idea? Research in law? It is probably not an accident that English and Law are departments that have been utterly vitiated by left-wing ideologies. The research model requires incumbents to do research in order to get tenure, money, and the glittering prizes. Some departments should be liberated from this burden.

Third, break up the “bums on seats” government education monopoly and its co-conspirator,
licensure. Why are we putting children in classrooms for twelve years K through 12, apart from creating jobs for education professionals? And why do we legislate a forest of credential requirements? The postmodernists know why. Power. Instead we could, we should be educating our children to adventure, to creativity, to service, or to work. Parents, take your pick.

It goes without saying that reforms of this magnitude can only be advanced by the conservative movement and its political arm, the Republican Party. Liberals, lefties, and Democrats are too compromised by their economic and political interests to do anything but resist to the last dollar of taxpayers’ money the system that gives them a comfortable livelihood, status, and power.

"Nobody Screws With Me"

Everybody is worrying about the decline of male participation in the university. At present
“135 women are graduating from college for every 100 men.”
Instapundit has a lot
of links.

The big question is: Where are all the men?
Vectorsphere
has some interesting posts on this, inluding a post from a father whose son was earning $70k a year as an
electrician. Many young men drop out of college because they cannot stand being indoctrinated as
“liberal feminists.” But after a few years in the real world, some of them return. So how do they deal
with the leftist faculty? One returnee responded:

I’ve got 12 years work experience, and if [they] dick
me around I’ll drag them through every rights process this university and state
laws have, and they know it. Nobody screws with me.”

So, fellas. Maybe the thing to do is to put off college until you’ve grown the cojones you
need to deal with the lefty professors. Then get in there and teach ’em a lesson.

Cherie Blair's Royal Progress

The personal is the political, they say. Whatever that may mean, we certainly like to imagine that celebrities actually live the characters they portray. And we like to imagine that the politicians of the other party are demonstrably not the kind, compassionate souls that other people’s money (actually, our money) makes them appear.

A recent biography of Britain’s First Couple, Tony and Cherie: A Special Relationship, by Paul Scott, gives us everything we want to believe about Cherie Blair, according to Frank Johnson (subscription required) in The Spectator, and more.

You see, as is proper in a working-class lass, Cherie Blair did not at all enjoy her trip to the Queens’s castle in Balmoral, Scotland.

First of all, she hated the ghoulish statue at the foot of her bed. Then she hated the bagpiper announcing the fresh Scottish morning at 6:00 am every day. The Queen’s royal corgis made “her eyes bulge, go red and begin to water.” Of course, writes Frank Johnson, this is probably because the royal pooches are not ordinary corgis but royal corgis. Not the sort of privileged animal likely to spark sympathy in the progressive breast of barrister Cherie Booth QC, who has defended the right of Muslim girls to wear the burqa in British schools.

All this is, of course, mere by-play. What really prompts an attack of acid reflux in the unbiased reader is the story of Cherie and the Tea with the Queen Mum.

Mrs Blair [did not] enjoy having to attend an afternoon tea party for the late Queen Mother’s `elderly women friends during a Balmoral holiday’. According to the book `it was not just tea but a steady supply of sherry that was on offer to the titled OAPs [old age pensioners]. The party began in a genteel enough manner, but as the afternoon progressed it steadily descended into a raucous sing-along with the Queen Mother leading from the front and insisting that a mortified Cherie join in every tune.’

Dear me. Now really. Who is there with a heart so hard that they could not enjoy, indeed not feel a lump in the throat when singing along with a bevy of slightly drunk little old ladies as they rumbled through the good old songs of their youth?

Maybe Cherie Blair would prefer a tuneful ditty from the Rolling Stones golden age, such as the compassionate and sensitive “Let’s Spend the Night Together.”

China and Japan Confront Each Other

Those of us that expect a world ruled by China in 2050 often worry about a coming confrontation
between the U.S. and China. Actually, it is more likely that the confrontation will be
between Japan and China. In Ping Chong’s puppet show Cathay: 3 Tales of China the Americans
are merely comic. But the Japanese are the murdering monsters that invaded China and killed innocent
Chinese children and raped pure Chinese mothers. If you listen to the Chinese guides when you visit
China, you certainly understand that they are not happy about the sacking of the Imperial Summer Palace
in the nineteenth century by the US and the Brits. But that outrage was small potatoes compared to the
crimes of the second-rate Japanese.

And there is another reason for the Chinese and the Japanese to dislike each other. Energy.
Arthur Herman tells the story about
“the rich natural gas reserves in the remote uninhabited Senkaku Islands, located in
the East China Sea roughly halfway between Taiwan and Okinawa.” Both China and Japan claim sovereignty
over the islands, and China has been executing naval shows of force around the islands lately.

For Herman, it all sounds familiar.

All this is eerily reminiscent of the international "incidents" in the
years leading up to World War One, when Europe’s Great Powers tested each other’s willingness
to go to the brink: Fashoda in 1898, Tangiers in 1905, Agadir in 1911.

A century ago, a strong, self-confident Germany was seeking a place in the sun.

Like Europe’s Great Powers a century ago, the industrial powers of
Asia and the Pacific Rim are strong, self-confident,
self-assertive; they feel their time for greatness has arrived.

Can we learn from history, or are we condemned to repeat it?

Why Democrats are so Obstructionist

Congressional Republicans are puzzled by the intransigent opposition and obstructionist
tactics of the Democrats in Congress, according to
Gary Andres.
They recall the good old days when they were in the minority. They
would always put up a “comprehensive alternative” to the legislation proposed by the Democrats, and
suffer good naturedly as it went down to certain defeat.

But the minority Democrats of the twenty-first century don’t play by those rules. They
“rarely offer comprehensive alternatives to major Republican initiatives, choosing instead to
propose politically embarrassing rifle-shot amendments or none at all.”

Why are they acting so obstructionist? The truth is that ongressional Democrats seem to be merely responding to the wishes of their party.

Some of the loudest and most influential voices in the Democratic Party --
such as Simon Rosenberg of the New Democratic Network, and blogger Markos Moulitsas from the Daily Kos -- care more about creating acrimony than alternatives. These activists dominate party voters, volunteers and contributors, and their message to
Democratic congressional leaders is clear -- combat yes, consensus no

But it is not just obstreperous activists that move the Democrats to obstruction. Their political
philosophy argues that as well. It was, after all, as recently as 2000 when Al Gore ran for president
to fight for the people against the powerful. Deep in Democratic hearts is the feeling that without
a powerful and compassionate government run by them the nation will descend into oppression and
victimization. Workers will lose their benefits, women will be dying from botched abortions, and old people will starve in their beds.
Democrats really believe that stuff, and that
is why the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee were insistent in
asking Judge Roberts how he proposed to defend peoples’ rights.

And let us not forget the influence of the academy that has been teaching the nation’s youth for
a generation that everything political comes down to racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia—in other
words, irreconcilable conflict.

Republicans had better stop complaining about the Democrats. They will always be petty and obstructionist
in opposition. Republicans should figure out how to turn the negativism to their advantage.

But at least the Democrats still have moderate folk like
Mickey Kaus. He argues against the mindless progressivism
of Matthew Yglesias that Democrats need the unions and should fight to keep the
Depression era Davis-Bacon Act that pegs construction wage rates for
public projects at union-defined
“prevailing” rates.

If union members constitute a mere 8 percent of the private sector work force, doesn’t that
mean that most Americans don’t feel the need to have unions fight for the people against the powerful?

Simon Wiesenthal, RIP

The great achievements of the life of Simon Wiesenthal are well known: how he
set up a center for investigation of crimes against Jews during the years of the
Second World War; how his sleuthing helped the Israeli Mossad track down and bring
to justice Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucrat that efficiently organized the death camps in
which so many millions died.

But it is the details of Wiesenthal’s life that are fresh and new, and cast a light
upon Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. He was born, for instance,
in 1908 in Buczacz, Galicia, a town that is now part of western Ukraine, but then “an autonomous region of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Polish was the official language.” Buczacz was then 60 percent Jewish.

His childhood was not without event, as the obituary in
The Daily Telegraph attests.

From 1915 to 1917, the family was obliged to seek refuge in Vienna, when
Buczacz was overrun by Jew-baiting Cossacks from Russia.

Evidently, the troubles in Eastern Europe started well before the Final Solution was promulgated in 1942. At the end of
World War I, Buczacz became part of Poland.

But while his education continued in Polish, there were continual changes of
authority: Russian Bolsheviks drove out the Poles; the Poles enlisted the aid of the brutal
Ukrainian Petlyura cavalry. "We would get up
without knowing what regime was in power," Wiesenthal remembered.

If you remember, Poland became involved in the civil
war that raged in the Soviet Union for years after the Bolshevik Revolution.

He graduated from the local gymnasium (which means that the city’s education system was
based on the German model) and struggled for years against anti-Semitic discrimination to qualify
as an architect. Then in 1939 in the Nazi-Soviet partition his town became part of Ukraine and
Wiesenthal was suspect as a “bourgeois” Jew.

In 1941, of course, Buczacz was invaded by the Germans and Wiesenthal became suspect not just
as a Jew but as a member of the “Bolshevik intelligentsia.” He ended up in the Mauthausen death camp.

How did he survive? When millions were done to death, how does the individual survive?
In Wiesenthal’s case the answer is: because of his drawing skill. A guard gave him extra food
“and gave him drawing materials to produce presents for the other guards.”

After the war he began his documentation activities for which we know him.

We may certainly understand, learning of the life of Simon Wiesenthal, how Eastern Europe and its
peoples were cruelly cast about and battered in the last century by the rip-tides of history. And
we may celebrate the great good fortune of those that survived as we mourn the millions lost
in the awful maelstrom.

"Don't Get Stuck on Stupid, Reporters"

Conservatives are rolling in the aisles this morning chuckling about LtGen Honore’s advice to the media
yesterday. “Don’t get stuck on stupid, reporters,”
he advised.
Honore and Mayor Nagin
were trying to advertise information about buses for evacuation of New Orleans
in advance of hurricane Rita. But reporters wanted to talk about why the
preparation for this hurricane was different that the preparation for hurricane
Katrina.

So LtGen Honore decided to treat the highly objective new media like they
were dumb recruits in basic training. He wanted to get a clear message out to
the people of New Orleans. Things like: Here is where the buses will be. They will take you
out of town. Period. He didn’t want to be retailing rumors about where the buses
might be, as one reporter asked. He wanted to use the news media as a medium
of communication. So help me, news media, he gently and respectfully asked.
Help me get this message out to save lives in the city of New Orleans.

Now you would think that the news media would be buzzing with reports about the,
er, plain talk from LtGen Honore. After all, they loved John McCain and his
“Straight Talk Express” in 2000. But no. If you look at
Google News on the morning of September 21, 2005, all you see is
entries from conservative blogs. No MSM in sight. Now why would that be?