Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
Like the fabled spring zephyr came news that the Golden Golem of Greatness, (a.k.a. President Trump) signed an executive order that would withhold federal funding from colleges and universities that do not demonstrate support for free speech. It has been an amazement to behold the appalling, hypocritical suppression of the first amendment on campuses across the nation, with their ignoble speech codes, asinine safe spaces, sinister kangaroo courts, and racist anti-whiteness crusades.
Most wondrous of all has been the failure of college presidents, deans, trustees, and faculty chairs to assert their authority and do the right thing — namely, take a stand against the arrant muzzling of free expression by campus Stalinists. Their craven passivity is a symptom of what future historians will identify as the epic institutional collapse of higher education, which first made itself into an industry like any other moneygrubbing business, and then became a titanic racketeering operation. And now it is all coming to grief.
In the years ahead, you will see colleges go out of business at a shocking rate and the contagion will spread to the giant state systems around the country. In my little region alone, several colleges have published their own obituaries in the last few months: Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont; Southern Vermont College in Bennington; and Hampshire College over in Amherst, MA (which is desperately searching for a buyout). That’s just the beginning of a wave of closures that will send tens of thousands of academic hierophants flooding the unemployment offices while sleeping in their cars.
It’s not hard to see how this fiasco developed and blossomed. In the 1960s, when I was in college, Marxism offered a neat, pre-engineered template for opposing the odious Establishment that blundered into the Vietnam War. Students then at least had skin in the game: the threat of getting drafted into the army and shipped over to die in the jungle for a senseless conflict. In fact, many young men unsuited for college took refuge there to evade the military. Then, with a bull market in Boomer Generation PhDs, the faculties were soon filled with the former Sixties radicals.
Many were Boomer women, who set out to explain and correct the evolving relations of men and women in the office workplace of the day. By then the war was over. The sick economy of the 1970s put an end to the ability of men to support a family and more women were forced to enter the office environment. Meanwhile radical progressivism needed an ever-fresh supply of new aggrieved parties to justify its agitation against the old Marxist bugbears of bourgeois values and structural oppression — and incidentally fuel academic careers. Hence, the multiplication of victims into handy intersectional categories.
By the 1980s, it also became evident that 60s civil rights legislation to end Jim Crow laws had not solved the quandaries of race in America, and that disappointment refreshed the progressive crusade to heal the world of injustice and inequality. Every other effort to produce equal outcomes for different categories of people had also proved disappointing, so now progressives resort to plain coercion to force equal outcomes at all costs, and nowhere is that behavior more overt than on campus the past decade.
The delusion that everybody must have a college education finally turned Higher Ed into a racket, when the federal government decided to guarantee college loans — which only prompted colleges to ramp up tuitions way beyond the official inflation rate and undertake massive expansion programs in the competition for the expanding base of student customer-borrowers. Almost all colleges acted as facilitators to this loan racket, though with federal guarantees they had no skin in that game. Now, outstanding student loan debt is $1.5 trillion, and about 40 percent of it is nonperforming, in euphemistic banker jargon. The student borrowers have been fleeced, many of them financially destroyed for life, and they have only begun to express themselves politically.
The anxiety and remorse behind that dastardly financial behavior, and the prospect of coming institutional ruin, is probably a big factor behind the engineered social justice hysterias that paradoxically made college campuses the most intellectually unfree — and intellectually unsafe! —places in the land. And turned all those college presidents into cowards and cravens. Since coercion is the only behavior modification college administrators understand these days, it’s reasonable that Mr. Trump use federal grant largesse as a lever to end the structural despotism of campus culture. The stumbling economy will take care of the rest.
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I have to laugh remembering when the academic and political Illuminati were denouncing Trump University. Universities today are different from TU in degree, not kind. As the wise man said, everything eventually turns into a racket. I am waiting to see what happened to the 800 or so young people who were alleged to have benefited from the scam that allowed parents to cheat or bribe their children’s way into prestigious colleges. My guess is that most of them graduated, despite being thick as bricks. So much for academic rigor. They might as well be getting their degrees from the Wizard of Oz.
Remember…they hate us for our freedoms. Bwahahabababa.
If Trump wants to really cut out this shit on college campuses he should end the government-subsidized student loan program. That’s where the universities get their big money. If that money tree is cut down, at least half the liberal arts colleges will go belly up almost immediately. Then all the diversity deans and other administrative riff-raff will fall by the wayside. Eventually, we will get back to downsized universities that actually teach students skills that they can use in the real world–skills like science, engineering, math, how to write, how to learn, how to expand your mind, etc.
But I’m a dreamer. The racket is too big and too many people are making boatloads of money off the current system so it will never change until the entire house of cards comes tumbling down.
I heard an interesting suggestion: make the colleges co-sign the loans taken out of by students. After all, they are the ones touting the supposed benefits of college, that it is a sure way to improving the graduates financial future. Let them put their money were their mouths are. Of course, they wouldn’t, and such a move would be tantamount to ending the student loan program. I’m for it anyway, because it would reveal the colleges’ mendacity and naked self-interest in burdening students with loans that only benefit the colleges.
In economic terms, we have aborted a generation, not surprising.
An entire generation has been raped on this whole racket, and they know it. The current and future batch of kids know that they’ve been “taught” state -enforced propaganda, and many aren’t too happy about it.
Greetings,
What isn’t mentioned is that women hold the vast majority of this debt. Given that women do not study STEM, the only employment for someone that majored in “studies” is in education or government. The shrinking pie will make sure that none of these women will be able to repay these debts. They are now debt slaves looking for a simp or beta male to save them.
With respect Nickel, corporate America has gone full diversity bat shit crazy, even creating positions such as Diversity Officer in charge of corporate diversity, insuring this dead weight finds a home.
This is becoming the norm, it is not a small amount.
They “teach” anything and everything except how to be responsible and productive. But yet, somehow, expect them to contribute to society and fund their retirement. It’s like pulling the rug out from under your own feet… and they’re the smart ones. That’ll learn’m.
People are slowly awaking to the scam known as Higher Post-Secondary Education. Many kids that I talk with know it’s a scam and are actually talking about learning a trade. Eventually these realizations will translate to a collapse in the fodder (the kids) for the colleges. However, trade schools will someday boom again, especially the ones poor people can afford. We are witnessing the beginning of the end of these Socialist Anti-American Indoctrination Centers. Eventually the political nature of this will result in no more Government Guaranteed Loans. Then, their collapse will be complete within 3 years. Isn’t it wonderful that most of us will be alive to witness this event?
i agree w/you guys about what bs the colleges are but what is rarely mentioned about student debt is that much of this debt is run up at non traditional schools such as beauty school,fashion school,etc.–
i have a tenant that has a student loan debt of over $80,000 from a fashion design school from which she never graduated–
An article posted in the Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind”, coincides perfectly with this from Jim Kunstler.
A few months back, I received the annual publication from my alma mater (University of California at Irvine). Yes, indeed a truly socialist hellhole, that was actually proud to have a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party as a professor in the Economics Dept. My major was biology, so I was barely impacted by these clowns (but I digress).
In the publication, the Chancellor actually wrote a quite insightful piece about free speech. He noted that 50 years previous, on the campuses of the University of California (Irvine was opened in 1965), the modern day free speech movement got its biggest push. He noted that the goal of the organizers (at least what was presented as the public face of the movement) was to strip away the free speech restrictions the administration and faculty were placing on the students. He noted with much irony and sadness that these same college campuses were now home to hundreds of thousands of students who now DEMAND that free speech rights be TAKEN AWAY from the students by the administration, all because they are too soft and “fragile” to handle anything that might upset their world view.
What a shock to see something like this from a UC Chancellor. He won’t be long in that position I’m sure.