MCViewPoint

Specifically, conservative and libertarian intellectuals should be hired until the professoriate doesn’t “look like America,” but instead thinks like America in terms of political and economic philosophy.

How To Cancel Woke U

By Walter E. Block

American Thinker

It should not shock anyone, except for perhaps Rip Van Winkle, and even he should have long ago stopped his slumber, that our universities are now intellectual cesspools.  Political correctness, wokeism, DIE, cultural and economic Marxism, Black History Month, affirmative action, anti-racism, allyship, non-colorblind, hetero-normativity, trigger warnings, cultural appropriation reign pretty much unopposed, at least on campus.

Thank God for Governors DeSantis of Florida and Abbott of Texas.  They, along with the legislatures of a dozen or so additional states, have been trying to do something about this disgrace in academia.

But these folks are like the boy who put his finger in the hole in the dike — well intentioned, but all but powerless to keep the waters from rising and continuing to overwhelm higher education.

The first foray of the good guys was to enquire as to the amount of money spent on DIE for attacks on academic freedom.  The bad guys responded, exultantly, “less than 1%.”  They were saying, in effect, that this can hardly amount to any significant threat to the university mandate — namely, to be a bastion of open inquiry.

Nonsense on stilts.  A virus can wreak havoc on the human person, even given that it weighs far less than 1% of total body weight.  Ditto for a nail in the tire, which again accounts for an infinitesimal proportion of the car’s total weight.  A few teeny, tiny cancer cells can spell the death knell for their relatively heavy host.  In the magnificent movie The Mouse That Roared, Peter Sellers (who played pretty much all the roles) was the general of a country like Monaco or Liechtenstein, yet his army of about a dozen soldiers conquered the entire United States military (the bigger they are, the harder they fall).

The relatively few deans, provosts, and assistant and associate deans and provosts in charge of the DIE initiatives can totally undermine the academic freedom of literally thousands of professors with their threats to fire them for not toeing the leftist party line.  Endangered, also, are even those who hold tenured faculty posts.

The next missile tossed at the forces of evil on campus by Governor DeSantis was to forbid the teaching of Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, Black Lives Matter, systemic racism and sexism, the abominations of cisgendered white males, and all the other Marxist-inspired accoutrements of modern college life taught by the usual suspects.

But this too will miss its mark.

First of all, there is nothing wrong with teaching — that is, giving both sides of all debatable issues.  It is exceedingly difficult to refute these noxious doctrines if one cannot discuss them at all.

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