Shining the Light on Power
Among the sectors of American society left behind by Nine-Eleven, America's First Rate Universities stand out. Even more than the determined refusal of the Democratic Party and the Major Standard Media to enter the new world, which are merely embarrassments, the refusal of University faculties to adjust their Left ideology to reality is a scandal. Faculties have dug in their heels. They have increased the level of invective and hyperbole in their public debate. They have thrown arrogant nonsense - they are Democrats because they are bright - at their critics. What they have not done is to face the intellectual corruption at the center of the Left academic ideologies.
The critique of the Left-Liberalism of the First Rate Universities has gathered such momentum and accumulated such punch in the past two years, we need only to reference it here. Rather than add to the evidence, which is not needed, in this series of brief articles, we shall examine the relationship between how university faculties work and their commitment to fallacious philosophies and false ideologies. Under the banner of collectivist ideology, after their long march out of the 1960s, the Left, Feminist, and Post-Modernist professorial ideologues obtained political and administrative power in America's universities in the early 1990s. At the moment of their triumph, their political model of collectivism failed with the collapse with Soviet Union. A decade later - but a brief breath of history - the notion that collectivism was, ontologically, the Fundamental Moral Good received its final rebuttal. Islamic terrorists attacked American cities. History refuted the ideologies upon which the new power elite of America's universities justified their reign. They had just settled into wielding power; much to their consternation, history threatened to snatch it away.
We start by elaborating on the distinction implicit in the borrowed British naval term, First Rate. Not all America's colleges and universities were or are Left-Liberal, because not all of them are First Rate. The Ivy League schools, top non-Ivy private research universities, and some top public research universities, like the University of California, are Left-Liberal. But there are hundreds of Second Rate and Third Rate colleges where the faculties are politically divided more along national political lines. There are hundreds of religiously affiliated colleges in which conservatives are more prominent. There are thousands of community colleges and vocational institutions where faculty are more conservative than Left. We shall see that the connection between being First Rate and espousing Leftist ideology has to do which how research agendas are set.
The second distinction concerns what we refer to when we say "university." Modern universities are enormous, complex institutions, the size of small cities, with distinctive faculties (i.e., peer-review units - a distinction of which we shall make more in a later article). Some faculties are primarily undergraduate; some primarily graduate. Law school, business school, medical school, humanities' graduate school, science graduate school, social science graduate school, music school, engineering school - all these schools have institutionally different faculties with different requirements for professional appointment and advancement, and different temperaments, intelligences, levels of social involvement and political activism, and - importantly - salaries. Most of the attention and consternation over the Left orientation of professors pertains to the faculties of the social sciences and humanities departments.
The clustering of Left ideologues in the social sciences and humanities is significant, because these disciplines are dominated by Marxism, theoretical Feminism, and Post-modernism (philosophies/ideologies that are not intellectually compatible with each other, by the way, but more about this, also, in a later article). The faculties of the sciences give the faculties of social sciences and humanities wide political berth. Most scientists are outraged at the Post-modernist attack on science. Scientists might be Democrats, but they are not joining their Leftist-Feminist-Post-Modernist colleagues on the political barricades. Leftist philosophies are utter nonsense for most scientists. This is significant when we wish to characterize American First Rate Universities, because the sciences (including in this category the medical faculties) are their core. The social sciences and humanities, by contrast, are subsidized fringe undertakings. The sciences and medicine are the university's bright lights; the social sciences and humanities are just dim bulbs.
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