They Call It “Higher Education”

America is educating itself to death. By “educating” I mean jamming millions of young people into publicly-funded colleges and universities to “learn” a lot of Far Left Crazy bilge that alienates them from their country and does absolutely nothing to help them to become productive citizens.

In addition to left-wing indoctrination, our looniversities also provide “education” which appears to serve no constructive purpose whatsoever. One of my blog readers, a retired professor, has received a newsletter from her university announcing the promotion of a certain professor to a chair of Popular Culture Studies, complete with higher salary and more lavish benefits. The new chair’s academic specialty is… comic books. That’s education!

Campus Reform last week published a list of the top five schools in America for left-wing bias, reflected in their course offerings. A comprehensive list would fill several volumes, so this is by no means an exclusive club. But CR thought these five were worthy (if that’s the word for it) of special mention.

San Diego State offered a course on “removing Trump from office.” Think that’ll be terribly relevant, once Donald Trump has finished serving as our president? Public outcry persuaded the looniversity to delete the specific reference to Mr. Trump, so now the course just focuses on how to complain about the president, whoever it might be. How that benefits the students is anybody’s guess.

University of Minnesota-Twin Cities hired an abortionist to teach abortions so that graduates might perform them at the local Planned Parenthood abattoir and also at the university medical center. Again, a public outcry: so they’ve backed off on the actual hiring and taken time out to ponder the situation.

At the University of Michigan, a professor refused to recommend a student for a program of overseas study in Israel… because he’s pro-Palestinian and doesn’t like Israel. Public outcry. They were going to “punish” the professor in some way for his prejudice, and for screwing up the student’s career—but the faculty rallied to his support. Predictably.

University of Southern Maine proposed to give academic credit to students to take a bus to Washington, D.C., to “protest” the nomination of Brett Kavanagh to the Supreme Court—based, of course, on a cock-and-bull story about Kavanagh being the worst sexual predator since Jack the Ripper. After the usual public outcry, the university scrapped the trip and fired the professor who had organized it.

And the University of California-Berkeley “disavowed” a Student Senator because she cited her religious beliefs as her reason for not jumping aboard the “transgender” bandwagon. A spot of groveling and winsomeness didn’t save her: the school stayed mad at her.

The good news is that in most cases the schools had to back off their Far Left Crazy schemes, or at least modify them to make them less in-your-face. They only backed off because their follies were publicly reported and the public got seriously annoyed. They just can’t stand up to scrutiny.

But the bad news is that these half-baked academic malpractices were ever thought of in the first place. And they’re dreaming up new ones all the time.

A few years down the road, what is America supposed to do with millions of mal-educated, sullen, ignorant, unemployable young people who’ve come out of college with meaningless degrees whose acquisition has made them less potentially productive than they were when they went in? We have way too many kids in college, going into debt for way too much money, being “taught” by way too many left-wing loons. It’s shaping up to be quite a serious problem in the near future.

Our best course would be to strip public funding from all the universities and let them survive in the free market, if they can. If any of them can succeed in providing an education product that’s worth anything, they’ll survive.

The rest won’t, and our country will be much better off without them.

I leave you with this image: “See that fella sweepin’ the floor of the Seven-Eleven? He has a master’s degree in Gender Studies!”

I have discussed this and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Why not stop in and visit? A single click will take you there.

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net