1036 Academentia

Would you spend $40,000 a year to send your daughter to Smith if you couldn't even figure out the restrooms? The OpinionJournal article by Roger Kimball who wrote about tenured radicals 15 years ago when things were simple (plain vanilla marxism) is quite enlightening. He suspects, that along with Mark Twain's demise, the death of the counterculture is greatly exaggerated. I agree with his solution. Dump tenure which has become a means to stifle dissent and fresh ideas. Seems to be the only way.

"Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral decivilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians? Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a world view that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold? These are questions that should be asked early and asked often."

When I get these phone calls from the Alma Mater appealing for money, I just tell them I'm retired and can no longer support either the College of LAS or the GSLIS. But I think I'll come up with a new line.