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Chapter 11. Separation of stages in powered ascent

Ignition of the second stage (pp. 251-253)

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... the suicidal slide of American academia to socialist hell. "Academic freedom is withering" on campuses [12]. Many productive colleagues are usually busy with their teaching and research in a highly competitive environment while activists and radical ideologues on the left concentrate on coercive politics, taking advantage of the indifference or fear of the majority of faculty. Consequently, not that many advocate individual freedom, limits on state power, representative democracy, and a market economy.

Many universities are steadily turning into one-party enclaves. My University of Southern California is no exception. A scholarly publication shows that the Democrat-to-Republican party registration ratio at USC exceeds 25 in the combined fields of economics, history, journalism (communications), law, and psychology. [13] The causes for such a skewed ratio in a country evenly divided politically are clear. The resulting inevitable impact on the quality of scholarship and education is also obvious.

"The leftward march of the professoriate" [14] and university administrators alarms many. Hard sciences, engineering, and professional societies are becoming increasingly politicized as well. Recently, during the pandemic, the vital medical field and public health also embarked on conversion to theology, as global climate science and arms control did in the past. Replacement of quantitative test measures by subjective criteria in admissions of students and non-merit based hiring and promotion in universities, government, and industry will demolish academia and ruin businesses.

The totalitarian neo-Marxist far left drives this sinister transformation in which, as history teaches us, many protagonists will be consumed much sooner than they could imagine. The principle of karma inevitably awaits them.

Also repeating history, the defining characteristics of the present-day radical socialists include ignorance, intolerance, and lack of empathy. The more extreme they become, the more pronounced these features are. Incompetence, dysfunction, and celebration of mediocrity, which universally characterize socialist societies, grow.

A recent report of the U.S. President's Commission noted that

Universities in the United States are often today hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship that combine to generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country. [15]

These tragic developments are a direct indictment of the educational system and the universities in the first place. They are failing students and harming the American republic.

Referring to a famous appreciation of the critically important contribution of the educational system, attributed to the Duke of Wellington, George Orwell observed in 1941:

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars [conducted by Great Britain] have been lost there. One of the dominant facts in English life during the past three quarters of a century has been the decay of ability in the ruling class. [16]

One does not have to be a rocket scientist to see such decay with an accompanying growth of government and slide to a socialist abyss celebrated by many in universities across the United States. It does not bode well for the free world and the world in general.

If the trend is not reversed and the free world, common sense, liberty, and human rights lose, then paraphrasing the Duke, this battle "was lost on the campuses of the Ivy League."

Sic transit gloria universitatum.

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