The Decline of Higher Education

 In the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, academic-freedom disputes routinely took a particular shape.

• The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) would insist that college campuses must be the one place with unfettered freedom to discuss and analyze issues of all kinds, no matter who might be offended
• This was then the consensus of academic life
• Today, the suppression of debate and analysis happens almost everywhere, and the perpetrators-both professors and administrators-represent a controlling majority of the campuses

The difference is that one kind of replacement happens overnight while the other took 50 years to complete.

• If we juxtapose typical professors of these two eras in light of all these differences, it's obvious that they have nothing in common
• This almost reminds me of those horror movies in which some sinister force manages to abduct some people and replace them with clones who look identical but are really an alien species.

In 1969, a survey by Martin Trow for the Carnegie Commission found that college faculties were fairly evenly split politically

• with about three left-of-center faculty to every two right- of-center
• This advantage allowed the Left to ensure that virtually all new professorial appointments were leftists
• Accordingly, the left-to-right ratio began to rise sharply

When recruiting is focused so heavily on political ideology, you don't simply wind up with academic scholars who happen to be all politically left

• You get political activists, not academic scholars
• This is the core of the problem we face: universities overrun by the wrong kind of people-political zealots who don't understand academia, have no aptitude for it, and use it to achieve ends incompatible with it
• Reform means in one way or another replacing the wrong kinds of people in higher education with the right kind, and nothing short of that will have much effect

https://www.city-journal.org/the-decline-of-higher-education