The Despair of Tenured Autocrats

Submitted by Serge Martinez (United States), Feb 26, 2005 at 10:34

After 40 years in academia I'm pained by the ideological armament with which my colleagues in academic have surrounded themselves.

It is distressing to find undisguised and aggressive discrimination in most of our academies. I've never met a colleague who does not have full-blown contempt for students who are conservatively religious (Christian mostly, but orthodox Jews too).

I am in full blown despair at the indifference with which we overpriced, life-time employed, fully insured, and completely immunized autocrats have attached ourselves to the bottom of American society. There may have been both good reason and sufficient resources to finance such a huge collection of court jesters and court sages in that remarkable period - 1950-1980.

Now, however, the urgent need for productive and economically engaged workers, of clear thinkers; of effeciently educated citizens has made the indulgent model of higher education absolutely disfunctional. We cannnot continue to diver hundreds of billions of dollars so that angry polemicists can continue to propagandize their students. Ward Churchill, the ill disposed Harvard and MIT professors, all of the "me" -centered "dons" and "donnas" of the Ivory tower have probably now been put on probation.

One more hissy fit and, and Trimp would say "You're Fired!"....

Oh not literally. Tenure precludes that. I mean by ending many of the obsolete and cost overrun departments, centers, programs, working groups, institutes and other grotesque and misshapen growths that have become the cancers of self-indulgence.

We are on the cusp of a new dawn! See the light breaking over the East? Smell the fresh air blowing through the stables?

Respectfully,

Serge

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