Libertarians should avoid taking sides in left-right antagonisms when promoting a principled third position would make more sense.
Regrettably, in “Christopher Rufo Wants To Shut Down ‘Activist’ Academic Departments. Here’s Why He’s Wrong,” libertarian magazine Reason fails to offer that alternative.
“In an essay published this week in City Journal,” author Emma Camp begins, “conservative activist Christopher Rufo argued that universities — or rather, the state legislatures governing these universities — should shut down ‘activist’ academic departments. But rather than protecting higher education, forcibly shutting down left-wing academic departments would be nothing more than routine censorship.”
Tellingly, she never defines “routine” censorship.
Let me help: routine censorship is the governmental policy of preventing or punishing private speech on private property.
State colleges and universities are public institutions, politically established and subsidized by taxpayers. With few exceptions, “private colleges” are also routinely tax-funded at the demand end, and are further supported with research contracts.
Getting rid of Marxist professors preaching political revolution is no more anti-free speech than preventing the CDC and Anthony Fauci from conducting gain-of-function virus research within some college laboratory.
Ms. Camp quotes the Supreme Court about the importance of “safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned.” Freedom sounds great, but as usual, the Supremes forget that taxpayers have an interest, and that constraints on public schools was once routine.
So how not to “cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom”?
Offer a third position: de-subsidize and dis-establish government “education” by empowering higher education’s customers. Let Marxist professors find payers in the private sector.
Instead, Emma Camp effectively tells conservatives they have no choice but to fund every leftist program that politics and the bureaucracy allow. She could have recognized that “Academic freedom” in the context of tax-subsidized schooling is merely ideological license.
Which is itself a sad alternative to real liberty.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “License for Leftists”
The problem with “school choice” as publicly framed is that “empowering the consumers” with vouchers and credits neither dis-establishes nor de-subsidizes education.
Since the money is politically directed, the politics will inevitably come with it — as has long since been demonstrated by e.g. the GI Bill, Pell Grants, and student loans — in the form of requirements that turn formerly “private” schools into de facto government schools.
The only way to get politics out of education is to completely separate school and state.
Posit that the biggest academic subsidy in the US is the federal government underwriting of the student loan program, no matter how unrealistic the job prospects of the preferred degrees. It has allowed the proliferation of of a cornucopia of degrees ending in “…. Studies” with no appreciable gain in intellectual reasoning ability nor reasonable realistic prospects of gainful employment. Once the bastion of the landed gentry where their offspring could be exposed to the subtleties and history of western culture, and have a reasonable chance of finding a partner of similar ilk before leaving and taking over the helm of the family business, the liberal arts colleges have become a festering hole for personality disorders and folks who hate themselves, their family, and their species. In a healthy world, the consequences would bring about an inevitable self-pruning of such institutions, given the uselessness of their products. Absent a functional job to pay back loans, and absent the government preventing students from abandoning their debt with bankruptcy, private lending institutions would cease loaning to colleges. But continuing government underwriting allow not only for them to continue, but also to jack up their prices. Virtually every field of human endeavor that the government has subsidized without attending to the result has yielded an increased in cost with a decline in quality. Like in harmonics, negative feedback suppresses and positive feedback exaggerates. If no one uses the feedback to steer, then the worst traits are amplified along with the best and the worst traits create chaos. Education is no different.