Reorganizing Our Universities

The nation's citizens are regularly frustrated by the embarrassingly tawdry quality of their educational systems. There is a clear linkage between all the elements that go into the many marks of lousy education. Rather than being good at teaching and scholarship, the typical American university like Slippery Rock has developed a corporate culture in which it is far better to be good

--at playing administrative games with meaningless buzzwords;

--at securing local perquisites and money more for the sake of personal aggrandizement than of genuine academic service and achievement;

--at mouthing politically correct platitudes which serve the sinecures of wealthy white women and others who mistakenly and cynically call themselves oppressed;

--at involvement in the utterly tedious work of local labor unions and campus committees;

--at mouthing politically correct platitudes while pretending to be open-minded and civil;

--at faking academic credentials, seeking out intellectually undemanding academic programs, and marginalizing the legitimate and the rigorous;

--at assuaging the egos of those who have previously sacrificed legitimate academics in favor of such fraud; and

--at stabbing in the back any who dare to stand up to the nexus of bureaucratized waste, fraud, abuse, and mediocrity.

People who wonder why the patterns of thickening, meaningless bureaucracy, mindless political correctness and intolerance, and union encrustation have never abated in public sector areas like Pa. (and other states') System of Higher Education can grasp one major point here -- that these elements are all mutually reinforcing. People with mediocre and fake credentials, who fill their professionally empty lives with the make-work of committees, administrative pseudo-initiatives, and unions, and who mindlessly mouthe politically fashionable mantras largely about the oppression of some rich people, will readily surround themselves with people of similar deracinated sensibility and wall out those who threaten with substance. They share the pretenses of being politically left wing by mouthing their politically correct platitudes while violating the free speech rights of colleagues and students who will not mirror back to them the self-images to which they desperately cling. And they construct bureaucracies which self-compound and render their mediocrity and fraudulence valid within the surreal worlds they build. Many existing academic administrators do not wish to challenge such a substanceless orthodoxy, in part because they buy into and thrive amidst the very baseless games that these academically substanceless people play. Such administrators need never be indulged. They can be fired. Furthermore, at a legislative level it is actually very easy to deconstruct the entangled concoction of unionists, politically correct mantra mouthers, and academic frauds; and there is no educationally valid reason not to do so.