Universities and Government Bureaucracies: The Left’s ‘Chokepoint Charlies’
In the days of the Berlin Wall during the Cold War, “Checkpoint Charlie” was a border crossing point between East and West Berlin. Its obvious purpose was to prevent those who wished to escape the Communist tyranny of East Germany from doing so. In about two and a half years before the Wall’s construction choked off the flow, roughly 550,000 East Germans fled to the West.
The communists had their checkpoints. Leftists have their chokepoints. Those who occupy positions in university systems, government bureaucracies, as well as certain union and professional organizations, often with the active assistance of the courts, serve as the system’s “Chokepoint Charlies.” You can’t get through or move on unless you jump through their hoops, comply with their demands, or behave according to their established norms. This column will focus on the first two sets of Chokepoint Charlies.
In university systems, the most obvious chokepoint is tenure. If you achieve it, you have a position for life; if you don’t, your career is essentially over. Not surprisingly, leftist-dominated universities have used denial of tenure as a principal means of culling promising conservative professors, or even usually reliable liberals who utter occasional center-right thoughts, from their faculties’ ranks.
Other university chokepoints are in the classroom. For the most part, it’s still true that if you’re bright enough, apply yourself, keep your head down, and avoid making too many waves, you’ll get through. But if you happen to incur the wrath of an intolerant radical prof by expressing a dissenting view, no matter how well-supported, you may find yourself with a failing grade, a lengthy redress or appeals process with less than assured results, and perhaps the inability, at least at that university, to go on to the next step in your desired major.
Perhaps the most dangerous chokepoint at universities is in research. If your line of inquiry leads to conclusions that are contrary to established beliefs — say, just for the heck of it, if you find evidence that the earth really hasn’t been warming, or even if it is warming that it’s not significantly influenced by human activity — there’s more than a slight chance that your “peer reviewers” won’t be impressed and that your next funding request may not be granted. Just like that, you’re on the outside looking in. As seen in the ClimateGate emails, you’ll also be the recipient of major grief, up to and including active attempts to prevent your work’s publication, from agenda-driven ideologues who are secondarily and not primarily scientists.
If there’s a solution that will lead to the elimination of higher education’s chokepoints, the relentless college cost bubble, where tuition and fees are entering at least their fifth decade of rising faster than general inflation by a substantial margin, may present the opportunity. The past year’s increases, in the presence of nearly zero inflation, have been particularly offensive. I believe the entire mechanism of higher education needs a comprehensive rethink. If you don’t, ask yourself this question: Given today’s technology, if the buildings, dorms, and stadiums weren’t already there, would you organize a university system as it is organized today? I didn’t think so.
I think one of the greatest chokepoints in the government has been the DOJ-civil rights division specifically the EEOC. Kneeling at the altar of Affirmative Action/Diversity they have caused many untold lives to be ruined by the denial of a job. They have birthed a grievance-lifestyle for minorities in the form of “protected minorities.” They have further separated the nation into white and black. That disparate impact crap has hurt our nation. And because most companies must employ a “diversity” (queen) person a lot of money is wasted.
The left controls other chokepoints as well in ostensibly non-government areas. The MSM is all radical left. They control what is and is not divulged to the public-as in the case of the Journal-List. The left has controlled most Human Resource Depts of private companies and they have the power to control lives through hiring.
I hate the left; I just wish there were more who felt the same.
Blotto, those are great examples.
I would say that a lot of HR people are reluctant PC enforcers advised by legal departments and outside attorneys to be careful to a fault in the face of the civil rights and diversity regime you cited.
Well done sir! The list of these chokepoints is becoming endless. I guess “red” tape is a very apt name.
If I was redesigning the university system there is a lot I would change but I would have a branch of the system that had dorms and buildings for sure. Much of what is learned at college is learned outside of class when bright young people get together and discuss things. I think this happens best in an intellectual environment that many small liberal arts schools provide. As for the stadiums, I would not design the stadiums in theory but in practice I would have to consider it. For many students the extra curricular opportunities are more important to their choice of where to attend than the curricula.
In all honesty I am not sure if technology as currently implemented has done more harm or good to education so far.
All of these organizations are simply life-support for Leftists. About 5-10% of Americans have the IQ to do college-level work. As such, most of the ‘pupils’ in college today are there only to justify paying Leftists a comfortable wage, while leaving most of their days free to organize demos and write propaganda. The time they do spend in the classroom is useful in brian-washing character-deficient youths in the Leftist catechism. Although the examples of carrying programs far past the advertised goals, the author doesn’t make clear that this is the reason why the government was never given authority to do any of it. The guv has no authority to do anything about health-care, pollution, or education — none! The ‘slippery-slope’ isn’t a possible argument against government programs, but a 100% certain description of their operation. Rightists have to go beyond conservative opposition to further usurpations, but on to abolishing them. Unions are illegal conspiracies to commit extortion. Illegal at Common Law (it’s in our Constitution), they were exempted only as part of Ol’ Rubberlegs’ New Deal. Undo their exemption. End all govt support to education — cut off the profs’ life-support. You have to behave like a man. Attend to your friends, in case they need help or advice. Observe your enemies for any chance to cripple or kill them. This, basically, is life.
As long as our fellow Americans vote for Democrats, our self-evident freedoms will continue to be lost. It worries me greatly that there are large numbers of our fellow citizens who lack the self-respect and dignity required to reject an oppressive, suffocating nanny (and bully) state that promises to take care of them. Until we, as a society, regain the courage to take care of ourselves, all is lost.
Colleges and universities have gone from using facts and knowledge to more subjective criteria, there by placing the ‘proctor’ in full control, as his “opinion” determines what is correct, rather than sound metrics.
Once you have placed yourself in the position of asking if your performance meets ‘his/her’ expectations instead of meeting measurable land mark criteria, you enter the realm of opinion. Not knowledge.
Obviously, indoctrination is the result (being told what to think). Not learning HOW to think.
The problem that the EPA was created to solve, were for the most part, created by govt interference in the first place.
It used to be against the law to pollute someone else’s stream, lake, or even air. But then govt decided that such primitive laws interfered with economic growth (a more accurate interpretation is that they interfered with the ability of political contributors to build factories where and when they wanted.) so govt passed laws that individuals could no longer sue to prevent pollution, only govt had that right. Then govt just never got around to suing anyone who was paid up in their donations to the right politicians.
Look up riparian rights.
And then the Clean Water Act
Choke off their funding, and all the chokepoints disappear.
While I agree it’s dumb for “… the courts, which ultimately and incredibly decided that what humans and other living things exhale is a pollutant.” I can’t agree that carbon dioxide is a non-pollutant because humans and other living things exhale it. We excrete shit, too, and people are agreed that, in the wrong places, *that* is a pollutant. In their proper place, both of the aforementioned are good for plant life.
“Natural” is not our friend, nor our enemy. It’s where we live.
Oh Ellen! I’m afraid you don’t know sh*t from Shinola. You’re in danger of having the effluent come out of the wrong end.
Good article. I wholeheartedly agree that extremists have built “chokepoints” to control society. This is even more evident in Germany where extreme socialists have entrenched themselves in the Universities and the all important government agencies. Students are not allowed to write papers on topics such as the prevalence of left-wing anti-semitism because their thesis advisors won’t allow it; and don’t even think about starting a business! The apparatchiks will swarm like locusts and attempt to derail any and all attempts at economic activity. The last time I checked, the owner of a business has to obtain nearly 40 different certifications before they can provide coffee and tea to clients, including courses on the safety hazards of ground meat. That’s right; apparently you have to learn about the effects of bacteria on raw hamburgers before you can serve a cup of joe.
These articles are great, but I’ve read literally hundreds of them over the years. They’re all correct, the examples they give are horrendous. But nobody ever does anything. Me included unfortunately. You don’t know what to do, a letter to your congressman gets a sappy reply and nothing happens. It’s like Gulliver’s Travels where the giant public is immobilized by thousands of these tiny strings and a thousand petty and stupid people.
In the build-up to the Pacific War, Admiral Yamamoto
cautioned the Imperial Japanese Government against
‘Waking the sleeping Giant of America.’
It is still good advice; Our problem
will be _limiting_ the response
when the Hard Times arrive.
Freedom is racist and the ignorant unwashed proletariat must be ground into submission for their own good and the left/liberal elite’s gratification! (If left/libtards were honest.)
Yes, yes, everything was fine till the Liberals screwed it up.
Did your mommy show you how to make strawmen?
Here’s your push-pop, go to the other room and let the grownups talk.
Nice strawman you’ve got there Downie.
1) We have to eliminate Federal funding of schools.
2) We have to go to school board meetings and identify the communists and root them out of the school boards at the ballot box. This might even mean running against the bastards.
3) We have to approve a serious voucher system so that our schools will become competitive in order to attract students.
4) We have to get the damned labor laws changed so that the membership of the NEA and other unions are not protected against competition for their jobs. We also need to eliminate tenure for teachers. What qualifies a teacher for this, in any event?
5) We have to eliminate research grants to universities which involve spending our tax dollars.
6) If none of the above can be done, it is because the collectivists are completely in control already, which I suspect is the case.
A friend of mine has a daughter in nearby Montana State University. The lefty party line about global warming is parroted in many classes like a mantra. Some of the students roll their eyes when the sermon begins, but they know better than to dispute the professor. Their grades will suffer if they disagree. Pathetic.
“In university systems, the most obvious chokepoint is tenure … leftist-dominated universities have used denial of tenure as a principal means of culling promising conservative professors … from their faculties’ ranks.”
I’ve been in the university faculty biz for 35 years and you can take it from me: Politically speaking, faculties are indeed nearly all monochrome, but denial of tenure is almost never the mechanism used to purge those who aren’t on board with the program. In fact, among the universities’ many modern failings is that it’s become too easy, if anything, to be awarded tenure. Quality control just isn’t what it was supposed to be. No. There are two reasons for the small and seemingly ever-shrinking number of university faculty members with any political views to the right of those that have become stereotypical in the “academy.” One is that there are a substantial number of fields in which newly fledged BAs with conservative views find the idea of graduate study highly unappetizing. And rightly so. The culture of those areas — both as regards both what is directly political and the atmospherics more generally — are highly off-putting to a young people who have an intellectual need for rigorous and reasoned argumentation. And if a conservative-minded student does for some reason go to graduate school in one of these fields, but does an imperfect job of concealing his or her positions, ostracism and a lack of support from the faculty is all too likely. Without strong backing from the faculty of the degree institution, in turn, appointment to a faculty job elsewhere is impossible. Finally, even if all this is somehow managed, a new PhD will simply not be hired in the fields I’m talking about if it’s apparent that he or she has political, social, and cultural views that are too unlike what is so uniform among the very people — i.e. the faculty of a department with a job to fill — who have essentially 100% of the say in appointing a beginning assistant professor. It’s at the entry level, in other words, that the choke point is effectively placed. But there is almost nobody to filter out anymore even at that comparatively early stage — at least not, as I keep saying, in a substantial number of fields of study.
I give it a decade till the chokepints are eliminated.
Then the leftist will move into full on treason and will agitate for surrendering US sovereignty to the tranzis.
It was a sad day (year? century?) when conservative parents persuaded themselves that it was OK to send their children to liberal/radical colleges and universities. All their wasted money could have created alternative institutions.