The Ominous 49th Parallel

From The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff (though also quoted here, not surprisingly):

The only person who is still a private individual in Germany,” boasted Robert Ley, a member of the Nazi hierarchy, after several years of Nazi rule, “is somebody who is asleep.”

Ghost of a Flea’s take on academia up in the 49th parallel (to namecheck a superb movie about a much more humanitarian Canada long since gone), sounds remarkably ominous itself:

People wonder why I quit university teaching. Imagine an office – all your colleagues and all your supervisors and anyone with a say in your tenure prospects, your research funding and your publications – where everyone organizes their careers in such a way that a “human rights” commission would have no reason to object. Their teaching practices, their research, their political views; everything they think and do including and especially their “private” lives from the television they (do not) watch to the fast food they (do not) eat to the sex lives they (do not) allow themselves to have. Even the concept of a “private” life dismissed as reactionary and/or illusory and in any event subject to the scrutiny of any undergraduate with internet access and a grudge. That is the life I escaped.

Can’t say I blame him–though I imagine life in America’s elite universities probably isn’t much different. Like the man said: “1984 — A user manual for lefties; a warning for the rest of us.”

(H/T: SDA)