Scott Walker and Academic Tenure

Scott Walker is advocating a reform in Wisconsin which could have a more profound impact on America than anything we have seen in a long time. Establishment leftism depends upon institutions which support and promote its philosophy and agenda using our money. The most obnoxious offender is Big Education, especially tenured professors who mock our values even as they rob our pockets.

Tenured professors are impossible to remove, they need do almost no work, and these goons spout Marxist nonsense and abuse conservative students with impunity. Even worse, overpaid professors and bloated state universities not only squeeze the taxpayers in tight state budgets but force middle class families and young adults into debt to purchase the dubious benefits of a college degree. Walker is proposing to end tenure in the state university system. Predictably, the overpaid and underworked professorial class is screeching about the loss of academic freedom. These are the same clowns who regularly intimidate conservative students in their classes, who exclude qualified conservatives from the very tenure they are defending, and who participate in keeping conservative speakers off campuses. Instead of providing diversity in thought and encouraging “schools of thought” in academia, the totalitarianism of Big Education actively works to insure a monolithic voice whose solidarity is insured by groupthink and the Party Line. Consider some of the consequence of that in the intellectual life of our nation (or, as far as that goes, the intellectual life of our world.)

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Ben Stein brilliantly showed the suppression of scientific thought which questioned the viability of evolution by Darwinian natural selection in his film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The leftist establishment reflexively presents their rhetoric – their illogical rhetoric – that debunking evolution by natural selection means that scientists need to look for other explanations for life in the universe. As Stein shows, tenure is denied over and over again to any qualified academicians who stray from the pack – this suppression of genuine academic freedom means that science stays in the Stone Age of 19th Century Darwinism. Manmade global warming is presented as “established science” even though it consistently fails to predict what the authors of this theory propose and now we found academicians working to rewrite old temperature data to fit into the broken theory of manmade global warming. The real research, the real scientific thinking which ought to be exploring whether the data used to support manmade global warming is true and whether other explanations for the data may not be true is suppressed and those who stray from the flock of academic sheep go to slaughter. The tired and failed social theories of leftism are presented, of course, as sacred dogma to tens of millions of innocent young adults each semester, so that these students either resist the indoctrination or surrender to it and thus have the privilege of spending tens of thousands of dollars and years of their adult life in reeducation camps called college campuses. Scott Walker and Wisconsin Republicans need to follow through on the tenure reform and, if anything, look at even more dramatic changes in college systems. What makes Governor Walker’s reforms even more important is that every state government run by Republicans – and there are a lot of them – could implement similar reforms, and perhaps even go farther. Why not, for example, provide state testing for all college courses at the modest cost to allow virtually anyone, whether formally enrolled in a college or not, to test out of the course? Why not create affirmative action plans to hire as professors those underrepresented like free market economists, devout Christians and Jews, social conservatives, and researchers who offer different theories than the orthodox leftist theories? If one state like Wisconsin implement truly dramatic reforms which clearly succeeded in lowering the cost of education to young adults, bringing intellectual diversity into faculties and classrooms, and demonstrating that the world did not end because academic fat cats had to begin lapping skim milk instead of heavy cream, then dozens of Republican-run states could follow suit and deal a body blow to established leftism. State governments can do a great deal to deconstruct the awful edifices upon which established leftism depends. Scott Walker showed great political courage – great political courage which made Reagan our best modern president – and he has the chance to show that courage again. Conservatives ought to be rallying behind him right now and tell him we are on his side, because he is truly on our side.