The James Martin Center has published Part II of my article, Leaving the Blight of Higher Education. Part I dedicated itself to a discussion of how the liberal regime that controls the institutions of higher education in our former republic has, through massive and continuous indoctrination, transformed the student body from a cohort of young people that was at least willing to learn into a mob-minded mass whose primary function is to monitor and denounce any infraction of the racialist totalitarian regime of political correctness on campus. I gave an account of the havoc that the anti-morality of denunciation works on any attempt to impart a genuine higher education. Once the slogans take over, thinking stops. I wrote how this conversion of the student-body into a quasi-police force increasingly disgusted my wife and me and led, in part, to our decision to retire from teaching – a task to which we had dedicated our lives. Part II, “Farewell, Faculty,” turns its attention to the instructor-side of the equation. My wife and I taught at what I call Upstate Consolation University for twenty years. The faculty committees that hired us in our respective departments (Foreign Languages in her case and English in mine) were firmly liberal in their political convictions but not politicized in the totalitarian way of the contemporary Left. This, too, would undergo a transformation. As older faculty members retired and newly graduated holders of the doctorate – most of them from state universities – replaced them, the character of the department changed. The intellectual level dropped, lower and lower, until the difference, in this regard, between the teachers and the students became minimal. The character of the two groups also merged. And at this point the urge to police, to betray, and to punish made any exercise of curiosity about the human condition or openness to knowledge impossible. An adolescent narcissism made itself universal in students and faculty alike as the behavior of undergraduates became the behavior of the faculty.
I draw an excerpt from Part II, which I preface here with a back-reference to a passage in Part I that acknowledged, with an allusion to the American philosopher George Santayana, the wide general knowledge of the “Old Guard” of professors, so as to contrast them with the “New Guard.” –