Amerika

What happens when a nation goes Leftist, as the United States did during its Civil War and intensified with the Second World War? You produce a government-created industry which serves a nonexistent need and reaps a parasitic profit from the rest of the system:

When the schools’ presidents began to create offices of diversity affairs, alumni and trustees waved them in as the right thing to do. Bureaucratize an idea, though, and what do you get? More of it than any normal person could want. It is not an overstatement to say that diversity offices are now running American higher education.

Higher-ed’s trade newspaper, the Chronicle of Higher Education, publishes a yearly supplement called “Diversity in Academe.” Its May cover story was “Who Sets a College’s Diversity Agenda?” The most telling piece inside was: “Auditing Diversity: An interest in assessments is rising as officials strive to show they are committed.”

The National Center for Education Statistics reports the U.S. has more than 7,000 postsecondary Title IV institutions serving some 21 million students. All university administrators know their next job depends on showing evidence of achieving diversity metrics. So they push them, relentlessly. In 20 years, diversity went from an idea to an industry.

During the time diversity has been a booming industry, American education has both over-sold itself and under-delivered. That is: today’s college students are less prepared for any facet of adult life than ever before, forcing those who previously could get by with college degrees into graduate school, and compelling everyone else to try for a college degree to prove they could handle the equivalent of high school.

This is what happens any time that governments create a need, but this method is inherent to Leftism and modern government. Education, Inc. thought it could sell itself because in the eyes of government, college degrees were the way to lift people out of poverty, forgetting that college degrees were actually a proxy for something else. Like all Leftists, they then killed the goose that laid the golden egg and devalued those degrees so now they are near-worthless.

In the meantime, like all failing enterprises, education had to invent another excuse for its necessity. They hit on that tried-and-true misinterpretation of the Bill of Rights, “equality,” which they extended beyond class warfare into diversity, or internal race warfare. This served as a justification for more schools, more classes, and more professors, and now many parasites are sucking the teat of the middle-class dollar.

This has in turn penalized good professors and good students. Those who come to college to learn how to be alive, and to be ready for the kind of mental analysis and behavior that an adult world needs, are at a disadvantage because their coursework is full of pap and the students around them are being promoted on the basis of ideological concerns, not ability. The good professors who want to actually teach their subjects are shoved aside in favor of those who make the right noises.

Every time Leftism is adopted, it seeks “equality” which instead of raising up the lower, lowers the higher, and then put everyone at the same level. This penalizes the competent and rewards the vacuous, and not surprisingly the society craters soon after, because it has replaced those that made it succeed with the inept and can no longer organize itself in a first-world manner.

Tags: diversity, education, leftism