Defund the Police? How About We Defund the Universities

Article by Philip Carl Salzman in "PJMedia":

Our universities have nurtured and foisted on America and Canada an extreme radicalism that vilifies American and Canadian history, society, and culture. This radicalism stems in the first instance from identity grievance studies programs, such as feminist and gender studies, gay and queer studies, black studies, Hispanic and Chicano studies, indigenous studies, and ethnic studies, which have adopted marxist theories popular in sociology and political science.

This far left ideology has diffused throughout the soft subjects of the social sciences, humanities, education, social work, and law. Far left radicalism has been adopted with enthusiasm by administrators and imposed on any laggard or dissenting students and professors by the many “diversity and inclusion” commissars whose salaries could have funded many scholarships and professorships in STEM fields.

Of what does this extreme radicalism consist? Substantively, it claims that America and Canada are evil, beginning life in sin as slave owners and colonial settlers who engaged in genocide, and continuing on those paths until today. But even in this theory all Americans and Canadians are not evil: only whites, males, heterosexuals, and Christians and Jews are evil oppressors. Females, people of color, LGBT+, indigenous natives, and Muslims, in contrast, are virtuous victims, and deserve to take the reins of control.

Universities have instituted policies that provide preferences and benefits, such as admissions, funding, and professorial and administrative posts, for females, people of color, LGBT+, indigenous natives, and Muslims, while sidelining, marginalizing, or entirely blocking white males, heterosexuals, and Christians and Jews. East Asian Americans and Canadians are sidelined and blocked, not because they are evil, but because they are too successful, thus taking places and resources that universities prefer to give to others.

Universities claim that they believe that sexism and racism are evil, while they raise reverse sexism and reverse racism into official policy. They have in aid of their reverse morality overthrown that “unfortunate” principle of equality before the law, because they do not like the presumption of innocence and the rules of due process. They have accepted that females should always be believed, and that people of color are always suffering from racism. In the U.S., the Obama-Biden Title IX removed the blindfold from justice, ensuring that females were always vindicated and males always punished.

Happily, real courts overthrew many of the university injustices and rebuked universities for their practices. The imaginary systemic racism was “overcome” by providing special consideration and benefits for people of color, such as segregated dining, sleeping, socializing, and ceremonies, segregation being the new “human rights” of the ideological extremists. Unfortunately, no court or legislature has yet intervened to assess these practices.

But it is not just certain categories of people for which universities have contempt, it is entire social and economic systems. Police are bad because they enforce “systemic racism” and kill innocent people of color “every single day,” a gross lie entirely refuted by all evidence. The radical solution to skyrocketing robberies, assaults, rapes, shootings, and murders in Democrat run cities such as NY, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit and elsewhere is to “defund the police.”

Universities stand against capitalism and advocate socialism and communism because capitalism generates along with prosperity economic inequality, demanding instead equality of outcome, each person and each census category of people receiving the same income and benefits, whatever their work or contribution. Universities instead advocate the “more desirable” equality of universal poverty and totalitarian governance characteristic of societies. No economic policy is more popular in universities than redistribution of wealth from those who have earned it to those who have not, including free university and grants and “free stuff” for all students. Is it any wonder that university students support socialism?

Today universities deem science as sexist and racist, because it was invented and developed primarily by white men. So, science cannot stand: in the U.S. it is being replaced by “feminist science,” and in Canada by First Nations “indigenous science.” National scientific councils and disciplinary associations in both countries are entirely behind this replacement, with ready sanctions for anyone who dares resist.

What can citizens who do not approve of university policies do?The idea of defunding universities has been raised by other professors and by university graduates: Jason Hill, Peter Wood, and Jay Latimer. Hill says “The core principles and foundations that keep the United States intact, that provide our citizens with their civic personalities and national identities, are being annihilated. The gravest internal threat to this country is not illegal aliens; it is leftist professors who are waging a war against America and teaching our young people to hate this country.”

Wood argues that “We should defund them because they are the root of the virulent anti-Americanism that feeds the riots, the looting and the learned helplessness that afflict the country. And they have been feeding the protest culture for generations. The chief lesson taught by our nation’s colleges and universities is soft disdain for our country and its forms of self-government.”

Latimer states that “Universities today are almost 100% hard left-wing bubbles, openly hostile to any conservative thought. They are intolerant of opposing opinions, the very opposite of the kind of dialogue intended for higher education, and so desperately needed today. These Molotov-cocktail wielding radicals are the end product of years of propaganda from left-wing professors.”

Defunding universities substantially would reduce their freedom to carry out their anti-American, anti-Canadian, and anti-justice practices. They would be in a weaker position to spend millions of dollars on ever-proliferating “diversity and inclusion” officers, departments, and programs. But reduction would best be targeted: malicious sexist and racist grievance studies programs should be defunded entirely, and the programs cancelled.

What can we do? Certainly stop donating to universities. Better, encourage others to stop donating. More important, do not send your children to university, and avoid the extremist indoctrination that is all that universities offer. But perhaps as individuals, even en masse, our economic power is limited. We need to lobby our legislators, who fund all of the public universities. They are in a good position to defund, and even to target funding. They can do more: at the national level they can remove the tax-free status of the vastly rich endowment funds of private universities.

If you like riots in the streets, looting, assaults, and murder, and are happy with the destruction of public property such as police stations and statues of Columbus, Washington, and Lincoln, and do not mind police being blocked by politicians as shootings and murders in inner cities negate the idea that black lives matter, then keep funding and supporting universities. If you prefer a civil society based on peace and order, equality before the law, freedom to express your views, freedom to pursue your goals, and proven economics and science to draw on, then fight to defund universities that are actively opposing these principles.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/philip-carl-salzman/2020/07/07/defund-the-police-how-about-we-defund-the-universities-n613874