Are you at your wit’s end with the perpetual campus craziness? If so, a prominent professor has some advice for you: close your wallet to the schools that promote “academic lunacy.”
That’s the argument Walter Williams, an economics professor at George Mason University, makes in an article at The Daily Signal. He suggests that most folks don’t have full knowledge of the level of craziness on college campuses, but makes the case it’s important they inform themselves.
“Parents, taxpayers, and donors who ignore or are too lazy to find out what goes on in the name of higher education are nearly as complicit as the professors and administrators who promote or sanction the lunacy, evil, and lawlessness,” he writes.
Williams, who was recently recognized by the conservative Bradley Foundation, isn’t shy about speaking out against the current culture in higher education. He’s said he’d suspend “students who are raising hell.”
In his piece at The Daily Signal, he emphasizes the “academic lunacy” has wide tentacles and provides examples from multiple campuses to prove it. He says the current situation stems from the 1960s:
Today’s academic climate might be described as a mixture of infantilism, kindergarten, and totalitarianism. The radicals, draft dodgers, and hippies of the 1960s who are now college administrators and professors are responsible for today’s academic climate.
The infantilism should not be tolerated, but more important for the future of our nation are the totalitarianism and the “hate America” lessons being taught at many of the nation’s colleges.
Williams highlights comments from New York University’s Provost Ulrich Baer, who’s argued “the idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks”
“It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community,” Baer wrote in an op-ed.
Williams believes that’s a troublesome view taking over higher education. It needs to be stopped and he writes fed up Americans can help in the fight against it:
Baer’s vision is totalitarian nonsense. The true test of one’s commitment to free speech comes when he permits people to be free to say and write those things he finds deeply offensive.
Americans who see themselves as either liberal or conservative should rise up against this totalitarian trend on America’s college campuses.
I believe the most effective way to do so is to hit these campus tyrants where it hurts the most—in the pocketbook. Lawmakers should slash budgets, and donors should keep their money in their pockets.
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