The Rot at the Head of the University

In The Intellectual Costs of Diversity, Robert Weissberg explains the devastating harm to academic excellence done by the promotion of diversity  in the American University — a cost that guarantees America`s demise as the world's leading intellectual, scientific and technological power.

In discussing this transformation of academia, the author considers the motivation of the Interim Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Champaigne-Urbana, Barbara Wilson, who has announced diversity, i.e., rigged hiring to insure blacks and women are favored over better qualified white or Asian males, to be central to the university’s mission. His conclusion is this:

... abandoning intellectual excellence is best explained by physical intimidation and what is most remarkable is the inconsequentiality of this threat. What interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson and others face is at most some fleeting verbal abuse …

This, sadly, is complete rubbish, for if it were not, it would be a simple matter to find university leaders with the balls to insist that the university is about scholarship, not the replacement of Christian morality with that of Political Correctness.

No, the true horror facing interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson were she so stupid (and honorable) as to ignore the rule of Political Correctness, is that she would suffer the certain fate of non-consideration for any further advancement in her career as an academic bureaucrat.

Why else do people suppose that destructive drones in academia such as Barbara Wilson are paid so much (In her previous post as a mere Dean, she was paid $325,000 plus benefits)? Obviously, because the Barbara Wilson's, like the JEBs and Rubios and other scum who rule in Congress and the White House as proxies for a hidden elite, are bought and paid for to impose the rule of Political Correctness (or whatever else the elite currently demand, e.g., precedence of corporate or military interests over scientific advancement in the direction of most university research) on all who pass through their hollowed halls.

The same disaster has likewise overtaken the academy in Britain. There, more than fifty years ago, at a, then, minor university, I was graduated, personally, by the Chancellor, Lord Adrian, Nobel Laureate and President of the Royal Society, a small, benignant, gray-haired gentleman who smilingly incanted a Latin phrase as he shook my hand thereby conferring upon me a batchelor's degree.

At the time, the ceremony left me largely unmoved, but later, while attempting to read my way through the (now demolished) main library stacks at the University of British Columbia, I came across a slim monograph, The Mechanism of Nervous Action (1932), by Edgar Adrian, in which I found inspiration, both literary and scientific.

Having as the institution's highest authority a figure of the most outstanding academic repute inevitably shaped the academic agenda. And following Lord Adrian, my alma mata had in succession as Chancellor, Alan Lloyd Hodgekin (Nobel Laureate, President of the Royal Society) , Sir George Porter (Nobel Laureate, president of the Royal Society), and Sir Michael Atiyah (Fields Medal Winner, President of the Royal Society).

But in 1995, under the malign influence, one must assume, of the war criminal and bought politician Tony Bliar, my old school appointed not a distinguished academic as its head, but the businessman, Sir Peter Williams; this action serving, no doubt, to inform the scholars of my old school that it was the interests of the owners of capital, not of science or learning that the university must henceforth serve.

Then, in 2012, to confirm the end of the era of scholarship, my old school appointed a one-time lecturer in sociology at the Birmingham College of Commerce, Bruce Grocott, a man who turned from the lower levels of academia to politics, rising in due course, to become a Labor MP and senior side-kick to said war-criminal and bought politician, Tony Bliar, following which service he was rewarded with the appointment, by Bliar, to Britain's upper house, as Lord Grocott.

So great civilizations die, within a single life-time.

Related:

CanSpeccy: Tim Hunt, the Kind, Unworldly Nobel-Prize-Winner, Brought Down By a Report of Disputed Veracity By a Twittering, Anglophobic, Black-Privileged, Resumé-padding, Lecturer in Journalism and the Lies of Professor Michael Arthur, Provost of University College London, a Man Unable to Acknowledge an Error of Judgment, and Under the Sway of the Odious Morality of a Stuffed Corpse

CanSpeccy: The Trashing of Tim Hunt, a Breach of the Social Contract, the Death of a Civilization

Unz Review: US Supreme Court Justice Scalia Condemned for Questioning Affirmative Action