Right Wing Nation

I’ve been searching all day for something I saw yesterday and didn’t bookmark — and after going through my whole blogroll twice, I decided to do a Google search. Lo! At the top of the page there were the results from my browser cache, and I found what I was looking for in about thirty seconds.

Thanks again to Parentalcation for suggesting Google Desktop. But on to the point.

Human Events quotes an interview with John Zmirak, author of Choosing the Right College:

The only hope I would hold out for a restoration of education from political sources would come in the form of funding cuts to the humanities. In most public and elite universities, these fields are hopelessly compromised, almost entirely in the hands of tenured radicals who cannot be removed, and who vote to choose their future colleagues and successors. I would be loath to see the federal government try ham-handedly to impose educational goals and political fairness on such departments; such an attempt would probably work about as well as “No Child Left Behind,” Title IX, affirmative action laws, and our futile attempt to turn Iraq into Switzerland by making the rubble bounce.

I hate to say that I agree with this — not to mention that you’d create a whole slew of “martyrs” to “McCarthyism!” (well okay, they already fancy themselves martyrs — speaking “truth” to power, claiming on television that they’re being silenced, and that sort of nonsense). However:

A large-scale withdrawal of federal and state funds from university programs (except those in math, the sciences, and foreign languages which have some relevance to national security) would force universities to cut back on programs which exist mainly to transfer leftist ideology to impressionable young minds, and to seek funding from donors (such as parents and alumni) who are much more effective at exerting positive pressure on college administrators than political hacks who work for legislators.

At first, this sounds workable, but on reflection, it just isn’t — or it would have less effect than he imagines. Universities can — and do — move funds around, and few states I know of fund programs directly. Even if the state drastically cut funding, universities would probably cut “non-PC” programs, such as physics departments, so they could shuttle the funds to the moonbatty wackjob departments, like Three-Toed People of Color Studies, and “diversity” programs.

That’s the reality of allowing universities to keep their own books and handle the taxpayers’ monies. And speaking of reality, will you academics ever stop whining and bitching about coaches’ making more money than you do?

What “intellectual value” you cook up in your head (nearly always bloated, by the way — both the “intellectual value” and the head) has nothing to do with how much you get paid. It hever has, and it never will. Get that through your dense skull.

Supply and demand determines how much you are paid. You can’t directly do much about demand, but you can affect supply. So if you really think academics in your field should be paid more, stop turning out PhDs by the hundreds. Count the number of PhD students currently in your program. Divide that number by four. Use that number as a maximum PhD program enrollment for your department (that’s maximum total, not maximum matriculations per year). In a decade or so, English PhDs will stop being a dime a dozen, and salaries will increase substantially.

And those of you who whine about teachers’ salaries, the same applies. Figure out some way to keep ed schools from admitting and granting degrees to masses of students (and while you’re at it, figure out some way to keep ed schools from granting degrees to all the students too stupid to do any other degree at the university). Drastically cut the number of ed grads, and lo, in a decade or two, teacher salaries will go up.

But stop whining about it. Whining isn’t going to increase your salaries. All whining does is make you annoying.