How Universities Became Factories for Sophisticated Barbarians | Blendr Report EP167

The place society sent its youth to be civilized now produces the most credentialed and least wise people in the country.

The most credentialed Americans are now about twice as likely to support political violence as the least credentialed. We've been told higher education makes people wiser and more intelligent. The university was supposed to push the boundaries of human thought and understanding. Except now it's doing the opposite, and it's doing it on purpose.

Just look at the staffing. Between 1975 and 2005, administrators grew by 240 percent while faculty grew by roughly 50. There are now significantly more managers than teachers. However, those teacher positions are becoming increasingly ideological. A survey of five thousand professors found communications and anthropology faculty sitting at 100 percent Democrat. Religion at 98.8, which is its own joke, atheists running the religion department. Even engineering, the most “balanced” field, was 61 percent left leaning.

The problem isn’t that students hear left-wing ideas. They always have, and always will. The problem is that the leftist worldview now gets presented as objective morality while disagreements are considered cruelty. The intolerance towards centrist or right-wing ideas is not some quirk, it is a strategy. A darling intellectual of the Left conceptualized Repressive Tolerance. The idea was that real freedom means tolerating the left and refusing to tolerate the right. That program has been running on campuses for fifty years. Leading to a climate where 25 percent of sociology faculty openly call themselves Marxists and no one flinches.

Then watch what the worldview does to the students it shapes. When you teach people to see everything through oppressor and oppressed, they go looking for their own seat in the oppressed column, even the ones who have everything. Rob Henderson wrote an excellent essay titled America’s Future Leaders Are Learning to Become Grifters. In it, he brings forth concerning data. Large shares of students at prestigious universities are lying about disability status to secure extra time for work and priority housing. At Stanford, forty percent reported having a disability. Contrast this to three or four percent at community colleges. Yet, the elite preaches that the working class is the privileged one.

Peter Turchin had an interesting explanation of this phenomenon. He called it Elite Overproduction. When a society creates far more credentialed people than it has real positions for, those people then realize they were sold a false promise, and the disappointment turns into grievance against the system and victimhood identity.

In this episode, we discuss whether parallel education options will become viable in the near future, what will happen if we continue to run a diploma factory model for higher education, and the dangers of creating a managerial class that believes themselves to be perpetual victims of an oppressive system.

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