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Amid all the depressing news about the failures of business schools, particularly the more well-known ones, there is a ray of hope.

On the face of it, opening a new university in this day and age would seem to be akin to selling refrigerators to Eskimos.

University professors need not be performance-oriented once they have gained tenure.

“The United States had become a great and powerful nation before it centralized administration.”—John Marini of the University of Nevada-Reno at Claremont Institute forum on October 20, 2011.

“Nine of 10 major educational software products on the market have no effect on test scores, the federal Department of Education found in 2009.”—Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute.

Noted academics seem to view the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations as a means of recapturing the 1960s, particularly if they missed the latter decade on the first go-round.

The links between tenured radicals and Occupy Wall Street are not hard to find.

The latest academic to argue that academia drives economic growth offers a long list of inventions spawned by universities but she might be missing a key ingredient.

To the uncredentialled, it may often appear that academics receive many degrees, not to mention a multitude of research grants, in order to ascertain what many can figure out by simple observation.

Dr. Walter Williams, a distinguished economics professor at George Mason University, noted recently that taxpayers have an imperfect understanding of the academic rot that exists at our nation’s colleges, adding that “what distinguishes one college from the other is the magnitude of that rot.”

“Those who find it comfortable going into high ethical strictures go into politics, those who don’t do into academia.”—Michigan State University economist Steven Waldman noted wryly at the fifth anniversary of the Free State Foundation.

“History teaches us that the bigger the government, the smaller the private sector.”—U. S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn at the Free States Foundation’s fifth anniversary, October 12, 2011.