Veteran Prof: Time to Defund the Ivory Curtain?

It might sound hyperbolic to compare today’s academic climate to an ideology that claimed at least 100 million lives but the parallels are startling. “I traveled to Budapest for the World Congress of Families in May 2017,” Robert Oscar Lopez writes on the site Dissident Prof. “While there, in this romantic city sometimes called the ‘Paris of the East,’ I had a unique opportunity to speak with academics who survived the Communist occupation.”

“The oppression they described sounds similar to the evils haunting American colleges and universities: show trials, smear campaigns, surveillance, censorship, secret files, spies, students snitching on teachers, blacklisting, and the rest. As I spoke with one woman only ten years older than I, she said: ‘We follow what is happening in American universities with a lot of heartbreak. We have been there before. The difference is we never had that many people enrolled in colleges.’”

It’s stunning to realize that true freedom might begin with rejection from college. Lopez goes on to suggest that we do something even more radical: Stop funding the colleges and universities that create the campus climate today.

By the way, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the “average earned by public-college leaders” is $521,000.