WEBVTT NOTE Liberty on Campus, and in America 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.000 Now, the good news is that the just plain silliness of all this stuff is becoming increasingly apparent to decision makers outside the university. 2 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:23.000 And as a result of which, students, parents, state legislatures, charitable foundations and other traditional supporters of American universities are beginning to withdraw their support. 3 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:31.000 Partly, as a result of that, the traditional university may become increasingly irrelevant in society. 4 00:00:31.000 --> 00:00:33.000 I'll come back to that in a minute. 5 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:38.000 First, let me give you a little bit more detail on the bad news side of my story. 6 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:44.000 As I'm sure you all know, every major university, large or small, in the United States, 7 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:50.000 has departments of women's studies and African-American studies and gender studies and who knows what else. 8 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:58.000 The kind of wackiness that one associates with a place like Berkeley, or Madison, Wisconsin, exists on every single campus. 9 00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:02.000 This is true even in my own adopted hometown of Athens, Georgia. 10 00:01:02.000 --> 00:01:09.000 Athens is presumably a sleepy little college town in the deep south, but it's becoming more and more odd. 11 00:01:09.000 --> 00:01:16.000 Just this past Tuesday of this week, the mayor of Athens, the deliciously named Gwen O'Looney, 12 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:25.200 Mayor Aluni officially designated Athens a nuclear-free zone. 13 00:01:25.200 --> 00:01:29.100 Having lived for several years in Berkeley, also a nuclear-free zone, I can assure you 14 00:01:29.100 --> 00:01:35.840 that knowing that there will not be any radioactive materials in town does not make for a more 15 00:01:35.840 --> 00:01:38.560 peaceful night's sleep. 16 00:01:38.560 --> 00:01:42.080 The University of Georgia itself is quite liberal as well. 17 00:01:42.080 --> 00:01:46.720 The current president of UGA, Charles Knapp, is leaving at the end of this year, he announced, 18 00:01:46.720 --> 00:01:51.720 to become president of the left-wing Aspen Institute in Washington D.C. 19 00:01:51.720 --> 00:01:57.120 The Aspen Institute, if you don't know much about it, according to their mission statement, 20 00:01:57.120 --> 00:02:02.240 the mission is, quote, to enhance the quality of leadership through informed dialogue, close 21 00:02:02.240 --> 00:02:03.240 quote. 22 00:02:03.240 --> 00:02:07.960 Now that sounds innocuous enough until you notice that the dialogue consists of such 23 00:02:07.960 --> 00:02:11.760 programs as the Justice and Society Seminars. 24 00:02:11.760 --> 00:02:17.060 Those are designed to examine and explore, quote, the parameters of civil disobedience, 25 00:02:17.060 --> 00:02:21.960 white collar crime and criminal punishment, and the breakdown of long established hierarchies 26 00:02:21.960 --> 00:02:28.960 of race and gender. The Aspen Institute's board includes such prominent members of the 27 00:02:29.040 --> 00:02:35.040 elite as David Gergen, William Gray, Ann Richards, Al Shanker and Paul Volcker. 28 00:02:35.040 --> 00:02:41.740 Now, Knapp, himself an economist by the way, has very solid liberal credentials. He was 29 00:02:41.740 --> 00:02:46.700 was an official in the Labor Department in the Carter administration. He has brought 30 00:02:46.700 --> 00:02:52.980 a series of distinguished lecturers to campus as part of a series that we have called the 31 00:02:52.980 --> 00:02:59.500 Charter Lectures. The most recent charter lecturer was that prominent intellectual Tony 32 00:02:59.500 --> 00:03:06.580 Kushner, a great scholar who is the playwright, author of Angels in America, a series of Pulitzer 33 00:03:06.580 --> 00:03:09.260 or prize-winning plays about living with AIDS. 34 00:03:10.340 --> 00:03:12.600 Knapp has increased the hiring of women and minorities 35 00:03:12.600 --> 00:03:15.660 on campus and so on, the standard things. 36 00:03:15.660 --> 00:03:17.860 Now he says that he's leaving the university 37 00:03:17.860 --> 00:03:19.500 simply because he's been there for 10 years 38 00:03:19.500 --> 00:03:21.620 and it's time to move on and do something else. 39 00:03:21.620 --> 00:03:24.340 But I suspect that the university administration 40 00:03:24.340 --> 00:03:27.080 won't be all that sorry to see him go. 41 00:03:27.080 --> 00:03:30.460 And that's because Knapp has one major disability, 42 00:03:30.460 --> 00:03:31.900 I should say. 43 00:03:31.900 --> 00:03:33.740 He's a middle-aged white male. 44 00:03:34.940 --> 00:03:36.220 Now how do I know this? 45 00:03:36.220 --> 00:03:42.100 Well, in all likelihood his successor as president will not be a middle-aged white male. 46 00:03:42.100 --> 00:03:46.280 The chancellor of the University of Georgia System, a man named Stephen Porch, was recently 47 00:03:46.280 --> 00:03:55.200 interviewed about the formation of a search committee to locate a new president. 48 00:03:55.200 --> 00:04:00.300 And Porch encouraged the search committee to seek, quote, interesting-looking and, quote, 49 00:04:00.300 --> 00:04:03.420 not traditional presidential candidates. 50 00:04:03.420 --> 00:04:08.040 The search committee should not court look-alike finalists, the court said. 51 00:04:08.040 --> 00:04:12.740 Not only will you be bored to tears, you won't be able to tell one from the other. 52 00:04:12.740 --> 00:04:14.620 Give yourself some options. 53 00:04:14.620 --> 00:04:19.220 Now, that's a sensible criterion for choosing presidential candidates, right? 54 00:04:19.220 --> 00:04:24.420 You want to make sure they don't all look the same, because you might get bored. 55 00:04:24.420 --> 00:04:29.160 Like every other university, we have the usual kind of PC silliness. 56 00:04:29.160 --> 00:04:34.480 For example, at random, I was looking through some university materials. I came across the 57 00:04:34.480 --> 00:04:40.040 winter quarter program for our on-campus counseling and testing center. Let me tell you the workshops 58 00:04:40.040 --> 00:04:42.920 that they're offering this quarter. And I'm reading you the complete list. This is not 59 00:04:42.920 --> 00:04:49.480 an edited, this is not excerpts. Quote, beyond tolerance, being lesbian, gay or bisexual, 60 00:04:49.480 --> 00:04:55.600 person to person, how your unconscious influences your choice of partners, relationships 101, 61 00:04:55.600 --> 00:05:02.200 Women in Transition, a Wellness Group, Can't We Just Get Along, and Gaining Self-Confidence 62 00:05:02.200 --> 00:05:07.480 Now I can assure you that we'll have the most self-actualized students at any university, 63 00:05:07.480 --> 00:05:09.680 if not the most educated. 64 00:05:09.680 --> 00:05:14.800 Now in my own discipline, economics, things aren't quite so bad. 65 00:05:14.800 --> 00:05:21.000 I've not been asked, for example, to learn and teach Ebonomics as an alternative to standard 66 00:05:21.000 --> 00:05:23.000 economics. 67 00:05:23.000 --> 00:05:27.920 As Lew mentioned last night, economists tend to be more sympathetic to the market than 68 00:05:27.920 --> 00:05:34.560 they were a generation or two ago. Most economists will not go on the record of supporting price 69 00:05:34.560 --> 00:05:40.640 controls and fine-tuning of the economy and so on. However, note that the dominant position 70 00:05:40.640 --> 00:05:45.080 among economists is that markets are pretty good in moderation. You don't want to have 71 00:05:45.080 --> 00:05:50.680 too much of a market. Capitalism is indeed preferred to socialism, but only if there's 72 00:05:50.680 --> 00:05:56.800 This is a strong central government performing certain essential functions, maintaining activist 73 00:05:56.800 --> 00:06:03.480 fiscal and monetary policies, vigorously enforcing anti-trust laws, making large investments, 74 00:06:03.480 --> 00:06:07.880 i.e. government spending, in R&D and education and these sorts of things. 75 00:06:07.880 --> 00:06:13.440 Just to give you a quick example, Lew mentioned Alan Blinder last night, I came across a quote 76 00:06:13.440 --> 00:06:19.000 from Janet Yellen who was a former Berkeley professor and a member of the Board of Governors 77 00:06:19.000 --> 00:06:26.000 I recognize the difficulty of conducting monetary policy over time in a way that will damp business cycles, but I do not concede that uncertainties of economic forecasts and long and variable policy lags inevitably doom our best efforts. 78 00:06:49.000 --> 00:06:55.000 The record to me indicates that within limits, tuning works, even if it's not fine. 79 00:06:55.000 --> 00:06:59.000 So even if we can't fine tune the economy, we can still tune it just a bit. 80 00:06:59.000 --> 00:07:04.000 And of course, as Lew also mentioned, there are many positive signs in economics, 81 00:07:04.000 --> 00:07:09.000 most importantly, the growth of Austrian economics in the profession. 82 00:07:09.000 --> 00:07:11.000 There's increasing interest in the Austrian school, 83 00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:16.000 Austrian economics is becoming more and more respectable within the mainstream. 84 00:07:16.000 --> 00:07:18.560 and the mainstream. 85 00:07:18.560 --> 00:07:22.600 Now there are a few exceptions to that, even within the Austrian School, and I can't help 86 00:07:22.600 --> 00:07:24.700 mentioning this one. 87 00:07:24.700 --> 00:07:29.880 At the most recent American Economic Association meetings, I was a discussant on a panel where 88 00:07:29.880 --> 00:07:36.860 one of the speakers proceeded to present a postmodern theory of the firm. 89 00:07:36.860 --> 00:07:42.400 Now I won't name the speaker, as Murray used to say, to protect the guilty, but I will 90 00:07:42.400 --> 00:07:47.560 We'll say that he's associated with a certain group of ex-Austrians at a certain university 91 00:07:47.560 --> 00:07:50.620 in Virginia. 92 00:07:50.620 --> 00:07:58.100 He argued that the stream of research on the size of the firm is all completely illegitimate. 93 00:07:58.100 --> 00:08:02.360 And the reason is because the boundaries of the firm don't exist at all. 94 00:08:02.360 --> 00:08:05.360 They're merely social constructs. 95 00:08:05.360 --> 00:08:10.640 Boundaries of the firm, that's a social construction, so there's no sense in trying to study it. 96 00:08:10.640 --> 00:08:15.000 that exists subjectively in the minds of various interpreters with their own hermeneutical 97 00:08:15.000 --> 00:08:21.400 understandings of what's going on. Now, as he said this, I wondered what he would say 98 00:08:21.400 --> 00:08:27.720 if the payroll department at his own university had a hermeneutical understanding of the boundaries 99 00:08:27.720 --> 00:08:36.120 of that institution such that he wasn't in it. I wondered how he would react to that. 100 00:08:36.120 --> 00:08:40.120 Of course, in general, on college campuses, particularly in the humanities, as I mentioned, 101 00:08:40.120 --> 00:08:46.660 Things are very bad. Things are very bad. A couple of examples. There's an academic 102 00:08:46.660 --> 00:08:54.760 journal called The Review of Higher Education, which is about trends on universities. It's 103 00:08:54.760 --> 00:09:00.500 a very well-respected academic journal. The lead article on the current issue by one Roger 104 00:09:00.500 --> 00:09:06.500 P. Morad is titled Postmodern Interdisciplinarity. I had to practice that word a few times last 105 00:09:06.500 --> 00:09:09.500 Postmodern Interdisciplinarity 106 00:09:09.500 --> 00:09:14.500 Let me just read you the abstract of the article. I won't subject you to any more. 107 00:09:14.500 --> 00:09:15.500 Quote, 108 00:09:15.500 --> 00:09:19.500 In many fields, postmodern forms of thought have recently emerged, 109 00:09:19.500 --> 00:09:23.500 posing fundamental challenges to modern assumptions concerning knowledge. 110 00:09:23.500 --> 00:09:28.500 This article explores the implications of four postmodern philosophical positions on knowledge 111 00:09:28.500 --> 00:09:31.500 to show how they reject absolute foundations 112 00:09:31.500 --> 00:09:35.500 and seek to expand the possibilities for scholarly practice. 113 00:09:35.500 --> 00:09:43.340 It further argues that an absolute foundation pervades higher education, and that it unjustifiably 114 00:09:43.340 --> 00:09:48.580 constrains the capacity of the intellect. This absolute foundation is the notion that 115 00:09:48.580 --> 00:09:53.740 legitimate intellectual activity is the disciplinary pursuit of knowledge of entities that exist 116 00:09:53.740 --> 00:09:59.140 before and independent of inquiry. A postmodern conception of higher education that would 117 00:09:59.140 --> 00:10:07.140 Expand the Playing Field for Inquiry is advanced in the article based on the flexible concept 118 00:10:07.140 --> 00:10:11.420 of intellectually compelling ideas. 119 00:10:11.420 --> 00:10:15.940 When you read between the lines here, it's clear that what most thinkers who call themselves 120 00:10:15.940 --> 00:10:22.420 postmodern means is that there are no absolute foundations to any intellectual activity. 121 00:10:22.420 --> 00:10:25.420 In other words, anything goes. 122 00:10:25.420 --> 00:10:31.540 If you think that was odd, let me assure you that that was only mildly odd. 123 00:10:31.540 --> 00:10:33.860 I was recently looking at a brochure. 124 00:10:33.860 --> 00:10:39.900 The Young Americas Foundation puts out a humorous pamphlet every year with lists of college 125 00:10:39.900 --> 00:10:46.360 course titles and descriptions pulled right out of university catalogs word for word. 126 00:10:46.360 --> 00:10:50.700 Let me read you from a sample of this collection and tell you some of the courses that are 127 00:10:50.700 --> 00:10:52.820 being offered nowadays. 128 00:10:52.820 --> 00:10:59.920 At Harvard this year, you can take such courses as Comparative Literature 108, Fetishism, 129 00:10:59.920 --> 00:11:07.100 Fine Arts 277, Queer Theory and Visuality, and Literature 124, Ecopolitics, the Environment 130 00:11:07.100 --> 00:11:13.900 in Post-Structuralist Thought. Stanford offers one of my favorites, History 212, Homosexuals, 131 00:11:13.900 --> 00:11:22.580 Heretics, Witches and Werewolves, Deviance in Medieval Society. Interestingly, Amherst 132 00:11:22.580 --> 00:11:27.500 The course offers a course, Political Science 61, called, Taking Mark Seriously. 133 00:11:27.500 --> 00:11:31.820 That sounds a little bit on the defensive, doesn't it? 134 00:11:31.820 --> 00:11:35.840 Now if you're fortunate enough to be a student at Oberlin College in Ohio, you can sign up 135 00:11:35.840 --> 00:11:41.500 for Religion 343, Feminist Critique and Reconstruction of the Christian Tradition. 136 00:11:41.500 --> 00:11:46.700 Let me read you the course description, quote, an exploration into some significant contributions 137 00:11:46.700 --> 00:11:51.280 of feminist thinkers challenging traditional paradigms in Christian thought. 138 00:11:51.280 --> 00:11:56.160 This seminar will examine a range of feminist positions from those who see Christianity 139 00:11:56.160 --> 00:12:02.440 and feminism as mutually antagonistic worldviews to those who see feminism as vital therapy 140 00:12:02.440 --> 00:12:05.440 for Christianity. 141 00:12:05.440 --> 00:12:10.720 Issues to be discussed will include patriarchy in the Bible, gender and language about God, 142 00:12:10.720 --> 00:12:15.200 women's experience as a source for doing theology, and the impact of racial and ethnic 143 00:12:15.200 --> 00:12:19.320 pluralism on constructive feminist Christian thought. 144 00:12:19.320 --> 00:12:23.080 Not being widely read in constructive feminist Christian thought, I can't tell you exactly 145 00:12:23.080 --> 00:12:24.080 what that would be. 146 00:12:24.080 --> 00:12:27.840 I'm sure it will be good. 147 00:12:27.840 --> 00:12:32.800 Now for you men in the audience, just so you don't think you're being left out, Brown has 148 00:12:32.800 --> 00:12:37.880 a course called Modern Culture and Media 163C, Iron Johns. 149 00:12:37.880 --> 00:12:40.360 That's the course title, Iron Johns. 150 00:12:40.360 --> 00:12:47.200 Quote, an exploration of recent and contemporary theories and debates about the nature of masculinity, 151 00:12:47.200 --> 00:12:52.560 Its relationship to power, pain, and violence, as well as to reformist conceptualizations 152 00:12:52.560 --> 00:12:58.040 of the dilemmas of maleness, patriarchal, and male-dominated cultures. 153 00:12:58.040 --> 00:13:02.800 The course attempts to conceptualize the relationship of masculinity to notions of health and deviance 154 00:13:02.800 --> 00:13:06.760 which have been normalized in the medical model of Western culture, especially with 155 00:13:06.760 --> 00:13:13.080 regard to the practices of medical psychiatry and alternative psychodramatic practices. 156 00:13:13.080 --> 00:13:15.320 Texts from both print and visual media. 157 00:13:15.320 --> 00:13:23.480 Moms, dads, grandmas, grandpas, this is what your kids are taking in college. 158 00:13:23.480 --> 00:13:29.200 One of my favorites is a course at the University of Colorado called Mathematics 2380-3, Mathematics 159 00:13:29.200 --> 00:13:30.760 for the Environment. 160 00:13:30.760 --> 00:13:37.440 Quote, an interdisciplinary course where analysis of real phenomena such as acid rain, population 161 00:13:37.440 --> 00:13:45.000 growth and roadkill rabbits in Nevada leads to consideration of certain concepts in mathematics. 162 00:13:45.000 --> 00:14:05.000 As Professor Hoppe can elaborate on the roadkill rabbits in Nevada, of course, I could go on for hours reading these, and there are plenty more, and you'd get a kick out of it, of course, it's so funny that it's really quite sad, and it has major consequences, serious consequences. 163 00:14:05.000 --> 00:14:15.000 The basic consequence of this type of study is that it ultimately leads to the loss of the foundations for Western society, the loss of the foundations for liberty. 164 00:14:16.000 --> 00:14:25.000 Mises has a wonderful article published in 1950 called The Idea of Liberty is Western, and it appears in the collection Money Method and the Market Process, which I think I saw back at the book table. 165 00:14:25.000 --> 00:14:31.720 and Mises argues there that the unique source of the concept of liberty and the 166 00:14:31.720 --> 00:14:36.040 concept of the limited state is in what we generally call the Western or the 167 00:14:36.040 --> 00:14:40.480 Judeo-Christian tradition, tradition based on Hebrew, Greek and Roman 168 00:14:40.480 --> 00:14:46.320 civilization. Mises notes that even tyrants are aware of the importance of 169 00:14:46.320 --> 00:14:52.040 this foundation and they work to stamp it out. Mises discusses how even in 170 00:14:52.040 --> 00:14:57.640 In Bismarck's day in Germany, their efforts were already underway to eliminate the study 171 00:14:57.640 --> 00:15:02.280 of the classics from German secondary schools. Mises says, quote, the passionate endeavors 172 00:15:02.280 --> 00:15:06.840 to eliminate the classical studies from the curriculum of the liberal education, and thus 173 00:15:06.840 --> 00:15:11.360 virtually to destroy its very character, were one of the major manifestations of the revival 174 00:15:11.360 --> 00:15:18.640 of the survival ideology in Germany. And of course, things are much worse than that today. 175 00:15:18.640 --> 00:15:22.920 As Keynes so famously put it, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both 176 00:15:22.920 --> 00:15:27.280 when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. 177 00:15:27.280 --> 00:15:30.480 Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. 178 00:15:30.480 --> 00:15:34.180 Now today, it's not the ideas of economists and political philosophers we need to be as 179 00:15:34.180 --> 00:15:35.180 worried about. 180 00:15:35.180 --> 00:15:40.080 It's the ideas of literary theorists, critical legal scholars, New Age philosophers, and 181 00:15:40.080 --> 00:15:41.080 their ilk. 182 00:15:41.080 --> 00:15:50.080 Now what happens is the ideas of these new age philosophers make their way into the general curriculum, 183 00:15:50.080 --> 00:15:54.080 giving us courses like the ones I alluded to. 184 00:15:54.080 --> 00:16:01.080 These courses make their way down to the education schools where future teachers are trained, 185 00:16:01.080 --> 00:16:08.080 and thus these ideas make it down all the way to secondary schools so children can be brainwashed at an early age. 186 00:16:08.080 --> 00:16:13.480 Just to give you one particular manifestation, it's increasingly true on university campuses, 187 00:16:13.480 --> 00:16:19.200 and this applies to religious schools as well as secular universities, that orthodox theism, 188 00:16:19.200 --> 00:16:24.080 whether Jewish or Christian, is increasingly considered an illegitimate worldview for 189 00:16:24.080 --> 00:16:27.080 an intellectual to take, to have. 190 00:16:27.080 --> 00:16:32.940 The only acceptable worldviews are either pure philosophical naturalism or a kind of 191 00:16:32.940 --> 00:16:45.940 primitive pantheism of the kind that Carl Sagan talks about when he makes his metaphysical ramblings about the cosmos and our place in the cosmos. 192 00:16:45.940 --> 00:16:51.940 There's a practical manifestation of this new age pantheism and that's of course the modern environmental movement. 193 00:16:51.940 --> 00:17:00.940 God and the forest are one, therefore you wouldn't want to cut out a part of God by cutting down a tree. 194 00:17:00.940 --> 00:17:04.540 So these things have very real practical significance. 195 00:17:04.540 --> 00:17:06.860 Now, I promised that I wouldn't dwell only on the bad news, 196 00:17:06.860 --> 00:17:08.540 but would also tell you some good news, 197 00:17:08.540 --> 00:17:10.420 and I'd like to do that. 198 00:17:10.420 --> 00:17:13.140 There are, I think, at least two silver linings 199 00:17:13.140 --> 00:17:16.820 to this dark cloud of preposterousness. 200 00:17:16.820 --> 00:17:19.540 The first silver lining is that these currently fashionable 201 00:17:19.540 --> 00:17:23.900 approaches I've outlined are so ridiculous 202 00:17:23.900 --> 00:17:27.620 that people outside the academy are beginning to notice. 203 00:17:27.620 --> 00:17:30.460 The second silver lining, which I'll come to in just a moment, 204 00:17:30.460 --> 00:17:37.100 is that the modern university itself is beginning to lose some of its influence and importance. 205 00:17:37.100 --> 00:17:43.980 Now what about this increasingly apparent silliness? Well, you all know about political correctness 206 00:17:43.980 --> 00:17:51.180 and how PC has become the butt of jokes in much of popular culture lately at talk shows. 207 00:17:51.180 --> 00:17:56.100 Everyone has their own favorite list of ridiculous politically correct terms. Of course I've 208 00:17:56.100 --> 00:18:10.100 No sir, those hooligans who vandalized your store were not looters, those were non-traditional shoppers. 209 00:18:10.100 --> 00:18:20.100 Yes, back in the 70s I used to have a pet rock, but now I have a companion mineral. 210 00:18:20.100 --> 00:18:27.620 Now, it's okay for me to make fun of these because I have my own special characteristic. 211 00:18:27.620 --> 00:18:35.020 I'm tolerance-challenged. 212 00:18:35.020 --> 00:18:40.140 Now in academic circles, we're even beginning to see a few courageous individuals stating 213 00:18:40.140 --> 00:18:46.580 publicly that this is all a sham, that the emperor has no clothes. 214 00:18:46.580 --> 00:18:51.140 Consider the famous Alan Sokol incident from last summer. You may have read about this 215 00:18:51.140 --> 00:18:56.540 in the papers. Alan Sokol is a young physicist at New York University, and he wrote an article 216 00:18:56.540 --> 00:19:06.340 called, quote, transgressing the boundaries toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum 217 00:19:06.340 --> 00:19:13.260 gravity. And he submitted this article to a trendy left-wing journal called Social Text. 218 00:19:13.260 --> 00:19:18.760 In this article, Sokol argues for a connection between quantum physics and radical politics. 219 00:19:18.760 --> 00:19:23.580 He calls for, quote, a liberatory postmodern science, quote. 220 00:19:23.580 --> 00:19:28.480 And he argues that, quote, physical reality, no less than social reality, is at bottom 221 00:19:28.480 --> 00:19:32.220 a social and linguistic concept, close quote. 222 00:19:32.220 --> 00:19:36.740 Naturally, this article was snapped up and published in a special issue of social text. 223 00:19:36.740 --> 00:19:42.540 Now, the very same day that the article appeared, Sokol revealed that the whole thing had been 224 00:19:42.540 --> 00:19:48.140 and hoax. He had made it up. He had made the article up completely. He submitted it to 225 00:19:48.140 --> 00:19:52.420 this journal Social Text, he said, to see whether, quote, a leading North American journal 226 00:19:52.420 --> 00:19:57.660 of cultural studies would publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if, A, it sounded 227 00:19:57.660 --> 00:20:02.940 good and, B, it flattered the editor's ideological preconceptions, which, of course, this article 228 00:20:02.940 --> 00:20:03.940 did. 229 00:20:03.940 --> 00:20:10.180 Now, the Marxist editors of the journal, along with their guru, the notorious Stanley Fish, 230 00:20:10.180 --> 00:20:15.740 who's Duke University Press publishes social text, reacted predictably, that they attacked 231 00:20:15.740 --> 00:20:22.180 Sokol viciously for academic dishonesty. Now, whatever you think of Sokol's motives, the 232 00:20:22.180 --> 00:20:26.320 plain and simple fact is that the editors of this journal could not distinguish this 233 00:20:26.320 --> 00:20:35.620 made up nonsense from the sort of nonsense that they normally publish. For example, appearing 234 00:20:35.620 --> 00:20:40.240 Something in the same issue of social text as Sokol's article was an article by a Harvard 235 00:20:40.240 --> 00:20:48.660 biologist Ruth Hubbard called Gender and Genitals, Constructs of Sex and Gender. 236 00:20:48.660 --> 00:20:53.720 In this article, Hubbard argues, quote, the time is right for physicians and scientists 237 00:20:53.720 --> 00:20:59.200 also to remove their binary spectacles and rather than explore what it means to be male 238 00:20:59.200 --> 00:21:04.780 or female, look into what it means to be neither or both, which is what most of us are. 239 00:21:04.780 --> 00:21:15.140 On the whole, this incident was a huge embarrassment for the academic left, a wonderful thing. 240 00:21:15.140 --> 00:21:20.040 Now my second silver lining is that the universities in general are beginning to lose a little 241 00:21:20.040 --> 00:21:23.980 bit of their relevance in society. 242 00:21:23.980 --> 00:21:28.820 Quite a number of commentators from various perspectives are arguing that the modern university 243 00:21:28.820 --> 00:21:31.100 is in a state of crisis. 244 00:21:31.100 --> 00:21:37.100 One thing is simply cost. A private university annual tuition fees room and board can cost 245 00:21:37.100 --> 00:21:44.820 up to $30,000. Public universities are facing increasing budget scrutiny. Cutbacks, downsizing 246 00:21:44.820 --> 00:21:50.260 and reorganization all loom on the horizon for major institutions. Now this wouldn't 247 00:21:50.260 --> 00:21:55.060 be so bad if it were perceived that the quality of the education were improving, but of course 248 00:21:55.060 --> 00:22:00.300 the reverse is true. Students are increasingly dissatisfied with large classes in different 249 00:22:00.300 --> 00:22:05.820 Poor instructors, poor facilities, poor safety on campus, and so on. 250 00:22:05.820 --> 00:22:08.660 Alumni loyalty is on the decline. 251 00:22:08.660 --> 00:22:10.940 Alumni giving is falling. 252 00:22:10.940 --> 00:22:14.140 Students increasingly transfer from one institution to the next. 253 00:22:14.140 --> 00:22:20.660 Now, of course, the university itself dates back to medieval times, but the modern university, 254 00:22:20.660 --> 00:22:25.540 this thing that we think of with a huge campus and complexes of buildings, classrooms, dorms, 255 00:22:25.540 --> 00:22:30.140 offices, and so on, is really only about 100 to 150 years old. 256 00:22:30.140 --> 00:22:35.060 But the simple fact is that these institutions, from the perspective of economic efficiency, 257 00:22:35.060 --> 00:22:41.900 are too large. They're just too big. They need to be scaled back. In all likeliness, 258 00:22:41.900 --> 00:22:47.540 the University of the future will be radically downsized and decentralized. 259 00:22:47.540 --> 00:22:51.700 Now already a lot of intellectual activity in the U.S. takes place not in universities 260 00:22:51.700 --> 00:22:57.620 but in private research organizations and think tanks, such as the Mises Institute. 261 00:22:57.620 --> 00:23:03.820 Top scholars have taken up positions at these kinds of institutions, where they're free 262 00:23:03.820 --> 00:23:09.620 from these large classes of indifferent students, the politicized curricula, the endless committee 263 00:23:09.620 --> 00:23:14.700 meetings, the mandatory sensitivity training seminars, and these sorts of things. 264 00:23:14.700 --> 00:23:20.740 I can tell you that both Jeff Herbner and myself spent the 1994-95 academic year as 265 00:23:20.740 --> 00:23:23.660 visiting scholars in residence at the Mises Institute in Auburn. 266 00:23:23.660 --> 00:23:36.660 The New York University psychologist Paul Vitz has written on these issues about the future of the university. 267 00:23:36.660 --> 00:23:38.660 As he puts it, quote, 268 00:23:38.660 --> 00:23:44.660 When universities fail to provide a decent environment for their original major functions, i.e. research and teaching, 269 00:23:44.660 --> 00:23:46.660 other institutions come along to replace them. 270 00:23:46.660 --> 00:23:52.660 The result is the development of a large intellectual community which no longer has any vested interest in the universities. 271 00:23:52.660 --> 00:24:00.660 At the same time, increasing numbers of students are uninterested in pursuing a higher education at one of these institutions. 272 00:24:00.660 --> 00:24:05.660 For example, the popularity of homeschooling is at an all-time high. 273 00:24:05.660 --> 00:24:11.660 Now think what kind of educational environment homeschooled kids are used to and expect. 274 00:24:11.660 --> 00:24:16.900 Act, personal attention, a serious curriculum, etc. They're certainly not going to find 275 00:24:16.900 --> 00:24:23.140 those things at most major universities. I believe that these students will begin and 276 00:24:23.140 --> 00:24:29.860 already are beginning to look for alternative models of higher education. They're going 277 00:24:29.860 --> 00:24:37.180 to specialize programs like the Mises University. They may be taking classes on video, classes 278 00:24:37.180 --> 00:24:54.180 To conclude, what should we do? What should our strategy be to deal with these problems? 279 00:24:54.180 --> 00:25:02.180 I suggest a two-pronged strategy. First, we have to continue to attack the academic left. 280 00:25:02.180 --> 00:25:05.580 Now, the easiest way to do this, of course, is merely to expose them. 281 00:25:05.580 --> 00:25:09.700 And I think that's the bottom line of the so-called incident. 282 00:25:09.700 --> 00:25:13.140 We have to encourage alumni, for example, to withhold their support as long as these 283 00:25:13.140 --> 00:25:16.260 kinds of shenanigans go on. 284 00:25:16.260 --> 00:25:21.700 Lew mentioned last night that a government that is laughed at cannot survive, and I think 285 00:25:21.700 --> 00:25:25.620 the same applies to an academic movement as well. 286 00:25:25.620 --> 00:25:32.340 Much like the Fed, these trendy, left-wing, postmodernist movements are surrounded with 287 00:25:32.340 --> 00:25:37.080 an aura of mystery that gives them a certain legitimacy and we've got to continue to expose 288 00:25:37.080 --> 00:25:43.860 them to show the sham that they really are. 289 00:25:43.860 --> 00:25:50.100 Second, we should work to continue to develop alternative educational institutions and private 290 00:25:50.100 --> 00:25:54.680 organizations much like the Mises Institute to support special educational programs like 291 00:25:54.680 --> 00:26:01.520 at Mises University, the Review of Austrian Economics, books, journals, programs to appeal 292 00:26:01.520 --> 00:26:05.120 to the current generation and future generations of students. 293 00:26:05.120 --> 00:26:10.880 By doing so, eventually, we can restore some rationality to higher education. 294 00:26:10.880 --> 00:26:17.760 Ultimately, we can reestablish the Western tradition as a central part of educational 295 00:26:17.760 --> 00:26:18.760 philosophy. 296 00:26:18.760 --> 00:26:27.760 Now, this is a long-term strategy, to be sure, but I think it's the only one that ultimately will restore our liberties. Thank you.