America’s Best College – Tom Finneran

Friday, September 04, 2020

Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the MA House

Numerous articles warn that America’s colleges and universities are facing major demographic challenges.

As the children of the baby boomers have graduated and begun their careers, they are marrying much later and having far fewer children than previous generations. That means that there are not as many “customers” as there were twenty years ago. Simply put, a great wringing out is right around the corner. It feels long overdue.

America’s colleges and universities have grown fat, dumb, and lazy. Perhaps the best evidence of their decline can be found by examining the titles (and salaries) of their innumerable administrators, often heading departments that have absolutely nothing to do with serious education and everything to do with appeasing the insatiable demands of a lunatic fringe. Yes, we have Presidents, Provosts, Chancellors, Deans, Directors, and Vice Presidents for every imagined grievance in God’s kingdom, but we do not have accomplished faculty teaching serious subjects. However, you dear Parent can be reassured that we have mandatory orientation on the unspeakable evils of Shakespeare and dead white men. In addition, we have mandatory orientation in Sex Week, always so reassuring to the parents of young men and women. We aggressively demand all sorts of diversity except for diversity of thought. And we insist on freedom of speech except for those with whom we disagree. With those recalcitrant students who think for themselves and who freely contest our approved ideas, we have a new academic department named The Re-Education Gulag, which we adopted from the Soviet Union and Communist China. We leave no stone unturned in our pursuit of monolithic thinking. Unbelievers will be dealt with harshly.

All this and much more can be yours here at Tyranny University for the bargain price of seventy thousand dollars a year.

It’s no wonder there’s a revolution out there. I find myself wondering why it has taken so long to say an emphatic “No” to such nonsense.

College and university leaders had best pay attention to the seismic shifts underway. When you are chasing fewer and fewer customers with an already too-expensive product, then your business plan is under serious structural stress. A few of the wisest leaders will catch on and the rest of the nation will marvel at their success.

A few keys are readily apparent:

1) Tame the faculty. Ignore the whining of these pampered revolutionaries. Fire more than a few of them and let the others know that their job is to teach. Tell them to leave the indoctrination nonsense to that remnant of old Soviets in Russia, nursing their last bottle of vodka while singing odes to those renowned murderers Lenin and Stalin;

2) Announce loudly and publicly that your college will teach the Western canon, emphasizing literature, history, and the sciences. Repeat your embrace of the Western canon at every opportunity.

3) Make it abundantly clear to the students that they do not run the university. They are to leave their harassing tactics far away from the campus. Tell them that they should expect to meet and talk with young men and women who are black, brown, white, gay, straight, liberal, conservative, and perhaps quite uncertain of their emerging identities. All are to be respected. All are to be treated with courtesy and civility. Ideas are to be argued in the classroom, in the cafeteria, and in dorm rooms, with plenty of tolerance for dissent and a strong institutional intolerance for bullying.

4) Cancel the cancel culture. Let it be known that the university will invite various speakers of various viewpoints to engage the students and faculty on various topics. Let it be known that no speaker is to be threatened, shouted down, or assaulted. Let it be known that any such disruption will result in immediate expulsion from the school, with a full forfeit of tuition.

5) Take out full-page ads in the newspapers of America announcing the new standards of behavior on your campus. Go on the morning talk shows and the evening news shows and talk about the continuing relevance of the Western canon and your school’s determination to restore it to its rightful place in society.

6) Get ready for an avalanche of applications from thoughtful families and students who seek a serious college experience. Voila! Your demographic challenge has just been solved! And your college will be among the best in America.