By Professor Doom
Higher education
is often referred to as the “ivory tower,” but a better metaphor would be a
field of ivory towers. Every department is its own ivory tower. At the
university level, I seldom so much as see
someone from another department. While I might well know something of what goes
on in my department, I just had no idea how bad things were elsewhere.
I’d been told
many times that our campuses were as much centers of indoctrination as
education, but I remained skeptical, even after years of hearing such things. I
saw nothing of the sort with my own eyes, after all…little realizing how
isolated I was, or how math departments were relatively free of the
indoctrination.
I saw a few
things with my own eyes, of course, though never enough to convince me.
“…in
the upscale neighborhood was an ice cream store. One of the confections on sale
was ice cream in the shape of a very large female breast, covered in a
chocolate coating.
This
shows how wealthy white people, even in the 20th century, still long
for their huge black mammies of the slave-owning days.”
--paraphrased
excerpt from a textbook used in a course on a community college campus. I feel
the need to point out: this passage was not in the book as an example of
ridiculous thinking for educated people to point at and laugh.
When I was at a
community college, I was exposed to the silliness of gender studies, but only
because students handed out lollipops for a grade (and so I got lollipops, each
with a little note indicating how great women are), or students carrying bags
of sand to represent the burden of having a child…such things didn’t convince
me of indoctrination as they did of the utter goofiness of that field, focusing
on making students feel good instead of on actual knowledge. Occasionally a
student would leave a textbook behind in a classroom, and I’d read a bit and be
stunned at the gibberish. I was, like most anyone, embarrassed at what went on
at the community college…but I still wasn’t convinced this was full on
indoctrination.
But now I’m
looking up from my books, looking outside my department at the university level.
I see our campuses often devolving into riots over the silliest things, see
people terrified to say a word out of line. I also see people believing the
most ridiculous things, beliefs that could only exist through the reinforcement
of indoctrination.
Allow me to
present an example of the ivory tower I’ve lived in. In math departments, we
change textbooks every three years. Even if we don’t change the books, every
few years we look at our textbooks, look at what else is available, and decide
if we’re still using the best books we can. Even though mathematical concepts
are basically immortal, we still change the books, or at least consider
changing them, on a regular basis.
Ok, I’m showing
my age with that previous paragraph. That’s how it was years ago. When I
developed an online course in the 90s (I really was one of the first, and I’m
sorry for it), I designed the course to account for a changing textbook.
Nowadays, we keep our textbooks longer, because there’s often an associated
online component the institution buys as well…it’s so much trouble and expense
changing the books and the associated software that we rather stick with a bad
book rather than even consider changing. The publishers are clever like that,
not that I’m criticizing them.
Anyway, in my
ivory tower, I just assumed all the departments changed their books more or
less regularly. While mathematics might be immortal, most other fields are
forever changing and advancing—much of what Freud taught a century ago has been
invalidated, for example, and other fields are often unrecognizable from what
they taught a century ago. Even in literature, even if Shakespeare is studied,
there are ever newer books explaining in ever better depth Shakespeare’s works.
That’s how it’s
supposed to work with knowledge: the best we know is forever evolving, forever
finding better ways to explain what we know.
Indoctrination is a different matter entirely:
truth is whatever authority says it is, and is reinforced through mindless
repetition. It can’t afford to change, because change can only come from asking
questions, a big no-no for indoctrination.
So what to make of
this:
As a philosophy
that killed (and is killing) many millions of people (hi Venezuela, sorry
you’re not in the news despite being a huge failure for communism…or is it
because?), I totally agree that his ideas should be studied by specialists, but
I see no need to make his book, well over a century old, a top mandatory read for
everyone. It would be far better to have a textbook that dissects the Manifesto,
slicing up each concept and discussing how each part led to disaster.
This old book is
freakishly popular:
The Communist Manifesto ranks first among texts assigned in New Jersey,
Wisconsin, Indiana, New Hampshire, and Washington State; second in New York,
Iowa, and Virginia; third in Massachusetts and Minnesota; fourth in California
and Connecticut; seventh in Illinois; eighth in Georgia; 22nd in
Tennessee; and 72nd in Texas.
Overall, it’s the
third most popular book our students must read. The top two are
Plato’s Republic (a good foundation for modern civilization, and Plato’s
ideas haven’t caused millions of deaths) and The Elements of Style
(another good foundation book, although I suspect it’s used more as reference
than reading).
I’m saddened to
see no math books in the top 100—who would have guessed that mathematics, the
least subjective of all disciplines, would be so incapable of agreeing on a
good book? In my ivory tower, I just assumed other disciplines likewise changed
through books often, but back to the point.
Why are we pushing this monster’s
Marx’s ideas so hard in higher education? I concede it’s an important albeit
disastrous political philosophy, but any consideration of Marxist utopian ideas
(all his book could possibly contain) must be tempered with the grim murderous
reality of the consequences of
following those ideas (which can’t possibly be in that book).
Krugman’s book on
Economics is #85, which is still a bit too popular I think; maybe Keynesianism
isn’t as lethal as communism, but I suspect that’s because we haven’t given it
enough time. What economist is the most popular?
…Marx is
the most assigned economist in college courses…
Wait…what? This
guy dominates economic as well as political thought? Seriously? Many communist
nations suffered starvation, severe starvation, massive depopulation-style
starvation, and extreme economic hardship, because a communist economic system
is so generally terrible people cannot thrive under it, merely survive, and not
all can even manage that.
Much like with the
Diversity studies text I quoted above, I strongly suspect the Manifesto
isn’t being studied as something to point at and laugh at how ridiculous it is
in terms of economic theory.
I guessed Marx
to be popular in politics, and apparently he’s also a big man in economics.
Just how dominant is Marx in higher education?
Among
History texts, however, The Communist Manifesto
ranks fourth, in the field of Sociology texts, it comes in third, and in
Politics, it ranks eighth.
So its best
strength is in Sociology, the study of group behavior. Insofar as group madness
is legitimately worth studying, I can see a book on communism being of some
interest there, although it really seems like we’d have made some advances in
the field over the last century.
And so I consider
the fact: these fields use the same book, for over a century, with no
possibility that it can be improved upon, no concern for the empirical evidence,
and a student must have Marx’s ideas repeated to him, verbatim, over and over
again as he studies economics, history, sociology, politics, and who knows
where else it appears.
I have to concede
that, yes, that sounds more like indoctrination than education. I am, however,
grateful that in the ivory tower of mathematics, Marx has no relevance.
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