Defund Police?  Defund the Thought Police: the Modern University

“Many intellectuals and their followers have been unduly impressed by the fact that highly educated elites like themselves have far more knowledge per capita—in the sense of special knowledge—than does the population at large. From this it is a short step to considering the educated elites to be superior guides to what should and should not be done in a society. They have often overlooked the crucial fact that the population at large may have vastly more total knowledge—in the mundane sense—than the elites, even if that knowledge is scattered in individually unimpressive fragments among vast numbers of people. The ignorance, prejudices, and groupthink of an educated elite are still ignorance, prejudice, and groupthink—and for those with one percent of the knowledge in a society to be guiding or controlling those with the other 99 percent is as perilous as it is absurd.

The power of the intelligentsia is demonstrated not only by their ability to create a general climate of opinion that strikes fear into those who oppose their agenda but also by their ability to create a climate of opinion which richly rewards those political leaders whose decisions are consonant with the vision of the intelligentsia.”
― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

If you had to put your finger on one organizing principle, or grievance among all of the riots that continue to plague America (and will be increasing), it is class, not race.[1]  Putting aside election-year grandstanding and opportunism, and as a strawman, looking at BLM, antifa, and other groups strictly as anthropological distortions—they are symbolically rebelling against (or being incited to rebel against) what they believe (or were told) is racially based privilege, elitism, preferred access to opportunity, knowledge and social capital.  But race really isn’t the direct issue of contention; it is a proxy for class economic disparity. In this way, it does indeed resemble a kind of modern Bolshevism, but with an ironic twist: the Left has actually become the party of the rich and privileged billionaire donors, indoctrinated, guilt-ridden White college graduates, and a dependent client base among poor non-Whites. But more, race has become not a source of liberation for minorities, but turned around to become a weapon of hatred and revenge that is increasingly, and dangerously, attacking Whites with a vehemence and bigotry that is turning the Civil Rights Act on its head.

Those special privileges assumed to be shared by the modern Bolshevists are today not an automatic product of birth, or inherited wealth even.  Apart from the client base of poor non-Whites, these advantages come generally from ingenuity, work and discipline, but a particularly insidious and entrenched component comes from membership in a club.  A club of information, contacts, and favors.  A club of special language, intellectual abstraction, social expectations and most of all, a detachment from laboring classes.  It is membership in the elite university club, and by extension, a private society of preferred access to capital, resources and markets.   BLM wants to be part of the club, and in some ways it is indoctrinated by it, and owned by it, but it is merely the club’s foot soldiers, their ‘front line’ who are sacrificed for the elite intellectual leaders in the rear.  BLM will never actually be allowed into the club, but it will serve the club’s interests in gaining advantages through its “creative destruction” which creates pretext for deeper government and special interest intrusion into the economy and larger society.

This special sub-society of the truly elite carefully stores and guards its secrets and access, whether scientific, legal, medical or financial.  It protects and manages its network and rations its influences.  It is an inter-locking society as well, with members drawn from business and government who reinforce the society and its privilege.

Across America’s centers of power and influence, a highly concentrated group of “insiders” tend to the society’s well-being, its growth and power, and even, or especially, its ability to produce competitive advantages among key sectors, especially technology and finance, and with a strong inter-weaving of laws and policy that reinforce and sustain these advantages.  Universities produce the intellectual “code” and social capital that together create sharp and nearly impenetrable class differences.  These differences are vital to maintaining the political currency of elitism, social abstraction (over-population, global warming, terrorism and biological safety) and top-down public policy (abortion, eugenics, distancing, isolation).[2]

The tech oligarchs seek to dominate the world financially and technologically. The clerisy in turn aim to undermine traditional bourgeois values with progressive ideas about globalism, environmental sustainability, redefined gender roles, and the authority of experts. They inculcate these values through their “dominance over the institutions of higher learning and media, aided by the oligarchy’s control of information technology and the channels of culture.” Both groups perceive a powerful central government as essential to carrying out their political, social, and economic objectives, and thus the need for an unassailable, credentialed “expert class.”  Increasing social stratification across the globe—with a small technocracy and clerisy at the top and a large…dependent serf class at the bottom—represents a new, modern feudalism. What binds these two groups together (oligarchs being the feudal lords; thought leaders, the clerics) are shared views on globalism, cosmopolitanism, credentialism, and technocratic expertise. Academia is not only exclusivist, it is the least politically tolerant group in America. Ivy League schools enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent. The proportion of liberals to conservatives at top-rated colleges is at least 8 to 1 and sometimes 70 to 1. Less than 10 percent of faculty at leading law schools describe themselves as conservative. The university is now an “ideological reeducation camp.” It seems to be working: 40 percent of millennials favor suppressing speech deemed offensive to minorities. To get a glimpse of the future neo-feudalist America, one need look no further than California, where a small class of fabulously wealthy and interconnected people act as a new nobility, while a massive underclass of underemployed and unemployed are reliant on the state for survival. California’s level of inequality is greater than that of Mexico, and on par with Guatemala and Honduras. When adjusted for cost of living, California’s overall poverty rate is highest in the country. Eight million Californians live in poverty, including two million children. Almost half the children in the state are living close to the poverty line. The Bay Area is perhaps the worst offender: 76,000 millionaires and billionaires live in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, while 30 percent of Silicon Valley residents rely on public or private financial assistance. And lest one think this is only an American problem, [in] China, the top 1 percent of the population hold about one-third of the nation’s wealth, and about 300 people hold about 20 percent. There will soon be more Chinese billionaires than American ones. Meanwhile China employs artificial intelligence with sophisticated algorithms to regulate society and public opinion—you know, the same systems currently used to brainwash hundreds of thousands of “problematic” Uighurs in Xinjiang Province. China has created a massive surveillance state that monitors individual citizens’ social capital, and, as an extension, access to various goods and services. Beijing is selling these surveillance tools to other nations.[3]

This is hardly a new phenomenon, as intellectual and related social distinctions have been an inherent part of society hierarchies for centuries, in nearly all societies.  What is new is the immense growth of America’s government and corporate institutions, and their capture by an elite educated governing class.  America is governed in reality by a new elite, with a massive “slave” class spread out in the vast open spaces of the rest of the country.  A handful of cities, university affiliations and intellectual and technical networks seek to control the country and have largely succeeded.  America’s elitism is intellectual, conceptual, linguistic and behavioral, much more than it is strictly financial, or even propertied, or especially, racial.  Some of it is merely symbolic; an image; a story; a carefully marketed illusion.  But it is an illusion that still divides the country into a very sharp differences of class and privilege.

Indeed, where would Barack Obama be without the one thing that made him stand apart and gave him cachet: his Columbia and Harvard degrees, and his University of Chicago Law school teaching bona fides; his claim to being a “constitutional scholar.”  The elite university is the essence of his identity.  And as Nietzsche points to, it is still an identity that thrives on its own consensus, its own insistence on a monotheism in belief, values and objectives.  It seeks to break down all others into a classless society, until there is no longer a rich garden of variety, of healthy competition and independence, but instead one group only—the obedient Hive.

Indeed, the current BLM riots have their effective intellectual base camp in several elite universities, especially Chicago.  But ironically it is a base camp that wants to maintain its borders and walls of protected privilege.  America’s working-class towns and small business may be burned and ransacked, its public spaces and even homes and churches threatened: but the elite university campuses like Harvard, Yale, Stanford and even Berkeley, are quiet, safe, tranquil and undisturbed.  How could that be?

For sure, the country’s colleges are hurting financially from reduced enrollment and the costs of altering their campuses into “ant farms” to control and direct student movement and behavior in the new biosecurity construct.  The massive student loan market—nearly $2 trillion dollars—is also a bubble threatening to burst any moment, while tuition of $80,000 a year at Chicago—the highest in the nation—is likely never going to return.  But the one thing keeping the haves from the have nots—information, knowledge and specific skills—is still being kept behind locked doors—doors that don’t open for everyone, and keep the US a sharply splintered society.  And elite intellectuals like it that way.

Tuition alone is the modern slave collar—decades of indebtedness that can’t be extinguished.  Paying money to build and grow your mind may be the ultimate insult to freedom—like charging for oxygen, sunlight and natural water.  These are all natural rights, natural resources and man’s natural privilege to procure as a free human being.  The modern elite university (and Silicon Valley Big Tech) wants instead to profit off of your own mental sovereignty, and take what is naturally yours, and keep you from it by way of their “admissions” game (as if you needed to be admitted to your own intellect), or as dribbled out in careful doses of “degrees” and diplomas.[4]  Police may imprison our body, but the modern university seeks to imprison your mind, by putting you in “education isolation” so you do not contaminate the ruling class and their privileged domain of specialized culture.  The university claims to offer its educational liberation to the under-privileged, the suppressed or disadvantaged.  What they really do is merely open the gate to a handful of the throng at its walls, in order to keep up the hope of salvation.  The rest are sent back to the educational plantations for the masses, and intellectually “quarantined” from the elite.  And now, before you enter either domain, you will be subject to new virus protocols and electronic “geofencing.” This alone turns the higher education calculus on its head: everyone inside the walls of academia may soon be stampeding to try and get out; or will they?  A new “Lord of the Flies” psychology is taking over many of our young adults, creating the welcome and the unwelcome, the safe and the unsafe, the right and the wrong, and of course the good and the bad.

Burning down small businesses, smashing windows of cars and clothing stores, threatening police officers, and looting consumer electronics and luxury goods aren’t going to create or deliver opportunity, or confer access to America’s power centers (and more is on the way).  Education—real, tangible education can.  But the access to information, laboratories, libraries, computers, tools, and the coaching and instruction that can activate their utility and extend them into social and economic networks, is controlled, metered, rationed, and restricted by an elite guard of university special interests safely retreated inside the walls of academic institutionalism—walls that seek to protect their privilege, contacts, intellectual property, and maintain the illusion that only some can qualify for the bestowing of elite higher education.  Community college for everyone?  Sure.  Yale for everyone?  That will take a new civil war (and yet the “community” college is the actual transformed, progressive manifestation of higher education; indeed, it is what “Yale” will eventually become).  The “borders” around this knowledge, information and privilege will eventually be torn down—and that terrifies the elite.  What to do?  Make the borders stronger, more pervasive: put them around an entire society and installed in the one place where they can be powerfully controlled: in the mind itself. 

Modern universities are selling the same product in the same ways for the last 200 years—a long, expensive medieval apprenticeship that is out of touch with the modern world, but its walls fortified and reinforced for self-preservation, self-dealing and self-worth. Robert Hanna, a philosophy Ph.D. from Yale, author and former university professor, escaped from the walled compound of institutionalism, and started “Philosophy Without Borders,” which challenges the elite notion that philosophical knowledge is somehow contained within and under the stewardship of academic faculty, when in fact it is within you, waiting to be cultivated in your own life as a “real” living philosopher, dealing with today’s tangible challenges.  If “BLM” wants to shake and disrupt the foundations of elitist control and enslavement, and seek “reparations” and justice, then its target is the walled compound of Harvard Square, not Times Square, nor the shopping village or town square.  It is the elite controlling campuses of the country’s intellectual complex at Yale, Chicago, Columbia, Stanford, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Brown, Berkeley, MIT, Caltech, Harvard, Northwestern, and others (like Oxford, Cambridge and the London School of Economics in the UK). These institutions create, guard and propagate the illusions of privilege and class and intellectual ownership—and charge for it, putting you in debtor’s prison.

The nation’s elite research universities are also hosting, indeed eagerly encouraging the transformation of the university campus into an effective “ant farm” of student social and behavioral engineering under the pretext of “biosecurity.”  No other universities are so intimately involved in this agenda as the “Ivy” and elite schools.  No campus culture embraces, propagates, and indeed creates the policies for a radical fundamentalist “Covidianism” more than the elite colleges.  These university administrations are obviously serving as program foot soldiers, and have abdicated their authority to a larger institutional network (e.g., the C.D.C., the Rockefeller and Gates foundations, and W.H.O.) that is “leading from behind,” with political pressure to act in lockstep. At the University of Chicago, for example, this political co-option has been especially formalized, and stems from mutual promises and favor among the Obama-Lightfoot-Sanders “triumvirate.” The University is also acting in lockstep with the Rockefeller Foundation, and certain agencies in law and intelligence.  This leaves students with an increasingly difficult but urgent choice: either submit to and comply with the university biosecurity “protocol” including the troubling “Health Pact” contract, along with personal tracing, tracking and “geofencing” or instead, reject the institutional abuse, and disregard for your own sovereignty and privacy, and walk away. At some point you have to learn how to say “No” and not merely line up at the campus sorting platform and be corralled, herded, traced and tracked (and eventually de-loused by “vaccination”).

This is where the basis of real inequality, corruption and division is hiding, and prospering, installed in its ivory tower.  It shackles all others with something far more dehumanizing than an entrapped body: an enslaved mind.

[1] Or rather, race and class are somewhat fungible, as “BLM” for example, is a claim of class victimization, through a racial narrative, as “White supremacy” is really more centered psychologically and linguistically, as “White privilege” vis-à-vis access to resources; preference for their distribution and title; and even putative utility and enjoyment of broad assets (suburban homes, transportation, luxury goods and education), labor markets and wages (higher minimum wages; broader re-distribution through tax) or membership in social groups, especially intellectual ones usually defined by elite education.  Meanwhile, it is a central cultural routine of higher education to sustain and propagate the racial-class dynamic, in part because it sustains a wide spectrum of economic objectives which include university enrollment velocity, funding, and the perpetuation of the Ph.D system.  See

https://cstms.berkeley.edu/current-events/no-one-wants-to-believe-it-manifestations-of-white-privilege-in-a-stem-focused-college/

[2] From a review of Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, by Casey Chalk.  https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/feudalism-without-a-soul/

[3] Ibid

[4] See “The Social Dilemma,”  https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224