After my difficulties with academia ten years ago, many friends came to counsel me and offer advice. The most common was that I should be more flexible with my expertise, more conciliatory with my opposition, more secretive with my politics and especially with my religion. My answer had been the one Jesus gave on the Via Dolorosa, "For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?"

Now the twenty-year tenured veterans, the temperate teachers, the seasoned dry wood is feeling the heat. Marvin Olasky, WORLD editor and faculty member at UTAustin, writes about a fellow philosophy professor who was recently demoted for spear-heading a successful "Western Civilization" program that brought in millions of outside dollars and satisfied students. 

As word spread that WCAI had established a beachhead, professorial machine guns began to spew out a response. Pangle recalls that even though Koons included professors and guest lecturers who were clearly not conservative, "people perceived it as a really right-wing ideological program. [Some thought] we had an American triumphalist lesson we wanted to teach . . . that the West has all the good ideas, that we celebrate dead white males . . . that we have a prescribed canon of books."

When faculty pressure failed to kill the program, detractors turned to the "nuclear option", front-page op-ed rag formerly known as the New York Times.

Three days later a New York Times front-page story, headlined "Conservatives Try New Tack on Campus," prominently named UT's program as one "mostly financed by conservative organizations and donors, run by conservative professors." That triggered explosions of the sort I know well....Numerous UT professors emailed Diehl with complaints that right­wingers were hornswoggling him. Diehl summoned Koons and chewed him out, saying his claims that the program wasn't ideological were wrong because its funding came from conservative organizations. (This should not have surprised Diehl, because the checks went through his office.) Diehl said the departmental chairs did not trust Koons either.

The outcome was predictable, though because of tenure, Koons is still around at UTAustin. The same reserve that enabled the formation of the program I suppose, also kept him tight-lipped for an entire year, but after 12 months it was clear that WCAI was history, and he wrote this in a blog:

In retrospect, we overestimated the value of strong support from outsiders such as private donors, legislators, and policy groups, while we underestimated the determination of our internal opponents.
The main obstacle to our success was the idée fixe of unbridled faculty governance over the curriculum, which dominates at UT and elsewhere. In practice, that means the tyranny of the faculty majority.
Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a 'distribution' standard—a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences. . . .
The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach.
Professors at research universities focus on the accumulation of prestige through publication, the indispensable means for acquiring tenure and increasing one's salary (through the leverage of outside offers). By allowing students to pick what they want to study, the Uncurriculum model eliminates a potentially great distraction from the quest for publications: the burden of teaching a required curriculum, unrelated to one's own narrow research agenda. . . .

Even in his criticism, Koons is showing marked restraint. He is saying, in essence, that his colleagues are lazy. But this does not explain or excuse their raw hatred. A lazy man does not work himself into a rage over the industriousness of others. Koons is picking the least offensive of their faults, he is shining the best light possible on the University, for the motive is far uglier than laziness, as the dean's emails attest; it is religious hatred, not envy that motivates the NYT slime job.

Whether we know or only suspect the motivation, the results are quantifiable and predictable. Koons writes:

Due to the Uncurriculum, the humanities are committing slow suicide. There has been a steady decline in liberal arts majors in the last thirty years (from over one-half to fewer than one-quarter of the total). However, the decline is slow enough to make little difference to tenured professors.

The very same conclusions were reached a decade ago by Victor Davis Hansen, entitled "Who Killed Homer?" But what was a disease affecting only the Classics then, has now infected the Humanities, and is making inroads on the Sciences. We are witnessing a slow-motion train wreck that is destroying America's Universities. The Classics were the canary, the Humanities are at the face, and the Sciences include every warm body up to the surface. The implosion is coming to higher education, and it will be as sudden as it is thorough.

For the entire value of an academic degree is based on attitude, on inflated stock, on ephemeral opinions. The day will come when the stock collapses, when a college diploma will be seen for the worthless piece of paper it has become, completely undeserving of its $100,000 - $200,000 price tag. The day is coming when students will refuse to attend the suffocating indoctrination of ivy-covered halls. The day has come when parents and students alike will find alternate ways to prepare themselves for the future and its vicissitudes.

What then will replace it, what will replace the indispensible "face-time" of the over-priced academy?

It is already here. The audio tapes of famous teachers lecturing about Euclid's theorems or Plato's Forms are already upon us. The YouTube videos are even more widespread. MIT lists the homework assignments for all its classes. Homework is graded by the world's most patient instructor--the electronic computer running an "expert system".

But if these are all so great, how come people aren't using them to replace the expensive schools?

Oh, but they are.

It's called homeschooling.

The homeschool we belong to (and yes, I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but the government required homeschoolers to be part of a bigger "covering") has math scholars that compete with the elite private school in town. It has quiz bowl teams that compete at a national level, individuals that beat out all competition to win spelling bees, history competitions, geography bees. One memorable year it had 7 National Merit finalists out of about 60 graduates, which is several sigma above the 1% chance probability, and even a sigma above the 12/600 national merit average of the best public school in town.

The explanation for this anomaly cannot be attributed to "motivated" parents, because many of the private school students have parents motivated to spend $20k-$30k/year. Nor can it be attributed to better education of the moms, because most of them have no advanced degrees, certainly not as credentialled as the public school teachers. Nor is it wealth, unless poverty is correlated with intelligence, nor race nor gender nor religious affiliation. The only thing accounting for this anomaly is the curricula itself.

This past year, our homeschool group graduated 75, swollen by students whose parents yanked them out of public school so they could have "homeschool" listed on their college application.

Yes, their day has come when homeschooling has become "hip".

And now I will let you in on the "next big thing", many of these parents have looked at the college choices for their child, and they've opted instead for a correspondence degree: a homeschool college. The very same criteria that caused them to do their secondary education at home is motivating them to do their collegiate experience the same way.

And why not? Alexander the Great didn't go to a University, he had Aristotle come to him. We would all be tutored if we could afford it; the University was only supposed to be a cheaper and more efficient method, not a superior one. What with the Internet and YouTube, we can all have Aristotle in digital reception on our 48" widescreen home theaters, we can have Einstein explaining relativity, Burke explaining politics, Madison explaining federal government. What exactly does that $50k/year obtain that the Internet doesn't--hangovers?

And that is what should be giving deans and vice presidents sleepless nights.

For colleges have become expensive indoctrination camps, where NSO (new student orientation) include faculty instruction to ignore parents and make use of the free condoms at the health center. Colleges demand co-ed dormitories, and would make all bathrooms co-ed too were it not for student revolt. As Koons relates above, professors teach only in their "specialty", on work they are already getting funded to study, causing education to be spotty and completely oriented toward faddish scholarship. Whether it be gender studies or global warming or international justice, there are no alternate views permitted, and the status quo is supported on an increasingly shrinking foundation.

For the day of judgement will surely come as sudden as the mortgage meltdown, when half of America's colleges and Universities will close their doors forever, and the other half will admit to being what they have in truth already become--federal government research institutes.

Yes, the day is coming when the indomitable American mother realizes that she must act to prevent her child from becoming the last in the class of world economies, when the future of America is no longer buoyed up by international faith in America, when foreigners occupy all the positions of prestige and power.

For I firmly believe that American academia will survive, but only through the fire of citizen revolt. And if I were a betting man, I would put my money on Internet curricula, take it out of higher education, and consider starting a consulting agency specializing in second careers for academics.

For the Uncurriculum becomes the Unversity.