Higher education used to be a small but useful part of the United States. Then the Left began its long march through our institutions, with higher ed a main target of attack. It was greatly aided by the federal government’s intrusion with easy money for students to go to college and grad school.

Where do things stand now?

In his latest Bastiat’s Window post, Bob Graboyes find things to be perilously bad.

He begins:

Practically every terrible idea eating away at America’s soul originated with some academician whose philosophy gelled while writing his PhD dissertation. Below, we’ll discuss (1) How academe has grown noxious; (2) How stilted research degrades society; (3) How the dissertation process stilts research by confining students within walls of orthodoxy; and (4) How the problem can be fixed. We’ll illustrate these points with a fable about a student researching the origins of COVID.

Analysis: true.

Graboyes argues his case with an entirely believable scenario in which a grad student is interested in the origins of Covid. He thinks it probably came from a lab leak. But that idea, his dissertation advisers inform him, is deeply problematic, since right-wingers are advancing that theory. The student therefore concludes that he ought to go with the flow and changes his argument. Heretics don’t get very far in our academic environment.

Graboyes has a modest proposal that would, at least to some degree, lessen the Left’s hold on the Ph.D. pipeline: Allow students to separate their coursework from their dissertations. Why should they have to be done at the same institution? There’s no reason.

Read and enjoy the whole thing.