Tenure’s Dirty Little Secret – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
I notice Milton Greenberg does not refer to the infamous letter of Lewis Powell, the former Supreme Court Justice regarding the threat to Capitalism represented by the counterculture, certain university departments and a number of tenured scholars. What a joke that prediction turned out to be, as high finance became a double entendre, and drug addled banks and brokerage firms became Kamikazes for capitalism.
I also notice he mentions think tanks as being places truth is pursued. Most of them were founded, along with the business lobbies, pursuant to Lewis Powell’s admonition, to enhance and promote free market dogma, as an antidote to what? The socialist dogma of the druggies in the banking system? The queer theorists in academe? The identity poitics crowd on the “left” that forsook the class struggle here at home and signed off on union busting, for Franz Fanon’s post colonial claptrap.
Is Milton Greenberg so naive as to think that think tanks actually think instead of promoting dogma? From what I can see, they earn the second half of the name by water boarding truth in the rush to subordinate free people to free markets. The free market has become more destructive to itself, as a result of Powell’s letter, than of any threat from the counterculture or the liberal arts.
What drivel.