This piece turned out well, even if some of the suggestions are terrible.

It is a dubious idea, admittedly, to address the dearth of conservatives in academia with a deliberately politicized hiring process. The best remedy to leftward drift or narrow academic bias in the academy surely isn’t the introduction of self-conscious conservative counter-programming, which would remain on the margins in any case. But it is tempting to paraphrase the axiom of that other Churchill (Winston) about democracy: that it’s the worst idea imaginable — except for all of the others that have ever been tried. So, with ever-accumulating evidence of bias against conservatives in academic hiring and advancement, perhaps an effort to introduce a conservative perspective in a high-profile way is an experiment that should be tried.

I insisted on one condition in accepting the appointment: that I be hosted by a regular academic department and teach departmental courses out of the catalogue, rather than be an ornament for an ad hoc or free-floating “conservative studies” program. Setting up a “conservative studies” program would ironically ratify the intellectual rot of the various “studies” departments that have sprung up over the years to appease the most radical, grievance-minded factions in academia. “Conservatism” is not a discrete subject, like biology or English literature; as with liberalism, it is a point of view or disposition that informs nearly all the traditional disciplines. And in any case, even a conservative professor who feels like a Soviet dissident on today’s campuses ought to uphold the traditional model of teaching by presenting a full spectrum of views in the classroom, rather than engage in counter-indoctrination.

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But these glimmers of reform are insufficient to the scale of the decay. Universities won’t begin to turn away from the intellectual corruption of radicalism until some kind of serious, organized opposition arises. A few isolated or token conservatives scattered in various departments, or visiting in a high-profile way, as I did at Boulder, won’t make much of a mark. To speak out alone against the relentless and insatiable demands of grievance leftism is to risk losing out on promotion and advancement, even if you already have tenure. Academic conservatives — along with disaffected moderates and liberals — need to emulate the campus Left and organize effective counter-programming, with their own centers and topical curricula, to contest the intellectual ground on campus. The thin ranks of academic conservatives need a campus rallying point, and a guerrilla mentality to match the determination of the Left. As Hemingway said of writers, conservative faculty ought to stick together like a pack of wolves.

The writer does a good job in explaining the current predicament of the university, although he’s probably too charitable to the sciences and engineering schools. We should expect academia to become even more radical as time goes on.

The best suggestion to the universities would be to figure out a way to terminate most of the faculty. The details of how that would be done aren’t really all that interesting to me. State governments can also gin up methods to deny funding to state universities. The Federal government is not that likely to back off from its commitments to continue inflating the student loan bubble until financial markets somehow force them to do so.

Considering the massive endowments of the most prestigious universities, not to mention the value of the real estate that they own, the faculty and bloated administration can be replaced or reformed. Most universities probably do not need to exist, and can be dismantled as quickly as they were thrown together over the last century.

Since the political side of things is unlikely to change without a financial shock, what parents should strongly consider is to choose alternatives to higher education, like apprenticeship, aggressive pursuit of demanding internships, freelancing, and other similar methods to help their sons to find meaningful work or a vocation without recourse to the university system.

Most university students and parents are not really interested in the academic life, and are instead looking for vocational preparation. The market there has to be un-muddled, so that the two groups of students stop mixing together as much as they have over the last century or so.

Parents that think that the Ivy League schools are major exceptions to the overall trends should audit some classes there and read the university newspaper every day for a year before fronting anything for tuition, room, & board.

American universities are unlikely to enjoy the international reputation that they currently have in the next 20 to 30 years. The catastrophe of the American university may be as long-lasting and devastating as the collapse of the German academic complex was during and after World War II. The problems are broadly understood, but no one in authority has the courage to do what is necessary to set these institutions on a more respectable path.

Above a certain class water mark, marriage has become more of a lifestyle product than a sacred rite which makes one man and one woman ‘into one flesh.’ Charles Murray writes about this phenomenon, informed from a statistics-heavy perspective, in his recent book on the increasing class divisions in White America entitled “Coming Apart.”

What is the striver marriage? It’s seen as a capstone lifestyle good, ideally achieved after both partners earn a master’s degree and both have secure positions at golden brand name corporations in a premiere city like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, or Mordor-on-the-Potomac. Failing that, a good job in a tony suburb will do.

The idea behind this marriage is that it is a union between equals. If one or both partners cook, they cook as an obsequious passion, usually under a popular dietary trend rather than an ethnic culture. It’s much more common to hear someone who is passionate about ‘paleo’ or ‘gluten-free’ cooking than it is to meet someone who cooks within a family tradition that might have been more familiar to previous generations.

The strivers are expected to have only a few children, and those children need to go to either a good private school, or otherwise to an exclusive magnet public school. In some more daring cases, the parents may home school their children, as was normal for the middle class or better in America before the growth of mandatory government schooling.

Strivers will usually go through a set of ‘long term relationships’ lasting a couple years or so, and then they may move towards marriages, in which some portion of them will last about as long as their past relationships did.

These types of people, who make up the part of the SWPL class that actually has purchasing power, receives endless criticism and resentment from all quarters. Poorer racial minorities hate them for their patronizing attitudes and habit of bidding rents up. Leftists harry them for being bourgeois while aping some of the outward fashions and life patterns of bohemians. They hate themselves, also, because it’s the only group that they are publicly allowed to express dislike for. Conservatives dislike them for their snobbish attitudes about food, culture, and dress, along with their comparative irreligiousity. Jack Donovan dubs them ‘elves,’ and calls for their annihilation.

Striver marriages do not bear much fruit, because people have the urge to reproduce themselves as they are, and the costs for reproducing this hothouse line of people are absolutely enormous, despite none of their educations being particularly rigorous or demanding. Their educations are simply expensive, mostly ornamental, and more about being useful to state power than being useful to civilization.

The majority of these people do not achieve the ideal — their careers are unlikely to be all that successful, they get out-competed for real estate by well-heeled foreigners from more dynamic economies, and they have trouble transitioning from ‘hooking up’ to low-status monogamy.

The word that we use to describe these ‘marriages’ does not describe the same thing in reality as past versions of marriage, leading to a lot of confusion about what it means. In other more secular European countries, it’s more common to avoid the formal term, but in the US, there is still the insistence on misusing language to describe what baby boomers would have called ‘going steady,’ except with more lawyers involved in the breakup.

Considering that this is the pattern of life of the slowly rising administrative class, any relationship pattern that deviates from that will seem disgusting and perverted to them. Whereas someone more traditional will be disgusted by homosexuals and transexuals, the elf finds the fecund, patriarchal family to be an abomination that sends them into fits of rage and nausea to even think of it being legal. If anything, the rage towards the old family pattern far exceeds anything said by the ‘homophobic’ or ‘transphobic.’

This inversion is just about never remarked on, because it is a little embarrassing, but it is human nature just the same. This is also not to say that ‘both sides are equally intolerant and therefore equally bad’ — the striver-marriage is what is odd and unsustainable, and the older form is what has been successfully adopted & maintained by every great culture in human history.