There's a great, lesser-known scene in "Ghostbusters" that deserves attention.
Our future Ghostbusters have just lost their jobs in academia, and they're panicked at the thought of what they might do next.
"You've never been out of college. You don't know what it's like out there. I've worked in the private sector. They expect results," Dan Aykroyd's character, Dr. Ray Stantz, says to Bill Murray with a sense of fatalism.
It's just one funny scene among many, but it sums up the academic mindset then ... and, sadly, now.
Results? We don't need no stinkin' results.
Except academia in 2026 is even worse than that, teaching a young generation to loathe capitalism and heart socialism. It's built into the College DNA.
Comedian Adam Carolla picked up on that thread in a recent episode of "The Adam and Dr. Drew Show." The podcast, which reteams Carolla with his old "Loveline" radio partner Dr. Drew Pinsky, examines the media, pop culture and more.
The episode in question had the hosts dumbfounded by the Democrats' embrace of Democratic Socialism, witnessing shocking primary results in New York and Colorado.
It's University Thinking 101, but it does deeper than that, Carolla said.
"The college campus is socialism," Carolla said. "Think about who the professors are. What the f*** is tenure? You have a job, comrade and you can never be fired."
"You're spending other people's money," he added. "Everyone there is spending everyone else's money. There's no bottom line. There's nothing you have to adhere to. You know, there's no quarterly reports."
"There's no consequences. Zero gravity," Dr. Pinsky said.
"In our world of checks and balances and competition, the college campus and the campus in general, is a little bastion of communism, socialism," Carolla said, before expanding his analogy to the world outside the campus setting.
"Look at L.A. county. What do we have? We have teachers' unions. What don't we have? We don't have school choice," he said. "OK. No competition. And what do the unions do? They're run by Democrats. They run Gavin Newsom. They run the mayor. So what happens? COVID comes around. So what aren't we going to do? We're not going back to work...and we'll do whatever the f*** we want because there's no competition."
You can forgive Carolla for getting worked up over college culture. In 2019, he teamed with Dennis Prager to make "No Safe Spaces." The movie captured how university campuses were breeding grounds for intolerance and free speech clampdowns. Director Justin Folk of "Am I Racist?" fame gave us the warning we needed, with a dollop of humor, to show how far colleges had fallen.
It's no spoiler alert to say we didn't listen.
Now, woke colleges are churning out young, educated socialists who ignore history and common sense. And, worst of all, they vote.
Old-school Democrats like James Carville are melting down over the socialist takeover of his party. Carolla and Dr. Pinsky saw it coming, and they correctly identified where it all came from in the first place.
