My wife left the profession too, and that was more than two decades ago. It has gotten much, much worse since we left, to my dismay if not my surprise. 

Many of the people I know who stuck it out became more and more disgusted, but switching careers in late middle age is tough and there is much to like about a tenured position, even if you spend too much time in an insane asylum. Many of the students are still smart and curious, although many get recruited into the cult that dominates modern academia, and that is why I always loved teaching. If you ignite students' curiosity and passion, there are few more satisfying things.

It's not the students who are intolerable. It is your colleagues and the administration that have become a cancer in academia.  

The group reported that José Felipe Alvergue flipped the table.

From their X account: "Jose Felipe Alvergue has now been confirmed by the university to be the attacker from this morning." pic.twitter.com/ZWalBxlQ6L

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) April 1, 2025

Back in the 1980s and 90s, academia was liberal--most elite institutions are liberal for a variety of reasons. But most liberals there were intellectually curious and generally respectful of differences. Academic politics were often petty, as any office politics can be, but the depths to which people would go didn't reach quite to Hades. 

The Professor said: "I see attacks on critical race theory as intentional efforts to erase or silence the memories of democratic failure, exceptionalism and settler colonialism, and White supremacy. Poetry is poised to fight this battle in many ways" pic.twitter.com/gi2KgpNwVF

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) April 1, 2025

But even then the radicals who have come to dominate academia--people whose passion is politics and propaganda--were already showing up in greater numbers, and the more who were hired, the more control they had over the hiring. Liberals hired radicals, and radicals hired even more radicals. 

This morning, the College Republicans at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire were tabling for the April 1st election.

A faculty member, who allegedly is the Chair of the English Department, came up to them and flipped the table they were using!

This is wholly unacceptable…

— Brady Penfield🇻🇦 (@Brady_Penfield) April 1, 2025

We have gotten to the point where radicals own the institutions, including the highest levels of the administration. Even college presidents, who tend to be social climbers who see their primary task as raising money, are more scared of the radicals than interested in reining them in. 

As long as the flow of money continues, they prefer peaceful relations with the students and staff to hewing to any principled line or care for academic interests. The only thing that will get them to restrain the chaos on campus is a threat to their funding. After all, hiring more administrators--who often outnumber professors and students--doesn't come cheap. 

“I am deeply concerned that our students’ peaceful effort to share information on campus on election day was disrupted,” UW-Eau Claire Interim Provost Michael Carney said in a statement to WRN.

“UW-Eau Claire strongly supports every person’s right to free speech and free expression, and the university remains committed to ensuring that campus is a place where a wide variety of opinions and beliefs can be shared and celebrated,” he added. “Civil dialogue is a critical part of the university experience, and peaceful engagement is fundamental to learning itself. We are working with the Universities of Wisconsin and the Office of General Counsel, which is conducting a comprehensive investigation of this matter. The faculty member involved has been placed on administrative leave pending that investigation.” WRN has asked the university to confirm the name of the faculty member, which we obtained from the College Republicans’ chair.

Over the past few years, I have read many stories about professors attacking students, including the famous case a couple of years ago when an NYU professor first attacked students and then chased a reporter down the street wielding a machete. She was eventually fired but remains a well-respected activist. 

Yesterday I attended CUNY 4 Palestine's teach-in, "Radical Solidarity and Organic Connections: Palestinian, Black, Puerto Rican, and Filipino Liberation Struggles".

Shellyne Rodriguez the machete-wielding professor that attacked a @nypost reporter was one of the speakers 🧵 pic.twitter.com/1grKaKAxQ7

— Stu (@thestustustudio) January 16, 2024

Promoting revolutionary violence is now almost required to be an academic, and nothing says a cause is evil better than a group of academics rushing to its defense or promoting more violence. 

"What did you think decolonization meant?" 

Ironically, it is the most prestigious institutions that are the worst, mainly because they are the places that pride themselves the most on pushing the boundaries. But few academic institutions are immune, although at least at state colleges the government can theoretically set policy if they dare. 

This puts us in an unfortunate bind. Excellent academic institutions have been a cornerstone of American exceptionalism. They not only train our scientists and engineers, but a well-constructed liberal arts education can and did add immeasurably to our culture and our intellectual life and expand our horizons. 

We don't have excellent academic institutions that do that anymore. While there is a lot of good scientific research that still goes on, even the hard sciences are filled with fraud, irreproducible research, chasing prestige and money, and empire-building. Not to mention a lot of politics. 

As for the social sciences and liberal arts? They are rotting corpses, leaking poisonous and infectious intellectual diseases. 

At this point I don't think that our elite institutions can be repaired, but only replaced. State colleges and universities can be reformed, but tenure, huge endowments, and administrators who are deathly afraid of offending their staff and students who will riot won't work to save their institutions. 

Almost every elite institution was privately founded. They are not sacred institutions that God decreed should exist forever, untouchable by mere mortals. They can and should be replaced by new privately funded and founded institutions dedicated to hiring the best and the brightest and dedicated to the principles that made once-great institutions rise to prominence. 

At this point, I won't mourn the loss of a Harvard, Columbia, or Yale. I will cheer on their demise. Unfortunately, if new institutions do not rise to replace them what we will have lost will impoverish us all.