The university has become a gulag. Bureaucratic sadism rules the day. "Administrators" have taken over intellectual life and turned ideas into bullet points, seminars into pencil-pushing contests. It used to be that nerds were interesting and earned our sympathy. Now it seems the world has gone mad, and a new profile has emerged, combining all the aggression and callous cruelty of the cool kids, with the passive-aggressive and neurotic sabotage of the geeks.
Save us, save us. Can we be saved?
Gaslight University is the code name for a real place, where real people work and must be subjugated by Bureaucratic Sadists every day. I work there. I find myself wandering, at times, along the sun-baked sidewalks (I work in a place that knows neither rain nor winter), wondering if the strange workplace in which I exist could possibly be real. Could it be? Could language have deteriorated into leftist gobbledygook, and "humanities" been transformed into a smattering of bitchy identity groups swiping at each other to see who can get grants from the Ford Foundation?
The students are not victims, but rather willing conspirators in the dawn of a new totalitarianism. Gone are the days I knew back in the 1980s, when students allied with professors against administrators, the knowledge-seekers versus the pointy-headed corporate robots. Nowadays the students ally with administrators against professors, the enforcers of orthodoxy against the traitors against the consensus. (more...)
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