Those most vulnerable to technology hate it the most. When we look at the hundreds of thousands of college professors, we are struck with one fact: few of them are necessary. If teaching were like the acting profession in the private sector, the very best teachers of each subject would teach, while the rest, at best, would have low-paid supporting roles. There used to be many, many actors, all performing on different vaudeville stages all over the country. Today, with films and broadcasting, he best actors are in movies and television. A few “stars” replace thousands of actors who once performed on the thousands of inefficient, individual stages that were built in most small towns.
The need for American college professors would drop to, maybe, a dozen or so in each subject. Their classes would be broadcast, and students would take those classes on line, or by downloading, until they knew enough to pass the required tests. Then, they would download the next class. While some believe in “individual instruction”, there are few questions that haven’t been answered. The internet does so with amazing efficiency.
Professorial ranks have not been winnowed by what is now old technology. The reason is clear. Colleges are not for teaching. They exist to provide jobs for the party faithful, social indoctrination, unemployment control, and certification to ensure that the dumbest possible person can be said to be “qualified”.
Colleges are useful tools of excessive government. The four or five years that most undergraduates spend in getting largely useless degrees keeps them from having children during the most fruitful time of their lives. It keeps them immersed in the sea of relativity in which many of them drown. They learn that they, just like Pavlov’s dogs, will be rewarded for parroting the lies and beliefs that enhance the power of the state.
Few professors have the intellectual honesty to admit that they are, in essence, replaceable by crude video-conferencing and broadcasting equipment. Mark Twain summed it up: “It’s hard to make a man understand the truth if his job depends on not understanding it.”
Tax-supported professors do have a vague awareness that their continued employment is utterly dependent on the whims of elected officials. Their jobs may, in times of budget constraints, be vulnerable to the centralization of talent that took place in acting. So, political contributions must be made, and that is why they have unions.
That often dim awareness of their basic “unnecessaryness” drives many professors to leftist positions. Many did not begin as leftists, but moved that way as they saw the rewards to loyal leftists in jobs, tenure, pensions, and benefits. The more unnecessary and replaceable any group becomes, the farther to the left they tend to be. As they move left, their hatred becomes more strident. Soon, they are driven to criticize virtually every aspect of the societies around them, ignoring the fact that only the taxation levels that private-sector automation can provide will produce enough to pay their large salaries.
