In plain sight and shamelessly exposed stand the ravished bodies of the American universities, brothels where administrations grow like cancers, the inane product of clientelism and the demise of thought are celebrated. The pictures have been revolting but were hidden from view. They no longer are.
There are two assets to an administrator: the student and the incompetent faculty. Both of these groups always pay. If the student pays he pays and there is the cash. These are foreign students and administrators love them. If he does not pay, the government puts down the cash and charges him for the dubious service of sustaining an entirely corrupt structure in which no longer discernible intellect is fostered for the rest of his life.
In such confabulation, ineptitude is promoted and this is for a very simple reason. Nothing is more stable institutionally that a sustained confabulation of mediocrities in which the ineptitude of students is groomed by the obsequios repugnance of faculty. In return, these students satisfied egos offer praise to the kindness of their mentors who, in keeping their public satisfied, guarantee their overweight administrators the sustained influx of checks provided by government or distant parents.
The preservation of a student body from whose fibers resources are extracted directly or as the bi-product of funding mechanisms is guaranteed by these forms of professorial imbecility. The flow of cash for salaries, houses, vacations and cars from parent or government agencies is guaranteed with the same idiotic smiles that fast food restaurants use to convince its customers that the compounded ring of radioactive styrofoam colored with lead-laced yellow 158 is chicken. This explains the tragic ascension to relevance of the student evaluations, popularity tests in which excitement, etiquette and personableness are purposefully conflated with pedagogic aptitude. Obsequious stupidity produces adoring fans, tedium only character. So any thought arduous or otherwise uncomfortable may be easily dispensed with and replaced with another expression of adorable idiocy and palatable ineptitude. Stemming to a great extent from ivies, these imbecility creeps powerfully. In the academic institutions of our intellectual Sodom, well-certified stupidity is cheap and impressively easy to replace.
Thus, institutions can build monstruous administrations with 12 Vice-Presidents including a refreshment-machine officer and a secretary of mopping or colleges with one provost for one dean and a baker’s dozen of faculty members. This is how, in the mix, fat presidents endowed with friends and a terminal case of intellectual intermittence hire faculty summarily and summarily eliminate them relaying on multi-toothed smiles always ready to deliver bad news. This is how academic officers can hire their closest of friends with little or not oversight and allow the deportation of students while singing from the other hither of their mouths the songs of equality and redemption.
This is how those who smile and tell tantalizing tales of homosexuality in islamic texts or deliberate on St. Augustine‘s penis have taken over the temples of thought. Exchangers of flattery who know that its easier–always easier–to sell St. Augustine’s penis, Socrates‘ homosexuality, the victimization of stupidity and the many forms of senseless poetization which can be easily regurgitated from mouth to mouth at the modest price of learning empty gestures and turns of phrase. No longer the need for the pain of thinking through informal fallacies, ontological proofs and theological voluntarism.
But this appeal to idiocy is no more than demagoguery in a chain of clientelism and in that sense revolting: in order to preserve their position, these professional victims of ancestral oppression flater the stupidity and ineptitude of their audiences and their overblown sense of indignation and in those ways hide their own. But what is easier than to flater an adolescent ego?
The functionality of these horse-persons of intelectual doom is their unmatched ability to keep customers satisfied. And to the most minimal indication of protest react with a lofty sense of righteous indignation. Feminism has been used to shelter nepotism, corruption and inefficiency as has all other forms of professional minoritism. And with this veritable tradition of slave morality to stand on, when is pointed out that a reflective judgment cannot be a determinate judgement, or asserted that the Symposium ought to be read philosophically… when one has the gall to argue that nobody should be taking skiing vacations when their students have barely money to eat, these beasts of convenience deploy their arsenal built over centuries of cunning of the oppressed.
They defend their cultural studies, their speculative sociology and their lonely planet political theories, their post-colonial empathy, their long meditation of the political use of the penis and the historical suffering of the vagina or their Cold Cuts Digest scientific literacy, in short, their willful imbecility and happy ineptitude with accusations of misogyny, racism and persecution. But all who care to look know that the only true persecutor of these destroyers of nobel thinking are their own consciences. The university has been destroyed by the ravaging advance of political perversity with the unstoppable metastasis of malignant growth.
So who will be left? All that institutions need is time because time is always on their side. Students will go and faculty will mostly preserve the status quo. And in the end, voices of protest will not even need to be addressed. But here is the thing: if the logic of this beasts is the logic of the client, then it behooves the client to punish the poor service that is rendered on dues that one day they will have to settle. Either those who can will have to raise their voices when stupidity and flattery are presented as thought or they will be complicit in the collapse of their own thinking and in the abandonment of their own good conscience.
