Who needs a throw rug when you have a borzoi?

Note: This article is chock-a-block full of triggering models and language, and cultural relativity that many people in power will find extremely offensive. And not because it’s wrong.

I’m fresh off reading the recent university self-study for Cornell University, titled the Report of the Committee on the Future of the American University. I don’t know if I should encourage you to download it and read it for yourself — but the link is above. It’s like sitting in a 238 page faculty meeting with earnest, but clueless group of diverse/not-diverse not-so-cool kids trying to figure out how they can justify not doing their jobs and doing what they want while being incessantly bullied by a group of professional mountebanks who are using the institution to rob the public blind while policing their language. In fact, policing the language is a big part of what universities have elected themselves to do. It’s part of the destructive strategy that essentially alien agents have pursued to collapse the host that feeds it.

The report was commissioned by the Cornell Provost, an Indian woman named Kavita Bala, who happens to come from both a computer science background, and Mumbai where she received a B.S. degree. She has a Wikipedia page. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in 1999, which gives her something like 25 years in the Sausage Factory (my colloquial name for the academy.) What is notable is that a.) she is the head of one of the most prominent (if not THE most prominent) public/private universities in the world. Cornell has a blended background that way, and you can investigate if that intrigues you. Bala is negatively impressive in a metacognitive way — she’s no thought leader in anything, having never issued an opinion that I could find, and she’s in a fascinating, collapsing discipline — especially in higher education, and one of the absolute first educational disciplines to be subsumed by AI. She is the force who ostensibly is going to lead us out of the wilderness. Good luck with that.

The report, like so many faculty meetings, exists to reassure the disordered people running the show in higher ed, that they really are nice folks, and all they really need to do is tune up their niceness to each other a little, while riding herd over the lower castes of autists and disciplinary slaves. The fact that they are sucking up inordinate amounts of public cash interests them only in that this public largesse appears to be coming to an end, and they are mostly likely unemployable in anything other than producing their bullshit, which the public, or rather parents of the next generation and the entire business enterprise of the country aren’t buying. What is stunning is there is no awareness, self- or otherwise, how they got into this pickle. Their mommies and daddies all were profoundly congratulatory at the various gates that were necessary for someone like Bala to pass through to draw her inordinate salary, likely north of $700K/year. Why are the lower castes not bowing down?

The report’s solutions to the academic crisis are milquetoast — more experiential education, more neglected publics, don’t short the all-important research, preserve the liberal arts, and so on. A renewed emphasis on Academic Civility — as if the reason that there are no dissenting opinions at Cornell was because people just aren’t being nice enough. There’s no mention of the obvious capture of the university by the DEI apparatus, as well as NO disclosure of the endless haranguing every employee at a university must be subjected to as part of their job conditions. No mention of the devastating effects COVID lockdowns had that drove some of these changes. No mention of the effects of DEI on student admissions, nor their expectations, and the university’s desire to service those, instead of stand for something other than the endless immiseration of its adherents.

So let’s cut to the chase and resolve how we got here. It’s a collapse story, just FYI. But its origins are actually mathematical in nature. I know that won’t satisfy folks looking for the red meat of racism, or anti-racism. But it’s the closest thing to a complicated truth. The problem is to get out of the hole requires some serious modifications of the transmogrified OS that runs places like Cornell, and those aren’t likely to happen, at least from an internal, conscious perspective.

Back in the early ’90s there was kind of an awakening across academia that academia as a whole was too white. I was part of that, and participated. It WAS true that most folks across the top of the institution were white men. What was interesting, though, was that even back in the ’80s, things were different. There was increasing “administrative professionalism” that was settling in across the nation.

What does that mean? We used to have administrators, but we also had faculty at the top in key positions. Yes, there would be a formal business manager for business administration. But top VP positions were also held by older professors. The way it would work was that IF you had a successful career, and you were personable and outgoing, you, one day, would get a call from the president. He (they were almost all ‘he’s’) would say “Chuck, we need an outgoing dealmaker who understands how to collegially adjudicate some of the various issues, as well as likes students enough to make the rounds to the dorms. We need a VP for Student Affairs. The gig will run 3 years, and after that, you can return to the faculty, and we’ll make sure you have time to write your book until you retire. Are you interested?”

You had been called to service, and would assent. And then coast off into retirement with time to finally put that long, career summative manuscript together. Deal.

But by my estimate, by the early ’90s, this kind of deal was dead. In place was a rapidly expanding administrative cohort. In my own university, I’ll never forget the beginning of an early presidential search. One of the candidates looked out across the sea of VPs, Vice-Provosts and the like and said “there sure seems to be a lot of you.”

At the same time, the nascent DEI apparatus was starting to be formed. You had true believers like myself (I did this!) going out in communities with diverse constituencies (in Washington, our primary minority was, and is Latin American) and recruiting students. And at the same time, there was a push to make both the professoriate and the administration look a little less white.

And there WAS racism. But the way the racism was baked in was that even back then, to get hired as a faculty member, you needed to come from a very constrained, elite group of universities. And like it or not, THOSE places mostly had white students. I graduated from Duke with my Ph.D. in 1987. My advisor was the Dean, and he had formerly been a full professor at Princeton. Folks in the academy actually thought a Duke Ph.D. degree was an inferior degree.

The key thing to remember here is that no one group of anything is monolithic. There might be some probabilistic variation, but for the sake of this piece, it’s fair to assume that people are distributed in some kind of normal, bell-shaped curve with talents and intelligence. What racism did (or even the inherent racism of institutions) was distort that bell curve. Where it did it the worst was on the right side of the distribution. People who were talented were suppressed.

And so you could march down the phenotypes. Black, East Asian, South Asian, Mexican, whatever. But most importantly, WOMEN. White women. When that dam, that vertical wall on the right side of the distribution came down, the best got picked first. African-Americans were the most highly prized in the treasure hunt, mostly because there were so damn few of them. The best got vacuumed up at places like Harvard, and displayed prominently across the literature produced by those organizations. Women were kinda down there on the list, as well as Hispanics. Native Americans were non-existent — a college degree has always been a tough sell on the Res. Those people want to go back to their place. Asians were obviously far easier.

But it didn’t matter. The quantities favored white women. And so across academia, women started getting hoovered up into both faculty and administrative positions. Obviously, disciplines like engineering were still poorly represented — there were (and still are) almost no women to hire.

And while I’ll admit it is a generalization — who is more likely to get ahead in their career? We were still bean-counting resumes on hiring committees. Who had more beans to count? Women with kids, or women without kids? If you can’t guess that, you’re probably not going to grok this essay anyway.

And then, who is more likely to not have kids? The answer is part of the subject of this essay. Lesbians. Lots of them. I noticed this by the late ’90s. Our provost was a lesbian, though it was not talked about as freely as today. There was no gay marriage either, so there was major consternation on how her partner was going to be compensated. This was 30 years ago. Think hushed tones.

And the tide continued. Like attracts like. More and more. And as all the lesser universities attempted to move into the research game (this happened around the turn of the century — 2000) there was increased demand for students, which could not be acquired locally. But people living in Third World countries were happy to oblige. They sent us their sons, and to a lesser extent, their daughters.

With more demand from lower prestige schools, there also was more demand for technical Ph.Ds to fill those slots. And with looser financing, even white kids who wanted a delayed adolescence would be encouraged to fill up those humanities slots. They were paying their way. And whom were we to discriminate against the cultural predilections of entire minority communities? One undiscussable point is how so many of these communities a.) thrive on status, as opposed to performance, and b.) eat their young. The African-American community is terrible about this. Getting to be called “Dr.” is a big deal. I think it comes out of the faith tradition — but it’s also because the majority African-American community is very authoritarian. Lots of the Ph.Ds in the softer arts were auto-ethnographic. So if you were willing to pay the university $200K, which the government would finance, you could write a report on how you spent your summer vacation and how oppressed you were, and they would give you a Ph.D.

At the time, I was the Chair of the University Faculty Senate — kind of the political head of the entire faculty. I was given the job of university restructuring by the current president, an old Mormon leader who ended up being my biggest fan – a story for another time. I went around to all the minority faculty and talked to them. “We only have money for one thing — 20 recruiters, or 1 VP? Which do you prefer?” They unanimously said “we want the VP.” I admonished them. “A VP is not boots-on-the-ground,” what I now understand as a performance-based perspective. They were convinced that being in the room was enough to get something done — a lesson 1619 founder Nikole Hannah-Jones is learning now is utter bullshit. So they got their VP (a nice guy and friend of mine.) Which led to setting up an even larger bureaucracy. I was heavily involved — the Director of a good hunk of it was my best friend, and honestly, we did quite a bit of good. Students got through and got degrees, and got jobs.

But back to the staffing situation. After the best were peeled off the right side of the distribution, you were left with depleted pools of demographic variations hostile to the success of their own in-group members. I’ve got stories. But there still was a hiring bias for those minorities inside the university, and at some level in corporate America. But inside the university, increasingly the only white males who could be tolerated were definitely in the ‘beta male’ category. I was already a rarity as a declared Alpha male. So the LGBTQ community subversively took towards assassinating the remnants. They were increasingly in the bureaucratic caste, as well as some of the disordered humanities. They were also not stupid, and heavily recruited, especially from the first generation students, who really just wanted a degree. And if they couldn’t hack the math, they were not going into engineering.

I could go on. But the whole point is that if you think there was some conspiratorial master plan to take over universities, that’s not what happened in the beginning. It was the mathematics of memetic cascades. The end result is we’re now stuck with a lot of mediocre people in academic administration, with not very much to do, that know they could never get a job that pays what they’re getting paid now.

While things STARTED with mathematics, though, that is NOT how things have ended. And how have they ended? With a phenomenon called polyphenism. And what the hell is that? It’s the reason bees that get born in the hive differentiate into workers, kings, and that one queen. They have the same genes. But some combination of epigenetic, hormonal and environmental factors drive biological differentiation.

What is going on now in universities is the cultural variant. Cultural polyphenism is what we’re dealing with. We may have inadvertently selected, through mathematical memetic cascades for more women without kids, which then turned out to be lesbians. But once the lesbians aggregated, we saw a profound political bias that directly came from putting all of them together in a group. We did NOT select for gay males — there is no equivalent on the masculine side of the system. And gay males tend to be more politically spread out than the female side. So we ended up with a hyper-feminine system, that not only sucked in the LGB side, it also gave the gender shape-shifters, the TQ part, the ability to mimic (lots of personality disorders in that crowd, along with narcissistic mirroring) and seize control. Which they did.

At the same time in tech., the demand for research faculties in lesser universities, and the plethora of grad students from places like India, Pakistan, and China, created faculties that are minority white. But they aren’t JUST phenotype-problematic. That’s an easy diversion. People like the provost of Cornell only recently came from India. They are not American, and especially in tech., they do not function the same once you pass a threshold of aggregation that once again triggers cultural polyphenism. It’s gotten so bad, with the decline of at least second-generation Americans in the faculty, that the Indians and Chinese faculty are publicly fighting with each other.

I’m glad I ended my academic career when I did. Why? I had great relationships with my Indian and Chinese colleagues. I toured China, and met with the Dean of Peking University’s engineering college, who we then ended up hiring one of his graduate students. I’ve mentored notable Indian and Chinese scholars myself. But what is going on regarding values will lead to the downfall of the university. Every system has some ability to absorb a certain number of cultural variants. But if you think a primarily Indian faculty is going to service, and more importantly predict the future needs of Americans and American students, you’ve got another thing coming. Their cultures have too many overlaps with the dynamic drivers of university collapse. And while I’ve always felt like my various projects of mentorship were wonderful people, I never counted on servicing the inherent biases in their backgrounds. It’s not just some pick-and-choose smorgasbord, culturally, out there. Core American culture is far superior than most of the homeland cultures these people derive their baseline OS from. And for the majority, that culture is NOT why they came here. They came here for the money.

I could also go on that some of it, towards the end, was a cultural clash with core American values, emblematic in my dogs, which I would take everywhere. If you think a dominant Muslim culture likes dogs, I’ve got news for you. But I digress. Trust me — they trash the bathrooms. It’s gross.

The deeper problem is that all these constituents are authority-driven identity structures. We’re so stuck on phenotypes that we think that kind of thing actually matters. But it doesn’t. The primary commonalities that exist between South Asian and Chinese cultures, as well as the LGBTQ+ community, is that there relational modes are externally defined. The Muslim/South Asian cultures relate to different people inside their communities, as well as the LGBTQ+ communities exactly in the same memetic framework. You are a declared external identity. Agency is low. And because agency is low, folks in the beta male cucks cohort fill out the rest of the hierarchy. And no one could be happier about the collapse of the larger, more genteel hierarchy established literally 100 years ago by their white male forebears. Few of any of these constituencies preserve the passion for particular discipline. They’re happy to declare themselves as professors – the status is what really matters, and if there’s another group out there who’s separate, realms can be established and peace uneasily maintained. In fact, destruction of the overall hierarchy maintains the neo-tribal social structure that makes sense to them. And sense of larger commitment to the larger university prospect is really foreign to the majority. And if the LGBTQ+ group is trying to Queer everything (that’s their term, not mine) all the better to be left alone — especially in the technical disciplines. That collapses the overarching controlling hierarchy anyway, leaving some loose association of confederate states, free to do whatever the hell they want.

The problem is that you end up with the perfect storm. These people do not care about undergraduates hardly at all. Or in a condescending way — servicing them is alternately equivalent to servicing the lower castes, and there’s baked in discrimination there, or in the case of the LGBTQ+ folks, getting them into some frame for perverse sex or genital mutilation, all in the name of reinforcing identity — sometimes permanently.

There’s more to write. But these are the problems that have to be fixed. And the only way they will be fixed is to realize that these problems are real. And they will only be fixed with human evolution of the agents involved.

I do want to end this on a somewhat positive note. I have had a minority of folks in each of these groups who realize there are problems exactly like I describe. Some of them have turned into champions who at least call out the bullshit at the local level, in a way that culturally cuts like a knife. They KNOW what perdition awaits. But we have a policing system inside the university that even squelches those voices. The people in control have divided up the pie. And you’re supposed to be happy and sing for your supper.