Deconstructing
the Motives of Marxist Professors
By
Russell Hasan
Most
ideas which are too smart for their own good eventually end up in a Woody Allen
movie. Continental philosopher Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction was
no different, showing up in the movie Deconstructing
Harry. Deconstruction looks at something, typically a text, and peels away
the layers of explicit meaning and logical order in order to see the bloody
reality that lurks beneath. It is interesting to attempt to apply the theory of
deconstruction for a libertarian analysis, specifically by deconstructing the
motives of Marxist professors on college campuses and examining why so many
academics are Marxists.
Marxist
professors appear to preach the political philosophy of Marx because they
believe in it. Or, perhaps, they are Marxists because that is what they were
taught by their professors way back when they were themselves students in
college. But a deeper motive can be discerned by looking underneath the surface.
In Ayn Rand’s opus Atlas Shrugged,
the physicist Dr. Robert Stadler justifies his betrayal of John Galt and his
support for the State Science Institute by telling Galt that he wanted to set
the mind free from money by getting government funding for scientific research.
The deconstruction of this statement shows that the free market either does
not, or might not, place a high value on the work that professors do, such that
some scholars could go unfunded if left without state assistance. Generally, in
a free market traders trade value for value, so that in order to buy something
you must first be productive and actually make some money. What is it precisely
that a Marxist professor of sociology, history, or political science really
produces? Unless their scholarship and ideas have some sort of concrete
financial value, the free market would not pay them very much in return for
their work. On the other hand, government funding for universities, especially
in the form of Department of Education-backed student loans but also from
government grants for research, results in a situation where the salary of the
typical college professor bears no relation whatsoever to his or her productive
value.
The
situation in the economics behind university education might accurately be
called a higher education bubble. Spending on education, motivated by the
Department of Education’s policies, goes ever higher and higher, as seen in
data presented in the Wikipedia article Higher
Education in the United States, while the actual productive value that
results from a college education bears no real relation to rising spending. The
university administrators and professors in general don’t seem to care. Indeed,
the theory of a “liberal arts” education, as articulated by Progressive
education pioneer John Dewey, believed that the purpose of an education was to
free the mind, not to help the student make money. Dewey also asserted a belief
that part of the purpose of education is to convert youth to Marxism, as seen
in the Wikipedia article John Dewey,
and Dewey’s influence upon modern education cannot be understated. Today’s
students should thank Mr. Dewey for the fact that their minds have been set
free while their bodies need to eat in a job market that has been mercilessly
crushed by the Great Recession, which resulted from the statist policies of
Bush and Obama.
Perhaps
the situation will be rectified when the higher education bubble bursts and the
forces of supply and demand wreak havoc on college funding and drag spending
back down to what is fiscally justified by the return on investment for a
college education. Bubbles usually burst when state-controlled systems run out
of other people’s money, in this case, the taxpayer’s money which funds student
loans and grants. If the economics of supply and demand are allowed to correct
the higher education bubble, then many Marxist professors might be fired unless
they can provide something to students which furthers the students’ careers or
future earning capacity, which would mean that the professors are actually
productive. A plausible deconstruction of the motives of Marxist professors is
that the professors just want to maximize the amount of money in their salaries,
because the state’s influence over education accomplishes a vast disconnect
between the professors’ salary received and the value that they produce. Note
that the state also receives a quid pro quo from the professors in the form of
the Marxist propaganda which they teach to their students in order to persuade
impressionable young minds to believe in statist economic policy, so that the
achievements of Marxist professors would have no value in a free market economy
but have a high importance in a centrally planned economy.
