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Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Deconstructing the Motives of Marxist Professors



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.