Start with ‘No’: The Bureaucratic/Academic Mindset
Excerpted from an article on Lewrockwell.com:
The academic mind, like the academic guild, is closed. It is trained from high school on to focus on what is irrelevant and therefore safe. The process is, as they say, majoring in minors.
I recall the day I took my young wife to a lecture at a Protestant seminary. The lecture was being given by a not-quite Ph.D. who was candidating for a teaching position. I told my wife the following before the lecture began:
This will be the most boring lecture you have ever heard. You will not have heard of the facts he mentions. The speaker will draw no conclusions of any importance.
After the lecture, she said, “How did you know? I almost fell asleep.” Here was my answer (approximately):
The guy was candidating for a job. He did not want to make a mistake. He therefore summarized his Ph.D. dissertation, as I knew he would. The topic is sufficiently narrow so that nobody on the faculty could spot a major error. Also, nobody is ever not hired because his lectures are boring. Lots of people are not hired because their lectures are lively, which might embarrass the other faculty members.
The man was hired. He has been president of the seminary for years. He is a very good lecturer. He speaks at denominational family camps, where teenagers attend. They apparently enjoy him. His insufferable boredom that candidating day was a product of the academic system, not his abilities.
The academic is a trained bureaucrat. He has survived a long system of specialized training in the rules of bureaucracy. Everything is tied to tests, term papers, and formal requirements. Academics and priests were the original trained bureaucrats. This is because they were literate. Kings made use of priests to do administrative duties.
Academics have less power than bureaucrats. They have fewer official responsibilities. Tenure converts fearful people into bored people. Nothing threatens an academic more than a requirement to perform. If he must face a free market, he is terrified.
The scene in Ghostbusters, where the three parapsychologists are fired by the university, is among my all-time favorites. Dan Ackroyd’s character warns the other two:
I liked the University. They gave us money, they gave us the facilities, and we didn’t have to produce anything! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results. You’ve never been out of college. You don’t know what it’s like out there.
The rule of survival in every bureaucracy is “Safety first.” Corollaries are: “Don’t make a mistake.” “Keep your head down.” “Do it by the book.” “Don’t make waves.” But the central, unbreakable rule of a master bureaucrat is this one:
Always say no initially. It’s a matter of leaving room to retreat. You can retreat from no to yes, and the person asking you to do something is happy. If you have to retreat from yes to no, you’ve made an enemy.
I remember that one clearly. It was the answer given to a reporter by the Washington bureaucrat with the longest tenure in 1976, upon her retirement. He had asked her how she had survived for so long.
The free market’s law is to say yes initially. The salesman wants the commission. To the question, “Can I get it in blue?” the salesman answers: “Will you sign the contract if I can get it for you in blue?” After the contract is signed, the salesman puts the pressure on the company to deliver it in blue.
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A decade ago, the neoconservative classicist Victor D. Hansen co-authored a book, Who Killed Homer? I have read it twice. It is a great little book. He shows how few students earn degrees in the classics today: under 600 a year. The entire field is dying. Who killed it? His conclusion: the professors themselves — the feminists, the quibblers, the purveyors of arcane specialized linguistic studies.
That sounds good, but he neglects to mention that the quibblers and the purveyors of arcane linguistic studies dominated classics departments early. They set the pattern, not just for today’s classicists but for all academia. They were paid to study the past and make judgments about the past — judgments that could be verified only by other scholars. Then they decided to narrow the field: to study the grammar and vocabulary of dead languages, which was really safe. Nobody spoke these languages. Who could say what the facts were? Only other specialists.
What we need is an amateur army of skilled analysts in every field from outside academia — people who have the basic skills of the scholar, but not the mindset. They need to know how to understand and interpret the past in terms of the present, in preparation for the future. This, the academic mind is trained not to do. The exceptions — the feminists, the Marxists, and the deconstructionists — are at war with the society that funds them, especially the taxpayers, who are deeply resented for not forking over even more of their income to fund their own destruction.
Education must be decentralized. It must be taken off tax-funded life support.
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