Academia needs a Thatcherite solution
For the United States to survive its own ruling class, the dictatorship of the professoriate must be broken, and it can be.
It has been clear for some time that the most corrupt, undemocratic, racist, and antisemitic major institution in the United States is academia. Completely unaccountable to the electorate or indeed anyone else, America’s institutions of higher education engage in systematically unethical and unprofessional behavior, flout the law with impunity, and actively seek to impose political and social radicalism on a nation that does not want it.
Today, with antisemitic mobs conquering and colonizing the universities—enabled or actively supported by faculty and administration—it is obvious to any thinking person that academia has collapsed into outright nihilism. As such, it is a clear and present danger not just to Jews but to anyone inside or outside academia who dissents from its totalitarian ideology.
The cause of the academy’s moral self-decimation is institutional: Academia has been long since hijacked by the political radicals of the 1960s and their descendants. In the name of their “long march through the institutions,” they infiltrated academia and constructed a dictatorship of the professoriate that now rules it with the proverbial iron fist.
This regime permits only the like-minded to become faculty and administrators. It isolates and ostracizes dissenting students and academics. It formulates curricula that indoctrinate students in the regime’s ideology. It demonizes all other ideologies and institutions as monstrously corrupt. It emotionally abuses and morally blackmails the vulnerable to induce fealty. It is willing to use ferocious rhetorical and physical violence against opponents without and “ideological deviationism” within. All this is in service of the ultimate goal of destroying American society as it currently exists and the imposition of the professoriate regime on a national scale.
In other words, academia has become a suicide cult.
Of course, America is a free society. If one wants to construct a suicide cult, one is permitted to do so within the limits of the law. But this is not an issue of freedom—academic or otherwise—because academia affects every American citizen. Despite their descent into moral bankruptcy, the more rarified institutions of higher education remain the manufacturing centers of the American elite. They churn out the country’s future political, social, and cultural leaders on an industrial scale.
They are, in other words, institutions with social responsibilities. As such, they are legitimate subjects of public criticism and reform. All Americans have a stake—and a say—in what these institutions do and how they conduct themselves. If academia is determined on suicide, then everyone else will be taken down with it. This is, to say the least, unacceptable.
The question, then, is what must be done. The obvious answer is: Smash the regime. This is easier said than done, however, for precisely the reasons mentioned above. Academia is the most powerful institution in the United States that is completely unaccountable. Supreme Court justices may not be elected, but even they must be appointed and confirmed. The regime, by contrast, does not have to answer to anyone and has no intention of ever doing so. As a result, it must be made to. Its impunity must be ended. This will require considerable political courage and equally considerable political will.
Fortunately, America has an excellent model for how it might be accomplished.
In 1984, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher faced a serious crisis. For decades, the British government had been deeply involved in the coal mining industry and, by the time Thatcher became PM, the miners’ unions had built up immense political and economic power. They could—and did—more or less stop the UK economy whenever they wanted to get whatever they wanted.
Labor power is by no means a bad thing. Every sector of society has a right to protect its interests and ensure its own welfare, and the working class is no different. The problem in 1980s Britain, however, was that the unions were directly threatening the welfare of the larger society.
At the time, the British coal industry was dying; it just didn’t know it yet. Other sources of energy were beginning to surpass coal and, in the UK, the government was forced to prop up the industry with increasingly unsustainable subsidies. Along with the union leaders’ demands, this was causing considerable damage to the still-struggling British economy. Reform was obviously needed. While Thatcher was indeed a free-market ideologue, even those who were not largely agreed that something had to be done.
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), however, proved unwilling to compromise with the Thatcher government’s push for reform. Led by the radical socialist Arthur Scargill, the NUM called a strike to force Thatcher to back down.
It is important to note that, while left-wing historians and commentators regularly refer to Thatcher as “controversial” or “divisive,” there was a consensus in British society that economic reform was needed. While Britons were not necessarily in sympathy with all of Thatcher’s policies, they did support them in the general sense and by and large took Thatcher’s side in the dispute. The issue was controversial only for extremist figures like Scargill.
Indeed, Scargill was, in many ways, a distinctly ugly character. Arrogant, verbally abusive, and not particularly bright, he was no match for Thatcher but made things infinitely worse for himself. Not only was his strike gambit bound to alienate the majority of Britons, but Scargill only alienated them further by openly deriding their decision to elect Thatcher in the first place.
One would think the fact that Thatcher was democratically elected while he was not would have pushed Scargill toward compromise. Instead, he had openly expressed opposition to democracy itself.
In 1983, Scargill said of the Thatcher government, “My attitude would be the same as the attitude of the working class in Germany when the Nazis came to power. It does not mean that because at some stage you elect a government that you tolerate its existence. You oppose it.”
That any sane person could see that Thatcher was obviously not Hitler and the Conservatives obviously not the Nazis appeared not to occur to him.
Moreover, even though Scargill had been elected to no local or national office, he attempted to delegitimize the elected prime minister, saying, “This totally undemocratic government can now easily push through whatever laws it chooses. Faced with possible parliamentary destruction of all that is good and compassionate in our society, extra-parliamentary action will be the only course open to the working class and the labor movement.”
The resulting strike resulted in considerable upheaval, including inevitable protests, pickets, and violence. Thatcher came under immense pressure to back down if only for the sake of social harmony. She proved as intransigent as Scargill, however, and a far more skilled tactician. She knew the NUM would hit her with everything it had and planned accordingly. She made sure sufficient reserves of coal were on hand to meet Britain’s energy needs during the strike; managed to divide the labor movement itself, which did not universally support the NUM; and retained the sometimes wobbly but ultimately persistent support of her government and much of her party.
Ultimately, Thatcher outlasted Scargill. After many months, the NUM found itself exhausted both physically and financially. It saw that Thatcher was not going to budge. The strike came to an end. The unions never recovered, but Britain did. The reforms pushed by Thatcher ultimately roused Britain from its long economic slump and set it on the road to becoming the economic powerhouse it remains today.
It is important to emphasize that, for many, this was not a particularly happy ending. One must give Scargill his due: He did his job catastrophically badly but his basic motivations were perfectly understandable. His duty was to fight for his members’ welfare and no one had any illusions about what comprehensive reform would mean for them. Indeed, it had a devastating effect on the coal industry and the working-class society it supported. Without government subsidies, the industry collapsed, bringing entire communities and an entire way of life down with it. There was, without doubt, enormous human suffering.
On this point, Thatcher’s free-market ideology deserves the criticism it received. Much more could and should have been done to help the now unemployed miners through the crisis and transition them to other industries and employment. The British government had to stop artificially propping up a dying industry, but it did not have to abandon those who were bound to suffer as a result.
All that being said, a national leader has a duty to consider the interests of the nation as a whole. There can be no question that for Britain to face the economic challenges of the 21st century, major reforms were necessary and, to enact them, the radical wing of the labor movement had to be broken.
These reforms might have been enacted in some form no matter who was prime minister, but Thatcher’s staunch defiance and—there is no other word for it—intransigence proved essential to doing so. Had she not been so relentlessly stubborn, there is reason to believe that Britain today would be a fourth-rate power.
This story is an object lesson for those concerned about the malignancy of the professoriate regime. It proves that a determined political leader can bring about major and necessary change despite the opposition of a vocal minority that wields enormous institutional power. This is the case even when that minority is led by fanatically radical leaders who are both capable of causing and perfectly willing to cause serious social upheaval to preserve their power and advance their ideology. If the reformers have a capable leader, a democratic mandate, and can call on the support of the silent majority, they will almost certainly win out in the end. Minority intimidation does not work if the majority refuses to be intimidated.
This is not just an issue of political will, however. While the steadfast leader who can accomplish anything is an appealing archetype, politics rarely works that way. To take on a powerful minority institution, a democratic leader must have a coherent and detailed plan for reform and how to successfully enact it. If Thatcher hadn’t planned out the chess game beforehand, she would have lost.
Fortunately, in the case of the professoriate regime, the necessary reforms are not difficult to outline in general terms: Faculty should be chosen by independent committees rather than existing faculty, preventing the radicals from installing ideological clones in top positions. Codes of conduct that forbid political bias in the classroom should be enforced under penalty of dismissal. A zero-tolerance policy on racism and antisemitism should be adopted with clear definitions of both. Political activities should be banned from taking place on campus grounds. A regulation should be enacted that stipulates any student who engages in politically motivated incitement, harassment, or physical violence will be expelled and banned from re-enrollment. Faculty and students hauled before disciplinary committees should have the right to counsel. Departments that exhibit persistent political bias should be dissolved.
Elected officials have considerable powers at hand to force these reforms. They can withhold the enormous taxpayer funds handed out even to private universities flush with billion-dollar endowments. They can deny government contracts and grants to offending institutions. They can push to have universities held responsible for violating the civil rights of targeted students and faculty. They can hold public, televised Congressional hearings into institutional corruption in higher education.
There are many options, but acting on even one or two of them would have a considerable impact. We are not dealing, after all, with particularly courageous people. As we have recently seen, once outside their bubble of impunity, they fold.
Of course, like Thatcher’s rivals, the regime will defend itself with everything it has. A great deal, after all, is at stake: Power, pride, prestige, influence, sadistic and masochistic pleasure, and large amounts of money. Moreover, the regime’s ideologues have long since convinced themselves that anyone to the right of them is a Nazi. They will see resistance to their power not as a threat to them but as a threat to civilization itself. Armed with this titanic self-regard, they will unleash spasms of incontinent rage and rivers of incontinent tears. They are well practiced, after all, in emotional blackmail.
Should pathos fail, the regime can turn to more powerful forces. It has immense influence over the Democratic party, especially the party’s progressive wing, and will undoubtedly attempt to wield its influence to prevent reform. Moreover, the regime’s graduates and acolytes are bored deep into the American elite, and they will undoubtedly be called upon to use their political, cultural, or social positions to defend the regime. Armies of lawyers can be set loose in an attempt to stymie reform in the courts. If worst comes to worst, the regime can let slip its minions in the activist industry and send the rioters into the streets to cause general bloody mayhem.
Any movement or leader who wishes to make a serious attempt at breaking or even simply containing the professoriate regime must plan for all of this. It took time and forbearance for Thatcher to break her rivals and the professoriate will be no different. But reformers should remember the essential fact that the majority of Americans do not just oppose or disapprove of the regime. They hate the regime—hate it. They are tired of being demonized, patronized, and abused by the obviously incompetent elite the regime has produced. They are horrified and appalled by the antisemitic mobs that the regime has nurtured and enabled. Any leader who wishes to break the regime will unquestionably have the silent majority on their side, and it is quite possible that this majority will not remain silent forever.
This is reason for optimism because if America’s future is to be secured, a confrontation with the regime is inevitable. A society can survive a great many things, but a ruling class that loathes the society it rules is not one of them. The regime has raised a generation of elites to serve as ideological and political suicide bombers. The targets are the fundamental principles of the United States itself. If the regime is not countered, it is unlikely that the republic can endure.
Thankfully, Thatcher proved that powerful institutions once thought invulnerable can be fought and defeated, albeit at great cost. The cost of overcoming the professoriate regime, however, will not be high. No industry will collapse, no communities will be hurled into poverty, no way of life will be destroyed. A great edifice will have fallen, but in doing so it will reveal itself to be no more than an edifice. It is likely that, when they examine the wreckage, people will wonder why it took so long to bring the ugly thing down and replace it with something better.
The person you describe, one with the fortitude, good sense, and foresight to carry out these reforms is almost perfectly embodied in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has already made great inroads in his home state. Unfortunately, he can only lead by example, and will not have a chance to act on a national level for at least four more years. Such a sad thing. Who knows how much more damage will happen until January 2029.
The author confuses a handful of prominent schools with "academia" as a whole. I am a life member of the NRA, a 20 year infantry Marine and - since 2007 - a college professor. There are thousands of colleges and universities that look nothing like what he describes. For every campus hosting (willingly or not) a pro-Palestine protest, there are hundreds doing nothing of the sort.