Ever since I was little, I wanted to be a scientist. Growing up I learned as much science as I could by supplementing public school with as many non-fiction books as I could find. When I could find no more, I devised math problems and solved them. This activity put my intelligence in the top tenth of one percent and my mathematical skill in the top one-thousandth of one percent. I went on to learn more mathematics in three and a half months from Professor Murray S. Klamkin with the Mathematical Olympiad program than I later learned in three and a half years of college.
The hostility of professors at college and especially my experience looking for work after college left me with the deep abiding realization that academia is a vast incompetent institution with an occasional competent soul struggling within it and that college degrees are at best worthless. This country has had an anti-intellectual culture from the beginning. Nobody documents this better than Dr. Richard Hofstadter in his insightful tome, Anti-intellectualism in American Life. This book is a must-read for every intellectual.
Although the country has been anti-intellectual from the beginning, the axe fell in 1948, when the United Nations declared in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that “Everyone has the right to education. . . . Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.” Upon reflection, one realizes that it is the ignorant, and not the knowledgeable, who “merit” an education. By this declaration, therefore, the United Nations has opened the floodgates of higher education to all–or at least to all the ignorant.
When I was in college, my impression was that professors believed that their calling was to help the ignorant student, for whom they would bend over backwards, while they could not care less about the knowledgeable student. My impression was that the bulk of ignorant students would get together and do homework in a group and that professors would assign the task of grading everything to a graduate assistant, who may never have taken the course being graded and who may have been given no answer key. These assistants were paid the equivalent of minimum wage, as a function of how many homework assignments that they graded–not as a function of time. The rumor was that they would take the commonest answer submitted to be the answer key. Thus, the ignorant student would earn an “A,” while I earned an “F.” Then, I would have to hunt the professor down and make the professor stick his nose in the assignment, like a dog, and regrade it problem by problem–only for him to admit that every answer was correct, whereupon he would give me a “B.” Why not an “A”? The professor would claim that it is his policy never to give an “A” on a regrade.
This was the state of academia then. The anti-intellectuals had already taken over as professors, but their professors in turn had all been intellectual, so they knew their subject matter. Their students–and in some cases the students of their students–are today’s professors. The anti-intellectuals of this latest generation are little monsters–the cancel culture. The cancel culture has metastasized, from professors to college administration to human resources to the board room to the city council and beyond.
Contemporaries love to distinguish generations as Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y (Millennials) Generation Z, and so forth, in something akin to astrology, but the significant difference is that each generation is stupider and less intellectual than the one before. Is it any wonder that 1972 was the last time Americans put a man on the moon?
When I was in college the concern was earning a lower grade because of completing homework individually rather than in a group. Later, researchers began to be ostracized for departing from the scientific consensus, such as by disputing that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) or by disputing the existence of neutron stars and black holes or by disputing man-made global warming. Nowadays not only a professor but anybody can be fired for making any one of several innocuous assertions, such as the following: All lives matter. It is a stupid idea to abolish the local police. Only women menstruate. The right to life is important, but property rights are important too. It is unfair to let an individual who was born with one X chromosome and one Y chromosome compete against women in women’s sports.
In college I recognized the hostility of the professor and the Ph.D., but never in my wildest imaginings would I have foreseen the depth to which academia has now sunk, the degree to which this vast, incompetent institution has polluted our whole society, and the brood of little monsters that the anti-intellectual professor and the anti-intellectual Ph.D. have now bred.
Not long ago, an intellectual might take refuge from academia by working for the big corporation and conducting a little research privately on the side. Today, even the big corporation is fast becoming a hostile environment, and the best situation for the intellectual is to be self-employed. Thus, much of college is a pointless waste of money, especially now that everything taught in college is readily available, at no additional cost, on the Internet. An Associate’s Degree in business, or something similar, from the local community college is now the best education for the intellectual. Fortunately, the Internet also serves as a venue for publishing research results, thereby enabling the intellectual to cut ties completely with the anti-intellectual academic establishment.