Oh, and we mandated equal funding for student organizations. When I was in school, it was a constant battle for our conservative paper to get funded, though the Marxist ones (including ones run by nonstudents!) always got a boatload of cash. And we got conservative rich guys to throw a few bucks at some underemployed young conservative lawyers to fund the cases.
Administrators would always, always do the easiest thing. The easiest thing had been buckling under to the faculty fascists. But when we got some lawyers involved, we would watch those administrators get super-duper concerned about things like free speech, nondiscrimination, and due process.
There is still a place for academia in America, of course. Except today it is a smaller place for fewer people, but with much more rigorous standards and a true dedication to knowledge and free inquiry. Yesterday, it was a racket and a joke, and it was ruining young lives with debt incurred earning useless degrees in silly subjects. Today it adds value to society—and conservatives are free to participate in it again.
Academia made us its enemy. We had no second thoughts when we helped the market ruthlessly reform it. Academia as we knew it was doomed anyway by economics and technology. We constitutional conservatives simply helped hasten its death and rebirth.
And we smiled as we did.
Ted Jindal (Technology Consultant)
As a UC Berkeley graduate (class of 2010), Jindal certainly has impressive academic credentials. However, even though he is the owner of a multimillion-dollar technology company, he is critical of the academic world that he came from.
My computer science degree was useful to me. It helped me do my actual work—you can’t say that about people like my roommate in the dorms. He was a sociology major, and last I heard he was a waiter at a steakhouse in Long Beach.
Technology changed the nature of college. These professors had been teaching the same way for centuries; then suddenly their whole world was turned upside down. What was the advantage of sitting in a giant hall with 500 other sophomores to hear some famous professor if you could do it in your house, at a time you chose, for a hundredth the cost—and rewind it if you missed something? Suddenly, these academic superstores became totally fungible.
Technology was going to force change regardless, but the arrogance of academia took away any incentive to provide them a soft landing. The old university model made its bed, and it died in it.
Delbert Windbridge (Liberal Professor)
Professor Windbridge of Duke University has the reputation of being an unhappy man. A staunch liberal, he joined the English Department in 2012 as a graduate student largely on the strength of his paper, The Song of the Phallus: Gender Identity Issues in Fifties Television Situation Comedy.
He was well known for packing auditoriums during his first two decades at the school with notoriously easy courses that included viewings of such vintage television programs as Leave It to Beaver and Three’s Company, followed by what the syllabus described as “an analysis from a Marxist, feminist, and genderqueered perspective.”
In 2017, a conservative student’s covert cell phone video of him went viral, getting over three million views. It showed him spending 15 tearful minutes apologizing to one of his sociology classes for “being an unconscious participant in the calculated system of male patriarchal, heteronormative oppression” and, specifically, “for this accursed penis I must bear.” After being auto tuned and remixed by an enterprising DJ in Dubrovnik, a version of the rant, entitled “Accursed Penis,” backed by heavy bass and drums, became a minor dance club hit, reaching number four on the Serbo-Croatian music charts.
Today he is particularly unhappy. It is his last day at Duke. He was terminated when only three students signed up for his seminar, “Hip Hop Music and American Racism: Voices of Funky Resistance”—and two dropped it before the first class.
Tenure used to protect scholars like me who perhaps did work that challenged the dominant paradigm. The conservatives invaded this safe space and eliminated it.
They ruined the university—they ruined the whole idea of a university as a place where intellectuals like myself were able to think about and write on important academic subjects without having to be “productive” [Professor Windbridge pauses to emphasize the word with air quotes] or to respond to the so-called “needs” of the students.
The conservatives started by cutting funding to academia. They said we weren’t preparing students for the real world. My work is not about getting some privileged white male a job. It’s about building consciousness to the racism, sexism, and homophobia that permeates every facet of society. When student loans were cut by these fascists, suddenly students had to pay more of their own expenses and they started forgoing classes like mine that focused on social justice for ones that could get them employed. Ridiculous!
Pretty soon I was being asked to do online courses, but that cut into my academic studies. I’d been working on my magnum opus, The Male Vagina: Poetry and Dance as a Counterpoint to Phallocentrism, for six years and I needed to devote my time to finishing it, not to teaching students. We had adjuncts for doing that.
Well, when the new dean—a damn conservative!—told us he was ending tenure and we’d have to demonstrate a positive costs/benefits ratio every year to stay on, well, we told him we would all quit.
And that bastard looked at us and said, “Great. Let me help you pack, because for every one of you there are ten other hacks with doctorates in bullshit studies who’d love to have your jobs at half the pay.” He called us “hacks”! Can you imagine?
Well, we stayed, but of course we made that sacrifice only for the students’ sake.
Chapter Twelve: The Conservative Alternative
With the election of a conservative president and a conservative Congress in 2024, conservatives had achieved the goal of every guerrilla movement and assumed real power. Now they would act—sometimes ruthlessly—to not only transition the government back to one of small ends and limited means but to ensure that the left could not seize control again.
The insurgency succeeded because it didn’t limit itself to one narrow sliver of society. Certainly, actions like targeting academia and other liberal institutions were key over the long term, but those were tactics. The strategy, to the extent there was a strategy, was to change the culture, because if you changed the culture you prevented rollback in the institutions.
It was not merely about replacing constitutional conservatives in the top posts in the institutions. It was about creating a culture that defaulted to constitutional conservative values. But doing that meant operating under the radar until they were ready to strike. And then it meant retaking the institutions the Gramscians had overtaken a generation before.
Tony “Gator” McCoy (Chief Advisor to President Carrie Marlowe)
In the White House with President Marlowe, we intended from day one to make conservative change permanent. Marlowe had us aggressively move to consolidate conservative power by exploiting her legislative majorities both in Congress and the states. We had a lot of work to do undoing the damage—we had to literally revoke thousands of executive orders, fire thousands of bureaucrats, and remake the Supreme Court even as we faced down Iran.