"Our Universities have become our most intellectually corrupt institutions." (Michael Barone)

Thirty years ago or even ten years ago I would have thought Mr. Barone -whom I respect- was exaggerating. Then I read I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS and attending the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, Va.
"Opinions have to be circulated like Samizdat, the authors taking care not to have their identities discovered by their leftist professors. He laughingly told us that there are many others like him, driven into intellectual hiding, sharing their views privately. He and his friends are careful not to express their views openly in an online forum or weblog. Others have paid too high a price for criticizing P.C. dogma.

" If you are outed as a conservative it could endanger future academic and job prospects. "

This is very true. As I have found out continuously in my modest career, such as it is as a rural schoolmaster, it is always better to go along with the PC liberal/feminist/Deweyite Teacher Ed Establishment. Getting a job as a TA and the tuition breaks that come with it is a make or break for any man like me with a wife and three children and a mortgage to meet. Essentially, despite the fact that I was Renshaw Fellow at UVA 2004-2005 and all my tuition was paid the fact that I earned ZERO dollars at the Curry School (despite being promised a position as a TA initially) from January to July 2005 essentially made further studies for me a mere exercise in personal vanity. Though it was a difficult decision after having worked so hard and made so many sacrifices both personal and financial to become the Renshaw Fellow I came to the conclusion that the Curry School was, essentially an enemy institution. Most of my friends were foreigners -only they seemed to respect men of faith and honor- or non-students. I had visited UVA once before in 1975 while I was serving in the Marine Corps Reserve. I found the institution very much changed and not changed for the better. If you had told me in 1975 I would have had more friends and I would be appreciate more by person who attended Liberty University I would not have believed it. Yet the same forces that drove Liberty University students from the UVA campus -many of the students there have parents or relatives who studied at UVA- made my stay at UVA very problematic. UVA was more moderate that Teacher's College or Stamford and less overtly anti-traditionalist but essentially it was a Deweyite and Sangerite Temple of PC Secular Orthodoxy. Traditionalists are considered by most to be an artifact of the dead past. As the last of the non-Affirmative Action Era hires (yes, most white Southern Males) retires UVA will essentially cease to be a school with any diversity (in the sense of being a Southern school at all). It will just become a safety school for Yale, Columbia and NYU applicants and yet another part of the Liberal New York-Boston-San Francisco-LA Establishment. One of the most profound impressions I had at UVA was that the indigenous Southerners were essentially being dispossessed from their city. Blue Charlottesville -strongly for Kerry like Princeton- was a Carpertbagger's Foothold. More than anything else Charlottesville reminded me of Inverness or Perth (Scotland) circa 2000. How utterly the Highlanders were defeated, cleared and dispossessed; one was much more likely to hear French or Finnish or German than Gaelic. In Charlottesville New Jersey and Brooklyn accents were more common among students and professors than dulcet Southern drawls. The South too was utterly defeated and occupied and is struggling not to be utterly destroyed and subsumed by Secularist Yankeedom. This struggle is represented in part by the rejection of young Southern men of higher education and their embrace of the military and private industry (mining, trucking and construction). In the West Virginia mine disaster recently there were no ardent feminists among the dead. I wonder why not. Why aren't the feminists lining up to break the glass ceiling or in this case coal black mine floor? Of course, we know the answer. Such other worldy non-productive pseudo-intellectualism can only thrive in an artificial state-subsidized environment like the Dewite Temple of Orthodox Deweyism that is the Curry School and many other schools of teacher-ed. Yes, there were nice people there and nice books in the library but it was not an atmosphere of great intellectual freedom nor originality nor openness but essential a place where doctrine was taught and where most learned the talk and learned to be above all subservient.

Non teachers and citizens have admired me for my stands on education reform, particularly bilingual education. I am particularly proud that I helped Prop 227 pass by a landslide in 1998. Ron Unz himself came over to tell me and shake my hand the night of the election at the Omni hotel and told me my help in the campaign was "very important" . The teachers who opposed the Union and who volunteered like me helped make the difference. I worked as a field representative,
translator, spokesperson for the campaingn on radio and on TV as well well as a source for Spanish speaking bilingual volunteers. In one of the great ironies of that campaign, since we were tarred as "English-only" our Spanish language material was of vastly superior quality than that of the pro-bilingual NENLI crowd that is NON-English Native Langauge Instruction ("Spanish-only"). But I lost many friends and made many enemies. To this day some Hispanic administrators will not even speak to me or acknowledge me. I cannot say that I did what I did for personal gain and I realized the risks. But when the pros were gone I was left isolated and I think it is true to say I paid a very high price professionally. Of course, a tendured teacher cannot be easily fired but he can be punished as I have. He can be exiled from his classroom, sent to a distant rodent-infested portable classroom without technology and removed permanently from his AP classes. I have been an AP reader and Adjunct Faculty for ETS for many years and yet ironically the only AP students I have had for years are private students whose parents hire me due to my reputation as a maker of "5's" and "4's" in AP Spanish AP Spanish Literature and AP US history. None of my private students have ever scored lower than a 4 on any of these exams and remarkably several never took the class in school (it was no offered or they were home-schoolers). For a teacher who cares about content and curriculum this is probably the worst punishment one can receive. If I were a single man I would have resigned and quit teaching by now. As it is I am just biding my time for an interdistirct transferr and planning for my early retirement. This is how mavericks are rewarded. But there is a world beyond the Deweyite and largely anti-intellectual public schools. There is the life of books, there is religious education and there is poetry. And having been a classroom teacher for 18 years I have already produced a handsome cohort of teachers who carry with them some of my paideia of education.

And then there is the heartland. There are the places like Kearney, Englewood and Ridgefield, New Jersey-where I grew up as a small boy and where I always felt more at home there than anywhere else especially in the ceilidhs of ethnic enclaves found around St. Patrick's in Jersey City and St. Cecilia's in Kearney. There one was likely to find not merely Irish people but Islanders and Govan folk who were mostly Islanders, Highlanders and Irish folk with some Glaswegian seasoning.

I agree with Barone that Judge Alito is a good example of the American virtues that once abounded in all of our finer universities "intellectual excellence" AND patriotism, "free inquiry, civility in the face of disagreement" not the humorless terror of the PC Inquistion. Once again I suggest everyone read I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS carefully. This is a funny and satirical book in the vein of Sinclair Lewis -I find ironic echos of ELMER GANTRY in Tom Wolfe's book. But I cannot help thinking the same thing about this book that I felt about JARHEAD (the book and especially the movie).

If I were Bin Laden I would translate these American cultural artifacts, these Satyricon's of their time for all the Islamic world to see. For such as world -like the Last Days of Pompeii- begs destruction. Things that cannot be sustained of course will not be sustained. This is why we must seek knowledge and true wisdom in the Solomonic and Aristotilean sense.

No one knows all the reasons for the Fall of the Roman Empire but all though there were many different and interlocking root causes,one was clearly the philosophical bankruptcy of the exhausted Pagan West. The Empire was wealthy and the living was easy and too many young men and women abandoned traditions, eschewed family life, embraced a cult of childlessness (a culture of Death) and stopped thinking as well. They stopped having faith in the future and only thought of themselves and having a Good Time. They had forgotten to remember the people from which they came and learn with humility that they lived off the surplus courage, work and wealth of the previous generations.

In America, too, the pursit of Mammon and temporary pleasure (hedonism in all its forms) is suffocating the mind of youth and corrupting the soul, heart and virtu of society. I have been to the Forum and to Clonmacnoice and to Ephesus and the ruins of Carthage. What wil be the lasting monument of this age. Elliot said it would be the remains of asphalt roads and thousands of lost golf balls.

Aye, "Except for the Lord...the watchman waketh in vain." Yet, I have an eternal hope that what is good and true and pure will endure and perhaps some of it will survive the Holocaust that is to come to help inspire a New Age when this bold but dying one is over and America once emulation of the world is just a echo as Troy is just an echo.

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