Opinion
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March 17, 2020 (American Thinker) — When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. When life hands you the coronavirus, start looking at all the good that can come from it. In that regard, if you haven't already read Gordon Wysong's delightful article about the benefits that can flow to America from its brush with coronavirus (“The Coronavirus Will Save America“), you should. It will lift your spirits.

In keeping with Mr. Wysong's premise, here's one more beneficial change that might flow from the coronavirus interlude in America: it may weaken America's institutions of higher indoctrination, also known as America's colleges and universities.

It's common knowledge that American academia is staffed almost entirely with Democrats:

There are more than 10 professors affiliated with the Democratic Party for every faculty member who is a registered Republican, according to a new study.

Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business management at Brooklyn College, reviewed the party affiliations of 8,688 tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors at 51 of the top 60 liberal arts colleges listed in U.S. News and World Report's 2017 rankings.

Nearly 60 percent of all faculty members were registered as either a Republican or a Democrat, and of that sample, there were 10.4 times as many Democrats as Republicans.

“The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic,” Mr. Langbert wrote in an article published by the National Association of Scholars. “Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free — having zero Republicans.”

This single-minded leftist staffing, which has gone on for decades now, has released into America all sorts of pernicious ideas. These ideas include hatred for America and her institutions, demands to end free speech, climate change madness, gender insanity, support for socialism, identity politics, racial segregation, an un-American anti-Semitism, and lots of ignorance. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the poster child for the “un-educating” that goes on in academia.)

The best thing that could happen to America would be for these institutions to weaken. One of the ways is to withdraw all taxpayer funds from these institutions unless the funds go to hardcore science in the service of national defense or health. Another way is to end the Obama-era program that eliminated the old federal guaranteed loan program and funneled all loans through the Department of Education, which made student loans explode. Both these ideas require unlikely congressional action.

It turns out that there's another way for these institutions to weaken: have a mass panic about the coronavirus. Colleges across America are sending kids home. For most, the remainder of the semester will be through online education. Being at a remove from the campus ethos instantly dilutes the power of propaganda. If young people aren't surrounded all the time by mini-revolutionaries, there's less likelihood that the nice, feminine daughter you raised will turn into a howling, man-hating feminist.

Online education also means that colleges need less money because there aren't students on campus. The enormous administrative staffs that are primarily responsible for the increase in college costs become unnecessary.

It turns out that there's another, unexpected upside to the coronavirus, which is that the changes to academia will take foreign money, especially Chinese money, out of college campuses. At the Daily Caller, in an article that's behind the Patriots paywall, Marlo Safi explains that “U.S. Colleges May Suffer Billions in Revenue Loss Due to Coronavirus Travel Restrictions.”

According to Safi, Trump's travel restrictions, if they continue into the next semester, will keep almost 370,000 Chinese students and around 700,000 other international students off of America's campuses. These students are all valuable because they pay full fare, with no discounts or scholarships.

The coronavirus may also force American campuses to cut their academic ties with China. The Confucius Institute is a Chinese government program that has a presence at myriad American colleges and universities. Although it's ostensibly meant just to promote Chinese language and culture, the Chinese government uses the Confucius Institute as a propaganda tool. We've also recently seen that embracing China too closely is literally unhealthy for the West.

Another example of problems from ties that are too close between China and academia is the case of Charles Lieber, a professor in Harvard's Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department. In January, Lieber was arrested for making hundreds of thousands of dollars stealing American research and technology and selling it to China. Harvard's close relationship with China, no doubt, made that easy to do.

This video from last September has a lot of good information about the reason why Chinese national students are flooding American colleges and universities:

Published with permission from the American Thinker.