Correcting Higher Education as a Funding Mechanism for Nonsense

The story of the University of Rhode Island professor who found it worth his while to diminish the Patriots’ star quarterback Tom Brady raises questions about the role of higher education — and especially public higher education:

Titled “Making American White Men Great Again: Tom Brady, Donald Trump, and the Allure of White Male Omnipotence in Post-Obama America,” the chapter attempts to provide evidence to back up Kusz’s suggestion that, like President Donald Trump, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady has gained popularity due to the “latest wave of white rage and white supremacy” that he says developed since the Obama presidency alongside a “disturbing racial reaction among white conservatives in response to the idea that a black man would be [president].” …

Kusz zeroes in on “the complex racial, gender, and class meanings that have been articulated with Brady’s body and his performances of white masculinity in the context of a backlash against the Obama presidency” and of “Trumpism,” which he claims is also rooted in both race and gender.

As a socio-economic matter, the question is whether society benefits by creating a sinecure for somebody to become an expert “on the intersection between sport, media, and contemporary cultural politics.”  As a niche specialty, the answer is probably “yes.”  The dominant culture benefits from challenges around its fringes, with radicals prodding our assumptions and highlighting our weaknesses.

The problem arises when the radicals become the dominant culture, as they have in higher education and, increasingly, the rest of elite society.  They become like an autoimmune disorder, attacking the society’s healthy attributes as well as its unhealthy ones.

This points to a practical question:  How should a university deal with a figure like Professor Kusz?  We can hazard to estimate that his new-found fame hurts the university’s reputation and undermines good will among the public — and it is, after all, a public university.  When budget time comes around, the university’s will be that much more difficult to sell because people are associating the funding with nonsense like Kusz’s scholarship.

One answer, perhaps, can be found in the identity politics activism of the past.  We may not like it, but that is how the doyens of academia think of things, and if Mr. Kusz’s work were pointed in the opposite ideological direction, we know very well what would be happening.  If (and it would be a big “if”) he managed to keep his job in the uproar, activists would demand new collegiate structures to advance their own causes.  There would be demands for more money for multicultural studies, new dedicated office space, new professorships, and so on.

Maybe demanding the same for more-traditional or conservative views would provide some corrective.  At the very least, it would give a sizable portion of the population a little comfort that they aren’t completely alienated from their state’s higher education system.

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