Systemic NaifismStop sending your child and your money to American universities.
Jason Morgan
Apr 18, 2023
Have you heard of the Madison Speakeasy? Probably not. Almost nobody has. But for a year or so during the mid-Aughts, the Madison Speakeasy was a glimmer of hope for a few conservatives on the University of Wisconsin’s flagship campus.
The Madison Speakeasy was a newspaper, kind of. I founded it as a dissertator at the U.W. I got a lot of help from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), which flew someone out to Madison to teach me and a hearty band of fellow non-leftists how to start and run a publication.
Undergrads and fellow grad students wrote articles for the Speakeasy for free. One talented undergrad designed the logo (a silhouetted whispering man in a fedora, very cheeky and noir). Professor John McAdams (1945-2021), the wonderful truth-blurter at Marquette, agreed to write an article for the Speakeasy, gratis, which I published with gratitude and pride.
The name of the newspaper tells you pretty much all you need to know about what it was and why I started it. I was fed up with the hall monitor-ism of U.W., sick of the trammeled discourse. Friends with roots in the Middle East, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and even exotic locales in northern Wisconsin and I were, apparently, racists, fascists, bigots, and “homophobes” for snickering at groupthink and calling out arrant nonsense.
It didn’t really matter what the topic was. Sexuality, race, abortion, congressional spending, there was only one acceptable opinion at the University of Wisconsin. And those who disagreed, from either a right or a left standpoint—doctrinaire Marxists were as hated in Madison as were Second Amendment Republicans—were anathema. So, my fellows and I did what any sane person on a college campus would do. We laughed at the lunatics and rubbed their noses in their lunacy.
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The Madison Speakeasy was an all-papyrus endeavor that registered hardly a ripple in its reality-challenged hometown. Even so, it was fun, and I am very glad I did it.
And yet, as the years have gone by, I have become less sure that I would want to do it again. It is not that the Madison Speakeasy was the problem. It was its presence on a college campus. We non-lunatics were laughing at the sea of idiot liberals around us. But maybe the joke was on us.
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I have not yet seen bumper stickers reading “My Child and My Money Go To Sing Sing” or sweatshirts emblazoned with “Proud Alumni of Leavenworth.” But why not? What is the difference between one institution packed with miscreants and another? The real fault of the university problem therefore lies with the parents. By paying scalper-rate tuition and buying all the paraphernalia that university bookstores sell at gouging prices, parents legitimize and perpetuate what is essentially an anti-social institution, namely, American higher ed.
It is naive to expect a late teen to simmer in a witch’s brew of “sex positivity,” overt racism, transgender propaganda, fake history, and compulsive rioting, and then come back for Thanksgiving break happy and well-adjusted. It is even more naive—structurally naive—to hand one’s offspring over as a pawn for universities desperate to appear normal so other parents will also spring the trap. It’s systemic naifism.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/systemic-naifism/
