Why Aren't Universities Managed by Government?

Paul Kengor at The American Thinker has a thought provoking post about universities and how they have escaped scrutiny from high costs, high salaries and wasteful spending despite receiving billions of dollars from Uncle Sam. With the recent TARP funding, many Americans seem to have no problem with any new law pertaining to the TARP recipients, whether or not the bank wanted or needed the money in the first place. Restrictions on pay? Fine. Restrictions on sales or training events in Las Vegas? Fine. 90% tax rates on bonuses? Fine.

But with universities, it's a different story - even though college professors are perhaps the best-paid hourly employees in the nation.

Here's a question for Senator Chuck Schumer's staff: Have you compared the wage of these folks to the custodians who clean their offices? How about professors in Feminist Studies at Cal-Berkeley or at Columbia Teachers College vs. the stiffs who prepare their food in the cafeteria? The typical tenured professor spends under 10 hours per week in the classroom, and gets at least five full months of paid vacation. No one, from the little library lady to a GM fat-cat, enjoys those perks.

I think the American Thinker nails it on the rationale for the absence of government outrage:

Alas, here's the dirty little secret: Liberal Democrats see no reason to investigate universities. Why? Because colleges serve as the popular front for advancing the left's agenda. They are essentially recruiting grounds for Democratic Party voters and activists.

Our universities are the most monolithic institutions in America. There may be more ideological diversity in the Taliban. Here are few figures:

A 2007 study by sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University found that liberal faculty outnumber conservatives by 11-1 among social scientists and 13-1 among humanities professors. That's consistent with a long line of surveys, which tend to find self-identified liberals around 80-90% and conservatives around 10%.

This should be no surprise to conservatives. The Left (and in fact, Leftists throughout history) has long desired control over the educational system to brainwash the young with socialist, politically correct garbage that takes years to flush from the system. Unfortunately, the Left has succeeded in its control, with the liberal National Education Association controlling public education and liberal professors and bureaucrats controlling secondary education.

It's why most Americans don't begin to turn conservative until after they've worked, paid taxes and started a family. Despite all this control, the U.S. is still generally a 50/50 country whose principles tend to lean slightly right (it's why even liberal Presidents have to run as conservatives these days). Imagine if our educational system were actually representative of the nation as a whole? Liberalism would die.