You gotta hand it to the Khmer Rouge.
To be sure, Pol Pot was a bad hombre. “Greatest Monsters of the 20th Century” is a competitive category, but he’s definitely in the running. I’ve been to the Killing Fields, and it’s grim as hell. So is the vibe in Phnom Penh, a charming French-colonial metropolis inhabited by Western perverts and weary locals still bearing the scars of communist terror.
Having said all that, I think we can all agree that Pol Pot was directionally right about academia and its corrosive effect on the social order. His intellectual descendants often talk about abolishing the institutions they don’t like. Pol Pot actually got it done.
Mass murder aside, the Khmer Rouge policy prescription—clear out the universities and put the eggheads to work in the fields—was not without merit. In fact, replicating it here in the United States would do more to advance the common good and restore cultural sanity than any reform currently under consideration.
If you haven’t already, read Tyler Austin Harper’s harrowing article in the Atlantic, “Confessions of a Token Black Professor.” The socialist academic recounts how the insufferably woke overlords at Bates College in Maine drove him to abandon a coveted tenure-track gig.
In 2022, when the Academic Affair Council sought to require every major discipline to offer at least one course on “race, power, privilege, colonialism, and their consequences,” Harper pushed back in defense of academic freedom. They even dismissed his suggestion that minority students would be “harmed” by out-of-their-depth science professors attempting to explain why math is white supremacy.
A professor on the council countered that this could be avoided by fostering a “culture of repair” in the classroom. Harper recalls: “She suggested that perhaps there could be a system in which students of color could call out ‘oops’ or ‘ouch’ if somebody accidentally said something racist—as though these were not young adults with basic human dignity paying minor fortunes to be taught by ostensible subject-matter experts, but toddlers learning not to bite their friends when someone grabbed their toy truck.”
Speaking of toddlers, the University of Michigan is poised to eliminate traditional letter grades for first-semester freshmen in favor of a pass/fail system. It’s supposed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college” and “curb the mental health crisis” among young people rich enough to go to college.
What demands, though? In 2022, almost 75 percent of the undergraduate grades given out at Michigan were A’s, up from 58 percent in 2012. It’s the same at every university. The academics in charge do everything they can to coddle their students from the tyranny of “demands,” which is a great way to ensure an even bigger mental health crisis when they graduate and encounter actual demands for the first time.
Psychotherapist and author Jonathan Alpert said it best, telling the New York Times that students should learn sooner rather than later that “feeling bad” about getting a B-plus “isn’t the same thing as being unwell.”
You know things have gone horribly wrong when Harvard is the voice of reason. The university will soon limit the number of A’s awarded in a given course. Students are already freaking out, which is promising. They’re flocking to easy nonsense classes on the “politics of food” and “dangerous encounters with otherworldly beings in folklore.”
This was “so sad,” one Harvard student told Bloomberg, because the people who go to Harvard “like to be challenged.” Others are concerned that “ambitious” students will be discouraged from pursuing “difficult majors.” Good. If they’re painfully discouraged by a B-plus, they probably aren’t cut out for the hard stuff.
They’ll do just fine as college administrators