If you don’t have Twitter, you won’t see this thread by Teresa M. Bajan, an American political theorist who teaches in Oriol College, Oxford. It’s fantastic. Read on:

Great thread. In the humanities, one price of this ideological homogeneity and leftist fanaticism is the death of entire fields as they are transformed into ideological zombies.

Roger Scruton and other leading Western academics — including prominent leftists like Jacques Derrida — banded together to help the Czechs continue the life of authentic scholarship despite their communist overlords. They formed an underground university that granted accredited degrees.

We need the same here, in the West, today, do we not? How else is the tradition going to survive? We have to stop simply pointing out the bigotries of our educational institutions, in vain hope that those who run them will be shamed into repentance, and instead start our own. But look, any initiative in that direction won’t go anywhere as long as parents remain devoted to the idea that it is more important for their children to succeed on this corrupt world’s terms than to commit themselves to the study of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

You can be as conservative as you like, but if it is more important for you that your child gets into an Ivy League university than that they train for Truth, then you are part of the problem.

UPDATE: A reader who is well-placed within the US governmental bureaucracy writes:

As far as education is concerned in the US, I would argue that the actual value of education and advanced degrees in terms of pure education are extremely limited. I myself attended [small college in flyover country] and I have regularly and reliably engaged with those who attended Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown. Apart from the contacts, connections, and the prestige associated with the degree that serves as the primary means of credentialed access to elite status in our society there is absolutely no reason to waste money on a prestige university degree in terms of pure education.

Certainly I think my own knowledge of [subject area] was not diminished in any way from failing to listen to Christine Fair’s unhinged rants about conservatives and Christians that I believe you have covered on your blog in the past. No doubt some useful knowledge may slip in from time to time, but it is minimal compared to the amount of time that is dedicated to gatekeeping and indoctrination. Some students may believe it, others not, but the majority will go along with the prevailing ideology unless they are genuinely principled or simply contrarian, which is how the left has a reliable flow of human capital to elite positions in the US and has for decades. Conservatives should be seeking to advance Walter Russell Mead’s proposals on either broadening university accreditation or massively constraining it. To date I have seen no evidence whatsoever to indicate that the right is genuinely interested in interfering with the key credentialing organ for access to elite status in our society, instead it is used as outrage fodder to fundraise, rage against, and grift off but I have never seen any American equivalent to French, Polish, and Hungarian efforts to actually take back the universities. These actions of course were part of what has gotten Orban and Duda declared fascists in national security circles, though Macron seems to have avoided that characterization to date due to his status as the ur-centrist technocrat.

I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the American right is dominated by dumb money and activists who are largely grifters and carnival barkers and see things in pure financial terms. This isn’t to say that they don’t care about the issues — many do — but at the end of the day they are looking at things in terms of how much money they are bringing in rather than whether or not they are actually making a difference in the broader cultural sphere. As a result, the right will blow more than half a billion to support Stop the Steal that largely ended up in the pockets of Trump and his cronies but no one has seriously thought about dropping a couple million to get the emerging cadre of Substack intellectuals a broader platform. Someone could finance a dedicated researcher who isn’t a white nationalist and a website to actually track anti-Asian and anti-Semitic attacks from open source … but no one does.

This reader’s comments underscore one of my greatest pet peeves: the absurd insistence of Trump supporters that “he fights,” therefore is worth our esteem and support. Nobody seems to ask if his fighting actually won anything substantial, advanced our goals in a defensible way (e.g., more than executive orders that were overturned as soon as we had a Democratic chief executive), and so forth. Matt Gaetz is the perfect symbol of Trumpist conservatism: no legislative accomplishments, but he was on Fox a lot, owning the libs.