They Have More Faith in the Market Than I

Glenn Reynolds and Stacy McCain: Heh. Heh. Heh.

One of my favorite lines in Ghostbusters:

Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.

The insulation of the academic cocoon has been thinning for some years now, and what Professor Glenn Reynolds calls The Higher Education Bubble may not yet be bursting, but it seems to have stopped expanding. A left-wing journalist at CounterPunch laments the darkening prospects for the radical intelligentsia:

There are still plenty of left-leaning professors in U.S. colleges and universities. But as an employment sector, higher education has changed. There are now powerful conservatizing trends afoot that will likely lead to the extinction of professors as a left force in U.S. society within a few decades.
One major change is that the expanding academic job market that Jacoby observed is now shrinking. When the market for professors was growing, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s, radicals could get jobs in universities, earn tenure, and do critical intellectual work, even if it was often muted by a desire for conventional academic rewards. Today, tenure-track jobs are fewer and farther between. In response to reduced budgets and out of a desire for a more “flexible” — that is, cheap, pliable, and disposable — labor force, university administrators have cut tenure-track lines, preferring to hire faculty on a temporary, part-time, non-tenure-track basis. . .

Welcome to the real world, you degenerate Bolshevik subversives!

The academy may well be slowly losing ground, but I expect to see continued, and maybe even heightened and public anti-conservative activism out of them, as competition for the ever fewer jobs means even more pressure to conform to the leftist talking points. When you can afford to be more selective, you tend to be.