Podcast: The Three Whisky Happy Hour: College Shop Talk

“Lucretia” and I had fully intended to work through our long-promised (or is it that threatened?) and now thrice-postponed seminar on the philosophical roots of leftist snobbishness and condescension, but we got diverted—strange that this keeps happening—by some notable campus news stories from last week. Naturally there were several stories of colleges disgracing themselves, capitulating to the student mob in the usual cowardly fashion (Haverford, Smith), but one university (yay Chicago!) showing how to tell the whiny mob to stuff it. So we ended up talking shop about the whole scene.

But wait—there’s more! The financial unsustainability of higher education is starting to show up in significant layoffs at last: employment is higher education institutions is down more than 10 percent since COVID hit, taking total college employment to a level not seen since before the housing crisis of 2008. Several universities are now starting to shrink core tenured core faculty positions, and closing down some liberal arts departments. But before you say “good riddance,” we note that the politicized departments of “gender studies” and such aren’t on the chopping block, and that we risk cutting down the tall trees and leaving the zoo animals unaffected.

We round off the episode with a visit to the local gun store, a few fond recollections of the late Walter Williams, and some of the usual bickering over whisky and stemware preferences, which caused me to debut the first in a series of campaign-style attack ads directed at “Lucretia.” Time to drink up! (And yes, I did swap out the exit music for this week’s episode, because it fit in an obscure way with the originally intended topic. You’ll just have to suffer with it.)

You know what to do now: listen here, or over with our hosts at Ricochet.

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