Academic Cabalism
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Great men are almost always bad men. [1]
Universities have introduced a commercial economy that supports technocratic group preferences based upon objective truth, the notion that some things will always be true and other things will always be false - an extreme concept in itself although sometimes commercially viable. Conversely, academic cabalism adheres to extreme theological or political concepts and does not allow individual critical thinking and interpretation in the manner of traditional universities. It involves emotional group think that denies the existence of objective truth and reaches consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas.
Both constructs predicate upon extremism. They apply an ideology where all the facts fit the notions put forward by an infallible group or sociopathic cult leader. [2] Humanities and social sciences now generally support this type of pejorative form of academic cabalism, a political philosophy that takes a moderate position or course of action deemed expedient by the group or leader and denies traditional development in favor of established political norms.
Academic cabalism does not allow the development of concepts; instead, it demands adherence to a preconceived ideology vested in the personal interests of a small group that refuses to allow heterodox thinking. It has become so widespread that it affects every aspect of teaching and thinking in almost every academic pursuit.
Commercialization of the academe has resulted in students paying ever more in tuition for less and less education. They either pay for indoctrination into useless cabals or for training that has very little to do with education. H&SS/LL&C adheres to this last notion in the guise of remedial education for uneducated engineers. In essence, the blind lead the blind with myopic thinking and lack of direction by teachers.
Cabalism avoids the extremes of right and left by adopting an apolitical, cultic ideology comprising a merit-less series of exclusionist group preferences and special interests. For the present purpose then, the terms “cabalism” and “cabalist” respectively describe academic centrism and its adherents.
Cabals exist as cults, or cloning mechanisms, that resemble religious groups that have no theology. Moreover, they develop an exclusionist cultural bias determined by preferred group interests through coercive persuasion and power brokerage. [Cloning Pointy-Heads]
Essentially, cabalism serves the social function of encouraging cohesion and solidarity among group members. It contributes to attitudes of superiority, intolerance, also contempt for groups with different customs and lifestyles. Cabalism permeates the humanities in ways that probably exceed anything experienced previously by intellectuals. Consequently, it does not conform to anything that a democratically-minded public could comprehend.
Today, this threat to intellectual liberty comes from academicians, the apologists of totalitarianism. The attack upon intellectual liberty comes from university administrators and technocrats. Both groups negatively influence the survival of academic freedom.
Proponents of cabalism generally coerce faculty members and students mutually to identify with a single ideology. Consequently, they have formed units that place them beyond good or evil. This “neo-collegiality” or politically correct dogma differs from the traditional collegiality that consisted of academic pride, honesty, trust, and responsibility: positive academic attributes that insured the accumulation of knowledge and the search for truth that has now largely disappeared. Instead, a disorganized and unethical scramble for power and material gain prevails.
Collegiality once meant devotion to a particular way of life with no wish to force it upon others. However, neo-collegiality consists of an absolute desire for power. Accordingly, cabalists try to secure more power and prestige. They do not necessarily always want power for themselves, but for the group into which they have sunk their own individuality.
Cabalists think solely about competitive prestige and posture either positively or negatively. Then, they randomly praise or humiliate outsiders to achieve their chaotic objectives of victory or defeat. Corruption of aesthetic judgment occurs in much the same way that political judgment becomes corrupted by nihilism.
Cabalists reject all distinctions in moral or religious value and willingly reject all previous theories of morality in favor of group preference. They believe that the destruction of existing academic and political structures will help to obtain absolute control for their own particular group.
Political Correctness
The public does not realize the process of indoctrination that exists within universities in the United States: an indoctrination that emanates from technocratic, pseudo-theocratic control which allows the establishment of politically correct cults - religions that have no theology.
Cruel and oppressive dictators for time immemorial used politically correct techniques to set moral standards. Having established an illusion of morality, they used arbitrary zero-tolerance policies to abuse and vilify others in order to achieve power and wealth.
Political correctness corrupts language and conforms to the absolutism of a privileged oligarchy that supports conformist ideology. It classifies as a technocratic, apolitical, aberration. It probably ranks as the most odious aspect of postmodernism. It denies history in an attempt to reject the past. It involves a mimetic "do as I do" type of posturing which demands unanimity on what to accept and what to exclude. [3] Ignorance derives from ideological indoctrination which presents the university as a bastion of integrity and freedom of expression. Gullibility allows despots to sanctify and impose their own politically expedient ideas with impunity.
Traditional tolerance for dissent has evaporated and a systematic and steady erosion of freedom of speech continues to occur. The principles that govern a free society do not allow regulation of speech and the US Constitution explicitly prohibits Congress from making any laws that might abridge freedom of speech or of the press. However, in recent years government has tried to curtail anything they define as "hate speech" by championing political correctness and intimidating journalists.
Political correctness proponents have, in attempts "to improve" personal behavior and language, ruined careers and disrupted or banned public speeches on campuses. Paradoxically, these individuals claim that they champion free speech.
Cabalists do not think, talk, or write about anything except the superiority of their own power group and their group inclinations. Their topics have become so imbued with political correctness and prestige that they defy rational thinking. They involve themselves in atrocious behavior and academic fraud. They retain a remarkable ability to ignore and cover up the illegal actions of other members of their group.
Proponents of this ideology can survive ignorance because their devoted followers do not expect the rational appraisal of facts that results from critical thinking. They rely upon the stimulation of group affinity. They have no neutral areas in their minds and no other interests except the struggle for group power and career advancement.
In the cabal, power corrupts and the absolute power of its leaders corrupts absolutely. A sense of right or wrong, good or evil, disappears. Cabalists condone absolutely any crime that suits their purpose and have no compunction in involving themselves in criminal cover-ups. They can even admit, in an intellectual sense, that their actions go beyond the bounds of morality and legality but they still allow the ideology to rule them. Their political silence insures that loyalty to the cause transcends law.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, pronounces itself as a leader among universities: probably a true statement from an engineering perspective but absolute hogwash when applied to its School of Humanities and Social Sciences (H&SS) and in particular its Department of Language, Literature, and Communication (LL&C). This haven for scientific fraud, political correctness, speech codes, and cabalistic propaganda shows no bounds when individuals come under the influence of its group coercion.
For twenty-two years H&SS defrauded graduate and doctoral students under the auspices of Thomas Phelan, a totally corrupt and unqualified dean. RPI employed John P. Harrington to replace him. Harrington has spent his time issuing a series of misleading statements probably to try to bury Phelan’s corruption with him.
Phelan, an Irish Catholic priest, acted as H&SS dean for 22 years without earning a graduate degree. He passed off a Licentiate in Sacred Theology (STL) as a PhD equivalency. Evidently, nobody at RPI questioned him about it. An STL at that time represented nothing more than a license to preach in the Catholic church and had no academic significance.
Incompetent, Phelan could not give a eulogy in an educated way let alone hold ultimate responsibility for a faculty at a leading university. When he died, RPI President Shirley Ann Jackson published a travesty of false adulation in a letter to the RPI community. She holds ultimate responsibility for multiple violation of civil and human rights and untold damage done to the careers of students and faculty members.
Jackson claimed that: "Dean Phelan was an extraordinary person. He was a professor, dean, historian, and wise counselor. Above all, he was a builder of community who also realized the value of understanding and documenting our rich history. The legacy he has left behind is as grand as the life he lived" - an absolute travesty and the type of thinking that has led to an extreme of corruption and abuse of human and civil rights.
[What Goes Around . . .]
Only politically correct intellectuals could believe some of the historical revisions that abound. Orwell reported that revisionism caused people to think that "during the second world war American troops arrived in Europe not to fight Germans but to crush an English revolution." Now we hear that "the Holocaust never existed."
Fortunately, Hitler disappeared as do most despots; however, only at the expense of strengthening all sorts of petty führers like Gary Judd and Merrill D. Whitburn and now Jackson and Harrington. With them, sanguine behavior that requires loyalty to the group transcends any common decency. Like the animals in Orwell’s farm led by a dysfunctional pig, they display similar traits.
Judd, a perfidious antisemitic Semite, discriminates irrationally between races and religions. Authentic Jews remain Jews by moral choice despite any martyrdom involved. Their ethics, however, serve no purpose for them in hostile social and political environments.
Inauthentic Jews flee Jewish reality and antisemites make them Jews despite themselves. They become Gentiles with a Jewish label. Anti-Semitic Semites stake everything on self-aggrandizement and create an unlivable life that derives pride from their humiliation. They relate to neither authentic nor inauthentic Jews because they have no affinity and no purpose other than parasitic survival. Judd precisely fits into this third category.[Academic Anti-Semitism - WIP]
Whitburn acted as Judd’s equivocating weasel for nineteen years. History has ceased to exist for him because his hunger for power led him in pursuit of subjective truth. He apparently believes that truth emanates only from his own weasel words.
Just like a weasel, Whitburn sucks the content out of the rhetorical egg and replaces it with an unending stream of gobbledegook. His bewildering language confuses and obscures deceitful and unlawful intent. Consequently, both Judd and Whitburn pose a powerful challenge to the impersonal forces of rationalism.
Like Dostoyevsky’s cynical underground man, Rensselaer’s “social scientists” rail against rational thinking and alienate themselves from their surroundings and colleagues while they fulminate against cultures organized by rational means. [4] They accept that two and two make five when Whitburn says so. [5]
A whole PhD class met privately to discuss the hour of baffling rhetoric that they had suffered from Whitburn. He had given garbled instructions for an examination that nobody could possibly understand. The students reached a consensus: “We will throw mud at the wall and see how much sticks”. They later threw their mud and passed the examination with 'A' grades. They scammed the scammer despite the academic fraud and lack of ethics of their action. However, one should not expect an ethical stance from students when they have unethical professors. [Weasel Summation]
The Rensselaer experience shows that absolute loyalty to any group has a devastating effect upon individual reality and critical inquiry. Cabalism, with its group loyalty, endangers the creative impulse and results in falsification and eventual loss of inventive faculties. To any rational person, let alone a rational intellectual, Whitburn's convoluted reasoning and intransigence likens that of the underground man. His moral turpitude precluded any of the values normally expected of a department chair at a prestigious university.
The Scam
H&SS/LL&C controls its graduate students by criteria that insure failure for those students unwilling to accept a sycophantic cloning process. This policy insures very few new PhDs enter the job market to threaten insecure and incompetent faculty members. Whitburn devised a program that required four courses, each taught and controlled by a tenured professor. These mainly unpublished individuals presented totally unprepared orations to classes. The content had virtually no bearing on the course descriptions. Some instructors attend classes drunk and others promoted discussion on anything and everything to avoid preparation.
Professors for required courses frequently do not show up for class at all. Grading exists as a frivolous, inconsistent, subjective, and malicious process. This academic circus completely negates the accumulation of knowledge ideal and precludes critical inquiry. It also promotes fraudulent research and publication of exaggerated findings.
LL&C cabal does not educate; instead it operates a three-ring extravaganza that aggrandizes and enriches university officials and excludes almost everyone else. It follows a totalitarian ideology enforced by censorship and denial of constitutional rights.
A graduate student from another department became incensed after paying tuition then having to listen to sixteen weeks of inane mumbo jumbo. He felt that he had a potential course of legal action because of the fraudulent description of the course, the manipulation of grades, and subsequent forgery to cover up those activities.
At the final session, the student became so incensed that he made a recording of Whitburn's summation as evidence so that he could sue the university later. The author obtained a copy of the tape and transcribed it verbatim in order to support his contentions. The final session at which Whitburn let forth cost fifteen doctoral students $121.00/hr each for a total $1,815. The required 3-credit course cost each student $4,363.00 for a class total of $65,445.00.
Conclusion
When one understands the nature of thought, then one understands the nature of reality as a whole. The rational mind manifests itself in the subjective consciousness and develops from a materialistic and subjectivistic state to a state of universal and rational consciousness. Cabalism reverses this procedure so that purely materialistic and subjectivistic outcomes become the goal.
Cabalistic impulses force individuals to submerge the ego as a constant element of survival. This causes a distillation of the primitive, irrational drives that menace a democratic society. [6] Cabalism occurs because both faculty members and students supinely accept the loss of individual freedom. Instead, they accept group ideologies that bring absolute corruption ever near.
Sociopathic, they transform historical truth into ideological myth then intellectual barbarism. In the case of Whitburn, his sociopathic personality characterized amorality and lack of affect. His antisocial personality disorder transferred his latent violence onto another person then had him arrested on trumped up charges.
The public should cringe when they realize that history has repeated itself. Individuals fail to realize that neglect to address issues with particularity leaves them incapable of recognizing aberrant past behavior that has reappeared in a new guise.
Apart from the career goals of a bunch of self-serving and ignorant buffoons what does H&SS/LL&C achieve?
How can a faculty that cannot critically inquire teach engineers technical and graphic communication?
Hannah Arendt classified Eichmann as a buffoon. His inability to speak intelligently closely paralleled his inability to think. Similarly, the problem today stems from faculty indifference and an inability to think coupled with increasingly psychotic behavior. It spawns in the humanities among malevolent clowns, many of whom possess very little intelligence and aspire to teach technical subjects in which they have no education, training or aptitude.
At his trial, Eichmann showed no remorse. His principal regret was that his career had not advanced further. He had no personal hatred of Jews although driven by careerism he became one of the chief functionaries in organizing the Shoah. He became a cog in a bureaucratic machine that governed the Holocaust. Like his modern counterparts, he showed how bureaucrats do not feel any responsibility for what they do, despite criminal culpability. [Apologia]
Complaints abound that public disclosure of academic wrongdoing injures innocent faculty members and students: they become guilty by association. Unfortunately, innocent people do have their reputations damaged by these disclosures; however, many of them have only themselves to blame. They have allowed absolutist administrators to deny academic freedom and due process for many years. Now they will probably pay the price for their benign neglect. However, they willingly succumbed to the coercive persuasion and dysfunctional behavior of their colleagues. They acted in ways inconsistent with their usual integrity. That makes them just as guilty as the perpetrators.
References
1. John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (Lord Acton)
In a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton (1887).
2. Sonia B. Orwell, and Ian Angus, 39.
Letter to H. J. Willmett. As I Please: 1943-1945.
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell 3,
(London, England: Secker & Warburg (Penguin). 1970), 3:177-78, 410-29.
3. Thomas F. Bertonneau.
The Contagion of Excited Purpose, or, Henry James and the New Conformism.
Academic Questions, 11(2): (Spring 98), 1998, 19, 21, 28, 30, 32.
4. Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Mirra Ginsberg (trans).
Notes from Underground.
(New York, NY: Bantam Books. 1974).
5. Bertrand Russell.
Power: A New Social Analysis.
(New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1939), 1:376.
6. Richard I. Smyer.
Primal Dream and Primal Crime: Orwell's Development as a Psychological Novelist.
(Columbia, MI: University of Missouri Press), 1979, 113.
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
© Copyright 1996 by Paul Trummel |
|||||||||||||||||||
