Academia suffered a big defeat today, as the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment, which bars federal funding for universities that ban military recruiters from their campuses.
The case was a cause celbre among professors who believe they have a God-given right to government funding, and who usually interpret the attachment of any conditions to their access to the taxpayers' largess as some kind of insidious, fascist attempt to enslave the entire galaxy, beginning with American academics.
The same dynamic is at play in the current battle over a proposed bill to create an advisory board to evaluate the effectiveness of the government's Title VI subsidies, which fund university-level foreign language studies. Needless to say, academics are mortally offended by the notion of having their work evaluated for effectiveness.
With an unshakeable belief in its right to virtually unlimited dollops of government cash, and an equally firm rejection of the entire concept of accountability, academia functions as a self-contained mini-economy that would make Karl Marx proud. It's about the closest thing to pure socialism this country has ever produced.
