Why America is Becoming a Second-World Nation and California is in the Crosshairs

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

Part 4 of a 4 Part Series

By Marilyn Dudley-Flores, Ph.D
CEO
OPS-Alaska

Moon Shot: Piercing the Corporate Academic Veil

Academe has typically been a “black box” for politicians. Its ways and means originate in the Middle Ages and seem esoteric to anyone on the outside. In the United States, that condition worsened after astronauts landed on the Moon. Such a lofty goal won, academic production no longer particularly served the national interests in a Space Race and a Cold War.

Legislators and state and federal executive turned their attentions elsewhere, abdicating their authority in large part over American Academe and allowing colleges and universities to govern themselves without much oversight. Without feet to the fire and without the influx of “national interest” funds, the horizons of academic administrators have shrunk to the confines of their campuses, behind the window dressing of an intellectual façade, where unchecked, their personal empire building has proceeded at the expense of cultivating the American brain trust. When challenged about their expenditures, those administrators in the large public academic systems typically retort that their hands are tied because of a paucity of state and federal funding. We hear this refrain continually here in California.

Now, loftier goals loom: overwhelming threats to civilization, including American civilization, and even human survival – goals that would now not seem so insurmountable had the level of science and technological progress been able to multiply from the height of the Apollo Era. Now, where is America’s “knowledge troops” needed to engage the problems? My message here is: If policymakers do not start looking at Academe as the most important industry in the United States and penetrate the corporate veil that a few thousand top postsecondary administrators have erected around their activities, then America will not lead in the contributions to the “big science, great policies” problems of the world. Those who mitigate those problems will lead the world system of societies.