Hereditary ailments are a useful comparison to understand the current problems with American higher education. Doctors can trace patients’ family medical histories to approximate higher risks for diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. A patient’s genealogy impacts how that individual lives today.
Similarly, the genealogy of the university, as a Western social institution, helps explain how colleges came to be disposed to structural ailments.
From a genealogical perspective, the institutional liberal bias that Campus Reform covers is in large part due to higher education’s historically complex, often love-hate relationship with capitalism. Universities have come to love the free market when alumni donations, football franchises, and new flagship buildings suit them. But in many ways, they also refuse to operate as a business – even a non-profit one – and posture that responding to market forces is beneath them when either popular criticism or overspending hit.
The bottom line: American colleges and universities have a relationship of convenience to free market capitalism because they are genealogically pre-capitalist institutions. And that historical legacy accounts for how they indoctrinate students with leftist ideologies.