The Problem of Academic Management
Ignore stock market valuations as irrelevant. American business is in big trouble, and the cause is what I call “academic management” in government, politics, and business. No major business is run logically anymore.
Politics definitely feeds off business, and the left has made a huge effort to control both business and the reporting of economics, but no one wants to talk about the 400-pound gorilla: the resulting bad management.
An old friend once said, “Big business exists for only one reason: to provide bonuses to middle- and upper-level management.” He explained that the public, customers, employees, and stockholders are important, but only to be kept mollified in order to keep bonuses flowing.
Today, although his observation on modern management greed remains accurate, we’ve added intentional bad management, which is what I refer to as “academic management.”
When I was young, I recall that college professors were poorly paid and really just advanced teachers. No one saw them as oracles. Some may have been politically active, and some were published somewhere as relevant in the world, but they were a minority.
I don’t need to illustrate how that has changed. Today, they are often very, very well paid, enjoy benefits few others enjoy, and — as long as they obey the hard left — are well respected and protected. But they are rarely right on any practical scale — any scale of actually producing anything of value to anyone.
A friend’s experience is illustrative. He worked for a middle-sized company that was undergoing a management shift due to the founders aging. The decision was to bring in an “expert,” a college professor who supposedly was going to move the company into a new era, better and stronger.
I’ll not bore you with the details, but the people who knew the market the company was in were pushed aside for overpaid academic “experts,” who knew only how to shuffle money. The company went from #1 in its industry to mediocrity.
I’ll avoid any specific examples in big business, but I ask you to reflect on GM, the banking industry, and oil companies. They have all changed into bastions of political correctness. The USW was given shares in GM as part of the restructuring; it sold them. So much for the workers wanting to be involved in management of the company.
The most obvious change that “academic management” has brought is, of course, anti-white, anti-male, and anti-heterosexual discrimination.
Most Americans are all for equal rights and fair treatment. But discrimination is punishing innocents to reward non-victims. The correct course is to end the problem.
Just today, I read that Judicial Watch and America First Legal had won a case and forced the 7th Circuit to reverse a policy by three judges in the Southern District of Illinois, who had granted special preferences to lawyers based upon sex, ethnicity, and race — in other words, to discourage white, male lawyers from participating.
In the past, we were told that we needed to look past skin color, age, race, ethnicity, and people’s personal life choices and judge people on their merit. Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to it as judging people by the content of their character.
These people forget that you do not respect what you do not earn.
Equality and fairness are a noble goal, but noble is no longer acceptable. Discrimination, at all levels, is now the goal — not to be fair, but to be unfair, as if new unfairness somehow makes up for past unfairness.
Today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is irrelevant to the academics and the hard left. His dream is ignored, completely. The pendulum has swung far past logic.
What do we need to do?
The #1 message that we need to be focused upon is equality.
The #2 message that we need to focus upon is merit, AKA “fairness.”
The #3 message that we need to focus upon is law.
It is not legal to employ discrimination, for any reason. We need to be clear on that. Today’s discrimination is punishment to present citizens for errors in the past, based solely on appearance.
We live in a republic, a system of laws set by elected representatives. The hard left hate that. They know better than the public and look down on the concept of true democracy — government by, for, and of the people. They are superior, and they see the public as rabble and unworthy of democracy.
Ironically, many of them identify themselves as “Democrats,” yet they reject the public’s right to choose the path of their government.
We need everyone to enjoy an equal chance for success, happiness, and peace.
We need people to achieve based on merit. It is the natural way; it is “right and just.”
Most important is law. A serious problem today is that the hard left desires to ignore laws that it does not like, not to change them.
This is widespread. Just one example is in the protests the country saw under Antifa. There were hundreds of fiery riots, with billions in damages to both public and private property. But the leaders were not held to account like the January 6 rioters. The law wasn’t as important as their opinions.
Laws are made to be changed, not selectively enforced. There is no justification for selective enforcement — but Barack Obama’s regime purposefully denied tax exemption to conservative charities but not liberal ones. That is shameful, unjust, and clearly and purely political.
If they believe in implementing the law based on politics, that would require a constitutional amendment. It would need to be shown as the only way to deal with “systemic inequity.” But they do not propose one. Why? Because they do not want to be so obvious.
Our laws preclude the present influx of unvetted “immigrants.” But the present administration ignores the law.
Academic philosophy and management have no firm foundation, and their adherents consider that laws are optional, dependent on their opinions — any given day. But when these vague and ever-changing morals and ethics are placed above the law, then the law ceases to be anything more than a bludgeon.
Overly moralistic religion of the distant past has been replaced with overly moralistic academic philosophy, with no foundation, no standard, and no defined basis for debate. You are for it, in whatever form it takes today, or you are evil.
Pexels.
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