And given California is governed by liberal Democrats, supported by liberal Democratic college and university faculty, the faculty now going on strike have only themselves to blame for the problems they suffer in this state. Yet they’re still griping.
Well, what did they expect? The liberal academics backed high taxes, restrictive land-use policies, and strangling regulations of every kind on industry, real estate development, and even the middle class. The result hurts us all. But few of us get our salaries paid for by the taxpayers the way they do.
There’s a special political problem in university and college areas. When I was state Sen. John Moorlach’s press secretary in 2020 during his re-election campaign, the University of California–Irvine was in his district. It was a swamp of peristaltic Democratic voters comprised largely of left-wing students and faculty members. His victorious opponent, current Sen. Dave Min (D-Irvine), was even a left-wing law professor, brought to the Law School faculty by left-wing stalwart Erwin Chemerinsky, now head of UC’s left-wing law school.
Calmatters reported on one UCLA worker, “Aya Konishi, a doctoral student in the sociology department, said she regularly commutes two hours round-trip between West Hollywood and Westwood because her current salary prevents her from living closer to campus. Even so, she said, half of her $2,400 monthly salary still goes toward rent.”
Konishi herself said, “For many of us, more than 30 percent of our paycheck every month goes towards rent. And that’s a very huge issue that I think applies to many, many people in our union.”
A good question here is: What exactly is a degree in left-wing sociology worth nowadays? Why are taxpayers subsidizing it? Why are students wasting their time on it, while running up tens of thousands of dollars in debt? Sociology is a noble field, but currently one suffering some of the most strict left-wing indoctrination around. Like so many of these humanities departments, sociology has become anti-intellectual, even anti-reason.
According to the study of faculty cited above, as reported by the Washington Examiner, the most drastic differences in the Democratic/Republican faculty ratio “were reported among professors of English, at 26.8 to 1, sociology at 27 to 1, and anthropology 42.2 to 1. When it comes to the more academically rigorous and well-respected disciplines of mathematics, at 5.5 to 1, chemistry, at 4.6 to 1, and economics at 3 to 1, a much smaller ratio was observed.”
The union Konishi mentioned that represents academic workers is the United Auto Workers (UAW). I grew up near Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s when the UAW fought the Big Three auto makers—GM, Ford, and Chrysler—in epic strikes. The union members were burly factory workers who made real things people need: cars, trucks, buses, and planes.
But the striking workers always knew one thing: If they went too far, the company they struck could go out of business and they would be out of work. That happened to Packard (defunct 1958), Studebaker (1967), and AMC (1990). Or go through bankruptcy like Chrysler and GM in 2009, although those two survived in different forms.
The UAW of that day also wasn’t into such politically correct fads as abortion, CRT, and “gender theory,” the way the current UAW is. The members and union bosses were family men and women who were socially conservative and very anti-communist.
By expanding away from its original purpose of representing auto workers to include left-wing university faculty, the UAW has been transformed into just another government-worker union, like the SEIU or the California Federation of Teachers.
As to the current situation, here’s a solution. The humanities departments, having become anti-intellectual and against all real research, should be dissolved. The money saved should be given to the faculty in the hard-science divisions as better pay and benefits—and to their students as lower tuition.
This country could use more engineers, mathematicians, chemists, physicists, and computer programmers. How else are we supposed to compete against China?
