While writing the headline, it struck me (for the umpteenth time) how far higher education in America has fallen over the decades. Our no-longer-hallowed halls of academia have intentionally reduced themselves to Petri dishes of wokeism, Marxist-derived indoctrination, revisionist history, and worse.

And there’s no end to the madness in sight.

Now, conservative Professor Colin Pearce of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism is retiring from a life in academia, with a heightened sense of fear for the future of higher education and the rich learning environment he so loved.

Pearce recently offered what he calls a “cure for the diseases which ail the modern university,” which he says foremost includes political pressure and demands from the corporate sector.

There is a great demand placed on the university by the corporate sector for a supply of ‘credentialed’ students to serve their operations.

Then there is the pressure from the political sphere to make the university cohere with the most strongly trending opinions in the public square.

Whatever insulation the university had against these forces in the past has long since dissolved.

The good professor is on the right track, particularly with respect to radical politics metastasizing within the university environment, but the majority of the political poison is produced within the walls of America’s universities themselves, as opposed to outside pressure from the larger leftist community.

Radical professors, obsessed with instilling their radicalism in mush minds of students, value indoctrination over education.

Here’s more:

Pearce is retiring from Clemson University, where he served as a professor for the school’s Lyceum Program since its founding in 2014.

The program, housed within the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, works to explore capitalism’s moral, political, and economic foundations. Pearce said he believes programs like the Lyceum initiative at Clemson are the cure to “the diseases which ail the modern university.”

[…]

During his tenure at Clemson, Pearce taught a variety of political lecture courses within and outside of the Lyceum curriculum, including American political thought, political terrorism, political theory, international relations, comparative politics, and American government, according to the university.

Pearce stressed the value of “humane learning.”

The graduate of the Lyceum Program is a student who can readily explain to anyone interested why humane learning is at the heart of true education and how the student who has been exposed to it will differ in certain fundamental characterological respects from the one who has not.

C. Bradley Thompson, executive director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, said Pearce taught his students the importance of “the intrepid pursuit of truth.”

Professor Pearce is the Socrates of the Lyceum Program. Like Socrates, he spent a lifetime talking to young people about the most important things. He also shares another quality with Socrates, namely the intrepid pursuit of truth. And, like Socrates, Pearce has always stood his ground. He is an intellectual warrior and will be impossible to replace.

What a marked difference from the bilge spewing forth from many college campuses, today, huh?

We see the exact opposite occur on a regular basis: the suppression of truth; the suppression and outright censorship of conservative thought and conversation; the rewriting of history, the cancelation of historic figures, the renaming of buildings — and leftism even doing its damnedest gaslighting to turn the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on end — in deference to Marxist-derived, so-called “Critical Race Theory.”

Making matters even worse, Pearce says, is the woeful unpreparedness and undereducation of today’s graduating high school seniors.

The contemporary undergraduate’s knowledge of history, geography, politics and related subjects is for the most part beneath measurement. Reading Federalist 10 becomes a challenge of Everest proportions.

Federalist 10, written by James Madison, is possibly the most famous essay in The Federalist Papers. The critical point of Federalist 10 is that a strong federal government can protect liberty because it guards against the dangers of control by a narrow interest. Madison also called it “faction.”

Perhaps most importantly, Madison argues in Federalist 10 that while factions, or special interest groups, can be dangerous, they are essential to liberty and a democratic government.

The no-longer-hallowed halls of academia — and the Democrat Party — were unavailable for comment.