I believe that your truly, James Red was one of the first to write about closing down the universities, and I put the idea to Sir Walter Crocker when I met him while visiting Adelaide about 1992. I was teaching then, and a bit concerned about my job, so I did not write for On Target, but I did talk regularly with Eric. Anyway, my spot in history will be forgotten, but I am not in it for the ego, but to get the job done. Better people are now saying better what I originally said. Take my only favourite philosopher, Roger Scruton, for example:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7035659/Roger-Scruton-Getting-rid-left-wing-universities-end-discrimination-faced-Tories.html
“Sir Roger Scruton says that getting rid of left-wing universities could end discrimination he believes conservatives face on some campuses. The philosopher thinks 'we have completely lost control' of state-sponsored institutions. The 75-year-old told a London conference on the future of Europe that universities could be founded outside the rubric of state control. Giving the University of Buckingham as an example, he suggested that private institutions would be preferable. But he added that scrapping state universities altogether could be another option, The Times reports. 'But there’s the other way forward, which is to get rid of universities altogether. That is to say, make sure their sources of funding dry up,' he said. 'They are essentially state-sponsored institutions. Withdrawing the grants that they enjoy would bring them right down to the level to which they are actually approaching.' His remarks come after a study found that just 11 per cent of academics supported the Tories in 2015, with 70 per cent backing Labour. In 1960 about 33 per cent supported the Conservatives and 45 per cent backed Labour. Sir Roger, who is acquainted with Hungary's right-wing prime minister Viktor Orban, was sacked as a government adviser on housing last month. His dismissal followed an interview in the left-wing New Statesman in which he made comments derided as racist.
The writer addressed the authoritarian Chinese government and said that it was creating replicas out of its people. He also said Hungarians had been 'extremely alarmed by the sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims' and said the word Islamophobia was 'invented by the Muslim Brotherhood to stop discussion'. The conservative thinker was also branded anti-Semitic because he said that Jewish investor George Soros had an 'empire' in Hungary.
In 2007 he was criticised for perceived homophobia because he said that homosexuality is 'not normal' in a Daily Telegraph article. He has since defended his comments and said that he intended merely to say that heterosexuals are in the majority.”
That is a good start. There is also an essay building on this by William Briggs:
https://wmbriggs.com/post/27412/
“Roger Scruton has called for dumping universities as they currently exist. Scrap them altogether, he says. At least dynamite the state-sponsored ones (in England). Most universities are state-sponsored, though. At least they are in the USA. Even institutions which have billion-plus dollar endowments rake in enormous wads of cash in the form of research “grants” and “overhead.” And student loans, which are all now government-backed. Our government can’t close Harvard down, at least because Harvard is a part of government, a breeding ground for future bureaucrats and apparatchiks. Think of like the State Department farm team. But we could, if we had a mind, cut off the money spigot. Which won’t happen. Instead, we ought to try and starve them of students, as we’ll see. Scruton said “we have completely lost control” and we ought to “get rid of universities altogether.” Again, not going to happen. There is no way the powerful are going to willingly surrender their control and authority. Bust as elite universities and governments are in essence one, there isn’t a chance in Hades for government-university to loosen its grip.
There are only two choices: cut off the supply of propaganda fodder, i.e. students, or start our own rival institutions that are in no way dependent on governments (as they are now constituted). This includes, unfortunately, disallowing government-backed student-loans. For he who gives the money dictates the terms. To cut off the students we have go after parents, the kids themselves, and woke corporations. The corporate world uses “degrees” as proxies for minimal competence and teachability. They can’t use formal tests for this, because these tests will inevitably be discovered to be “racist”, “sexist”, whatever. Corporations could just drop the “degree” requirement for entry-level positions, but then they have to justify not hiring the vast mass of indigenous populants applying for jobs. Sounds like an impossible situation, but I don’t buy it. Having an applicant sit in a chair for half hour and respond to hard questions would provide just as much information as a piece of paper stating the applicant had a “Communications degree” from a university.
The real problem is convincing woke corporations to change their practices, so that they abandon “degree” requirements. Since the tail wags the dog in those places, i.e. HR dictates policy, we have to go after HR.
That means unwaking the woke. If you can solve that problem, you can solve our culture’s main problem. Which doesn’t seem likely. Next step is to target parents and kids. Convince them that “degrees” are too damned expensive, that becoming a slave to a woke corporation with tens of thousands in student-loan debt in tow is not a worthy goal. There are better ways to live. Forbes doesn’t think so. They say “Taking out loans gives students a reality check.” So does dropping a bar of soap in a prison shower. Be a carpenter, or mechanic, or plumber, electrician, specialty farmer, anything which frees you as best as possible from the working for the woke corporate oligarch-controlled machine. Marry early, have a family, stay close to home, go to Church, and live modestly. That strikes me as not only more feasible, but all evidence is that it works in practice. Still, for a few, and only for a few, we will need a mechanism for advanced education. To do this, we need our own institutions, of some form.
Others too, have promoted the private university idea:
https://www.city-journal.org/new-american-university-to-rival-left
The James Reed solution is to change the universities into vocation training centres rather than the Left-wing propaganda sewers they presently are. The simple way of doing this is to utterly destroy the Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts/farts. No funding at all for these scumbag disciplines and a sacking by redundancy of all so-called teachers, or parasites. Do not permit pseudo sciences like psychology to sneak into medical schools. Eliminate them and out will go all of the pc bs trash. It will save heaps of money, and may save Western civilisation to boot.