Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [119]
Even so, Wikiality is not really democratic. It, like I say above, is actually an exchange of factoids resembling supply-side economics. The facts are determined by the suppliers of fact, where the notion of an expert is repugnant—Why? Because recognition of expertise, criteria for truth, standards for determining when one speaks falsely, and so on, would all require regulations! And, our free-market will have none of that (or, at any rate, we will want as few restrictions as possible). Ideally, “any user can change any entry [on a Wikipedia site],” he says, “and if enough other users agree with them, it becomes true!” Just think, he ponders, “If only the entire body of human knowledge worked this way.” It is a deregulated free market of ideas.
What’s more, it seems pretty clear that Stephen, in casting knowledge (sold piecemeal in the form of ideas) as a commodity, ultimately sees those supplying it as being bound to whatever restrictions (as few as those may be) found in the marketplace. Whatever the suppliers in the marketplace think is valuable is valuable. Consumers of ideas are simply asked to buy whatever ideas best suit them. The trouble, as Stephen sees it, is that currently the suppliers of ideas, those pesky professors, are biased—they are “liberals” and “socialists,” both being downright un-American. They only offer ideas of the left (this is akin to the sort of thing claimed by David Horowitz, Anne Neal, and others of the far-right, in their campaign to legislate an Academic Bill of Rights). As Stephen says at the opening of his chapter on higher education in I Am America (And So Can You!):
If there’s a bigger contributor to left-wing elitist brainwashing than colleges and universities, I’d like to see it. There’s an old saying, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Which means a lot of knowledge must be a really dangerous thing. (p. 119)
Every idea should be offered in our marketplace, he says. And, this is not happening with those lefties controlling which ideas are made available. No doubt, if a physicist could pull it off, they would tell unsuspecting students that electrons spin only one-half to the left—bastard socialists! To fix this, Stephen says, we need to convert higher education and its institutions that trade in ideas to the private sector, to the holy of holies. Let the same people who control the marketplace (the suppliers) control education—after all, the sole reason for higher education, Stephen thinks, is to train people for jobs. Education must serve the needs of corporations.
Stephen reported on an article in the New York Times, an article revealing that the State University of New York was batting around the idea of charging tuition based upon a student’s declared major. The higher the cost of administering a program, the higher the student’s tuition. According to the article, one reason that business programs, engineering programs, and so on, cost more is because of the high salaries associated with faculty teaching in these fields, and the high costs of technology. By contrast, students majoring in philosophy or art history are charged less in the way of tuition, since the cost of running those programs is relatively low. In light of the real marketplace, Stephen takes this to clearly show that business, marketing, and chemical engineering, are more valuable than philosophy, art history, and poetry.
As it stands, in the hands of those lefties, universities charge the same amount in tuition to both the student of poetry and the student of engineering, who designs weapons that repel poets. Is higher education a hotbed of socialism, or what? Stephen suggests that universities ought to “arrange all fields of knowledge in a three-tiered pricing system: marketable, non-marketable, and can’tyou-see-this-is-killing-your-parents?” Let tuition costs be based on this tripartite division of knowledge.
Taking things a bit further, and trying to make the classroom look more like a for-profit business, Stephen argues that