The Counter-Currents 2023 Fundraiser: A Question of Degree
Posted By Mark Gullick On In North American New Right
[1]1,586 words
Like all journals of dissident ideas, Counter-Currents depends on the support of our readers. So far this year, we’ve raised $94,312, or 31.44% of our $300,000 goal. I want to thank everyone who has donated so far. (Please donate here [2]!) And now, Mark Gullick offers a few words on why donating to Counter-Currents may be a much better contribution to your education than going to a college or university.
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Jonathan Bowden’s description of Counter-Currents as an “online university” can be considered as the school motto, perhaps gilded above an arch as you enter. It also invites consideration of the state of actual universities in the United States and United Kingdom.
I doubt anyone reading this is preparing to start university, but you may have children, relatives, or friend’s children who are. If they are not reading science, technology, engineering, and/or math subjects, tell them not to bother. Humanities degrees are becoming increasingly worthless as formerly autonomous and classical subjects become infected with the narcissistic egalitarianism loosely termed “woke.”
You will rack up an unpayable debt which future politicians will promise to annul — but won’t. You will spend three years in a cross between a Stasi boot camp and a Marxist finishing school. You will read a “decolonized” curriculum and never know that it was the colonized bit that was important. More than anything else, you will make yourself unemployable.
Those outside the US are led to believe that a degree is a necessity in America for non-manual employment — a sine qua non, as the Classicists say: “a thing which is absolutely necessary.” If so, that will change. I remember a radio interview 20 years ago in the UK with the head of the Confederation of British Industries (CBI) concerning graduate employment. You could almost hear the despair in his voice as he lamented the standard of graduate interviewees, who were utterly incapable of the simplest cognitive tasks. And that was two decades ago. Fast forward 20 years. With the acceleration in grievance studies degrees, employers will increasingly be met with individuals with no knowledge of anything worth knowing, no ability to reason or assess situations, no social skills, no work ethic, and a sense of entitlement usually reserved for African princes. I recently watched a young white girl on YouTube explaining that the reason she is always late for work is because she suffers from “time blindness.” Employers can expect a lot more where that came from.
And so you may find employers turning increasingly to the autodidacts, a sort of reservist army of eminently employable people. Degrees in the US seem to start at around $15,000, from what I can gather, and tuition fees at the top end obviously drag up the average. I note that the University of Chicago charges students — or their parents — $85,000 annually. Does that also cover the cost of bulletproof vests?
If you took a tiny fraction of the cost of a degree and went to every charity shop or thrift store you could find that sells books, and bought books that looked interesting until you had spent your budget, you will have launched an academic career in the Humanities which will be far more fruitful than anything a modern university could supply. Modern lecturers are either strident activists or worthless, timid, and afraid. Classical and archaic teachers, long dead but very much alive, are the opposite and are available at the turn of a page. As noted, if you are young this will enhance your prospects of future employment as employers come to realize that someone steeped in the Classics is of more use in the office than a grievance-machine with a degree in Gender Studies and suffering from time-blindness.
In addition to this, you will avoid the undoubted harm to your mental health that three years at a modern university would cause. Living in an atmosphere of suspicion and censure, a microcosmic version of the Soviet Union — and I have known people who lived under Soviet rule — is not conducive to a healthy, inquiring, and temperate personality. Modern universities across the West are incubating a generation of people who are going to be very hard to get along with once they graduate. I see a schism in the not-too-distant future between the post-modernes [sic] and their carnival of puritanical neuroses, and conservatives, for want of a better word, who recognize that the West has changed for the worse and are fully aware of who is to blame. Secession is inevitable, segregation something to be wished for. We have enough trouble with blacks and have no wish for the added burden of imbecilic whites.
In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, Canadian businessman and politician Rex Mottram says of university, “I was never there. It just means you start life three years behind the other fellow.” This was true for the hard-headed Rex, but it is doubly true now. Three years at university will leave even promising Humanities students unemployable, unable to process information, socially crippled, unpleasant company, broke, and wide open to a range of mental illnesses and clinical depression. But at least they will understand what social justice is. They won’t have any choice.
St. Andrew’s University recently made the news for two reasons. First, it ranked as the best university in Scotland and the fourth best in the UK [3]. Second, it has a new entrance examination which must be passed in order for the student to proceed with his degree. You would assume that such an examination, set by one of Britain’s top universities, would be quite intellectually rigorous, but you would be wrong.
St. Andrews has for some time required freshmen — is that term still allowed? — to take “diversity modules.” A pass is essential if the student wishes to be allowed to begin their degree, but it is quite easy to pass, as Britain’s Daily Mail explained in 2021: [4]
St. Andrews’ modules asked students to agree with sentences such as: Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful start in overcoming unconscious bias.
If a pupil tick [sic] that they ‘disagree’ they are incorrect and are forced to redo the course if they get too many ‘wrong’.
Another question in the tests reportedly says: Does equality mean treating everyone the same?
That kid you know who is going to university and can’t wait to start, do they know about this? Because it’s a pound to a pinch of snuff this is not confined to Bonny Scotland’s finest.
So forget about university. Academically speaking, that well has been poisoned. Besides, you already have a university. It’s here, you’ve arrived, you’ve got your grades, and there is no entrance examination in which you have to debase your guilty white self. What there is at Counter-Currents consists of an education in topics no university in the world could offer. I have written for a number of American magazines (no one in the UK will touch me with a long pole), and I can say from experience that none have the range of topics, the class of comments, and the philosophical depth of Counter-Currents. Let me talk you down the page at the time of writing, containing as it does pieces on the following subjects:
A Boston journalist named Howie Carr.
A review of a book titled The Origins of Woke.
A review of a French book on the importance of concrete.
Anime.
Feminism.
A nineteenth-century Wyoming woman captured by Sioux Indians.
A review of a book titled Burning Beethoven: The Eradication of German Culture in the United States During World War I.
Race and IQ differences.
Donald Trump and the Jewish lobby.
A book review of Charles Krafft’s An Artist of the Right [5].
A first-hand account of Costa Rican Independence Day.
A review of a book by Pat Buchanan titled Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World.
The US police.
A comparison between Marx and Rousseau.
I am writing this on September 25, and the list takes us back to the September 19. I wonder what first-year Humanities undergraduates will learn in an average week.
But universities have it easy with funding. All they have to do is assist the government in manipulating statistics by admitting ever more non-whites, deplatform the right people, set St. Andrews-style confessional examinations, and decolonize their curricula, and the money tap stays on. Add that to the exorbitant fees charged to foreign students, and the modern university is a cash cow. This is not the case with our online university, which relies on your answer to a straightforward question: Do I get enough intellectual and political sustenance from Counter-Currents to feel I should pay for it?
Magazines such as this one have no advertising revenue, the lifeblood of the mainstream media and even the blander Right-of-center online publications. Counter-Currents relies on subscriptions and can’t teach without it. One subscription and, perhaps, one child persuaded to bunk off “uni” and come here instead, and you will have contributed to education, both yours and that of others. Spend time here, and you will see the value of Bowden’s online university.
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Thank you again for your loyal readership and generous support.
Greg Johnson
Editor-in-Chief