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Many of the processes at many universities are negative rather than positive external effects
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Politically correct nonsense is rampant in Canadian universities, as evidenced by the Queen’s University naming controversy last year. Photo by Ian MacAlpine / The Whig-Standard / Postmedia Network
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Many people, especially the left, enthusiastically support carbon taxes. In theory, a carbon tax could make sense, as the English economist Arthur Pigou noted a hundred years ago, if carbon emissions cause material social costs by causing harmful global warming. The words “if” and “could” and “theoretically” do a lot here, and good evidence suggests that carbon taxes are harmful rather than useful; however, the idea of Pigovian taxes on negative externalities is logically sound. And the idea of Pigovian subsidies for activities that generate material social benefits is based on the same consideration.
Problems arise, however, when governments exaggerate the extent of externalities to justify economic interference, or misjudge the direction of the externality and end up subsidizing what they should be taxing, or vice versa. The global warming externality used to justify Pigovian taxes on carbon emissions and Pigovian subsidies on wind and solar power is perhaps the best example of such a government error. But another one that is increasingly suggesting it is massive government subsidies for many university programs.
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Subsidies to post-secondary education are often justified, at least in part, on the grounds that such education enhances culture, promotes civic education, and cultivates better social and political leaders for the benefit of society as a whole. But evidence to the contrary continues to mount. The latest is from Yale University, where a recent psychiatrist gave a talk on “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” in which she described in glaring detail her fantasies of killing white people. The talk was clearly a form of brain pollution, not a social benefit, and should therefore not be eligible for Pigovian subsidies.
Fortunately, psychiatrists’ insane fantasies are not representative of the average university lecture, yet many of the goings-on at many universities are negative rather than positive. Examples are the enforcement of politically correct ideologies, the imposition of the waking culture, the frequent censorship of nonconforming ideas and the shrill declarations of climate emergencies. Schools “increasingly teach students to become campaigners for social justice rather than broadening their intellectual horizons,” as Professor Francis H. Buckley recently wrote.
Buckley, once a professor at McGill, teaches at the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University in Virginia, where the university’s faculty senate voted five years ago when the law school was renamed after the late Conservative Supreme Court Justice Renamed on the grounds that Scalia allegedly made “numerous publicly abusive comments about various groups – including people of color, women and LGBTQ people”. No examples of offensive remarks were given, however, an uncomfortable fact which, when brought up by a law professor in the faculty’s Senate meeting, interrupted his colleagues and prevented him from speaking further.
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Politically correct nonsense is as prevalent on the Canadian campus as was seen in the Queen’s University naming controversy last year. A university advisory committee spent two months advising people and then released a 65-page report recommending that Sir John A. Macdonald’s name be removed from the law school building. The report quoted people who said the building’s name “perpetuates violence, racism, colonialism and whiteness.” Indigenous, racialized and marginalized groups, according to the report, said this “creates feelings that range from exclusion to trauma”. The word “trauma” or a variation of it was used 13 times in the report. You might conclude that if the name of Canada’s first prime minister causes such widespread trauma, Queens may not be ready for serious intellectual exploration.
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In an essay published last year by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal in Raleigh, North Carolina, researchers Joy Pullmann and Sumantra Maitra describe how “the rise of the activist professor at the academy helped create a pattern the redesign of the departments has led to “goals from the search for truth to the engine for socio-political change.” But even where professors are really good teachers and not ideological propagandists, as Thomas Sowell has argued, “the knowledge that a diploma is supposed to represent can, actually only isolated fragments of knowledge about the humanities, natural or social sciences, whatever narrow topics the respective professors of the students wrote in their dissertations, books or scientific journal articles. “
The negative externalities of many university programs are often large and the positive externalities limited, so that Pigovian taxes at universities can be more sensible than Pigovian subsidies. Of course, as with the CO2 tax, the Pigov taxes at universities could go too far. But let’s at least cut the subsidies.
Matthew Lau is a writer from Toronto.
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source https://collegeeducationnewsllc.com/matthew-lau-should-we-tax-universities-for-the-damage-they-do/
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