Tristan Ewins "But some of the right-wing commentators here seem to want a "one dimensional society"; and would wipe criticism from the face of academia. Some of them seem to want to trash the Humanities and Social Sciences all together."

Well, first there would actually have to be conservative thinkers/texts/philosophers used in the Humanities and Social Sciences for that to occur. The post-structuralists have a stranglehold on it at the moment, and I don't see them letting go any time soon.

Can you name any conservative philosopher/thinker that is used in the Humanities and Social Sciences? I can think of only Durkheim and perhaps his follower, Talcott Parsons.

Well Said Kilarney

If you google "attack on the American free enterprise system"
you will end up reading a confidential memo by a US Justice Powell, written in 1971

In this memo, he outlines a chilling plan to avert the tide of what he perceives to be communist forces in the US.

The strategy outlined for conservative forces to marshal their power and control the Media and the content in Universities.

The memo offers a fantastic insight into the early development of a plan which would come to its full power over the course of 20-30 years and entirely supplant the organic free impulse of our society and transform it into a grotesque oligarchical paranoid delusional nightmare we have today.

Bolt has a good post on how the left is stacking the ranks of the university academics:

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/university_is_the_last_refuge_of_the_failed_labor_minister/

That list doesn't include the potential criminal Gillard and Rudd of course has been given a sinecure at Harvard as an expert on China; they'll love him after his description of them as rat.......!

Kilarney and yebiga are just old commies who will peddle their disgusting ideology until the other comrades shovel the dirt over their hero's graves. Nothing to see there with their quaint little conspiracy theories and capitalist bashing nonsense.

Killarney is however particularly amusing when he pushes the tired old barrow about the right being flushed with money compared to the comrade heroes of the left.

That, like all left positions is just a lie. For instance who are the biggest political donors in the US; that's right the unions:

http://washingtonexaminer.com/it-turns-out-the-evil-koch-bros.-are-only-the-59th-biggest-donors-in-american-politics.-can-you-guess-who-is-number-one/article/2544025

And this is being echoed right throughout the West; the stinking left has all the money whether it be for the scam of AGW or super funds [dominated by the unions and when the renewable scam runs out of taxpayer funds won't the super funds which invested in renewables be crying] or the media dominated by the tax payer funded hard left abc.

The fact is Gramsci's march has been successful and the left have infiltrated all the institutions of the West and like parasites are eating it hollow.

That still doesn't stop the old commies from mouthing the usual canards about the rich evil right. A leftie couldn't lie straight in bed.

A sharp rise in the number of right wing think thanks occurs in the 1970s and 1980s.

Reagan and Thatcher execute and legitimize a sharp right turn to economic rationalism. The concentration of media ownership accelerates and the quality and breadth of content inexorably coalesces to the inanity of celebrity and sports culture.

In our Universities, the western canon is emaciated and replaced with the incoherent whining of postmodernism.

By the year 2000, the oligarchical forces were so drunk with their complete success, they would with total impunity force a fraudulent election win for the Presidency of the United States, invent a fraudulent war against invisible forces, invade countries to secure their resources, dismiss human rights conventions and openly justify torture, implement illegal global surveillance and threaten any serious dissent with the removal of basic civic rights.

While the public is happily distracted with Celebrity and Sports, our brightest students are pursuing MBAs or trying to decide whether the author, reader or the text is dead

YEBIGA,

I marvel at your ability to take a batch of meaningless rhetoric and platitudes and string them together into something that you seem to think makes sense.

I have read and reread your last post and cannot find any content whatsoever. How do you manage that?

Is that what you call “narrative theory”

In 1976 the income of the top 1% accounted for 16% of total income
In 2012 the income of the top 1% accounted for 26% of total income

The possibility of extracting this kind of data has been possible since the early 1900s. Since, the top 1% has fluctuated within this range of 16% to 26%. For most of the last 100 years, this number has hovered just under 20%

The last time it got to 26%, we had the great depression.

I am not suggesting this is a rigorous analysis but I believe it does highlight, in a simple way, what I believe is a serious and potentially fatal imbalance.