Scruton details the evolution of the modern university, and the de-volution of the university’s contemporary form. His description of the underground universities of Soviet-occupied Europe is fascinating.
university
Liberal Bias in Academia
Some years ago I recall reading the (possibly apocryphal) story of a conversation had by the Soviet Politburo in the late 1980s where the subject of potato-farming came up. These were Gorbachev’s years of Glasnost and the leadership was discussing ways in which they could modernize Soviet agriculture and de-couple it from the state apparatus. One of the men suggested that potato farmers should be made responsible for the harvesting of their own potatoes, to which the reply went something along the lines of “This would be impossible! Even in the United States, the Army is mobilized every year to help with the potato harvest!”
Now these were not stupid men. To the contrary, they were extremely well-educated and had been conducting the affairs of a world superpower for decades. And yet their limited worldview led them to believe, in all honesty, that potatoes simply could not be harvested without the intervention of the state (by employing the manpower of the army no less). That this anecdote seems farcical today, as it would have even at the time, tells us something profound about how inbuilt intellectual bias and limited experience can narrow the bounds of thought without the thinkers even being aware of the limitation.
Hail & Grapeshot 