During Monday’s chaotic day of demonstrations at the University of Missouri, professor Melissa Click accomplished something she may have never done before in her academic career – taught an important lesson. Click, an assistant professor of mass media at Mizzou’s communications department, was recorded intimidating and threatening student journalists trying to document the protests occurring on campus. Because in today’s progressive up-side down world, the communications professors are anti-free speech.
So what exactly does a mass media professor who’s anti-journalism actually teach? As The Federalist reported, Click specializes in “audience studies, theories of gender and sexuality, and media literacy.”
According to her school profile:
[Click’s] research projects involve 50 Shades of Grey readers, the impact of social media in fans’ relationship with Lady Gaga, masculinity and male fans, messages about class and food in reality television programming, and messages about work in children’s television programs.
Is there a better example of educational malinvestment than spending thousands of dollars a semester studying 50 Shades of Grey? More to the point, if not for the state’s hijacking of higher learning – would Melissa Click be able to make her current salary on the market with the skills she developed researching “commodification of femininity, affluence and whiteness in the Martha Stewart phenomenon?”
As Liz Mair astutely pointed out on Twitter, the fact taxpayers are paying Click to study “the impact of social media in fans’ relationship with Lady Gaga” makes Click’s salary little more than academic welfare. Where else outside of government-sponsored academic can someone make a living analyzing “class and food in reality television programming?” Is it not likely that she’d be far more useful as a Starbucks barista, offending Donald Trump with snowflake-less red cups? As Tom DiLorenzo pointed out during a recent Mises Circle on Political Correctness, the infantilitzation of college students is not limited to “public universities,” but as Peter Klein has mentioned – private universities today are also highly subsidized with Federal dollars. Not to mention how dependent many academics are on central planners outside of a professorial paycheck. These are the natural consequences of the current academic cartel.
Ludwig von Mises understood the devastating impact professors like Click can have on society. In Human Action, he wrote:
What has made many of the present-day universities by and large nurseries of socialism is not so much the conditions prevailing in the departments of economics as the teachings handed down in other departments.
Until we are able to fully separate education from the state, we’ll continue to see the left’s indoctrination of students on the public dime.
This article was taken from the Mises Wire which appeared at: https://mises.org/blog/academic-welfare-queens
