WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BUG HOUSE SQUARE?

...H o w the dons captured the universities from our patriotic playboys and Bolsheviks, making the universities their virtual preserves, is a story as intriguing as it is instructive...

...Children chatter about it, parents ponder it...

...Indeed it arises as clearly and augustly as the wart on Queen Elizabeth's nose...

...Thus as still another of The Alternative's continuing services to its readers we present a report of this critical issue which is "Whatever happened to Bug House Square...

...Diligently exercising on triple A teams like Indiana University's Political Science crew, they have coopted that national attention formerly accorded flag pole sitters and reform politicians, and effectively interdicted serious thinkers from the campus...

...And the savants are wondering why...

...Chomsky, an M I T linguist, is not surprisingly a leading critic of American foreign policy, and in his recent book, American Power and the N e w Mandarins, he serves up the cogent hypothesis that our State Department has for twenty-five years been the victim of sunspots...

...However there is a melancholy aspect of the Academe's foolery...

...As nearly as I can ascertain every would-be revolutionary thrashing away at the Republic is either incarcerated on a imiversity faculty or entangled in some remote artery of the political-educational-complex — BUG HOUSE SQUARE say, the Massachusetts delegation to the Senate...

...Francis of Assisi, he would stand amongst the feeding pigeons trumpeting his message...

...Proscribing any young "professor" with a penchant for thoughtfulness, it insures the job of the pervert and renders that of the criminal inviolate...

...Under this plan the politicians and "professors" could continue to splash in the public trough...

...Thus Mr...

...The first is "academic freedom," the second "tenure...

...And soon, our Informed Sources tell me, this searing issue will be honored by the convocation of a presidential commission composed of Blacks (Negroes), Catholics, Jews, and even a token Protestant, followed by publication of another nonsensical presidential report...

...Go to Harvard Square and you can hear their dizzy twaddle...

...Further the universities have served as an ingenious way to neutralize revolution...

...The thoughtful student would retreat in an instant were it not for a national epidemic of diplomaism...

...Of course P-E-C has recently provided the good fellows of the land with some marvelously humorous episodes, episodes which have left us all rocking in mirth...

...Now all this might promise gold dust for the loonies, assuring the universities an ample supply of "professors" and "teaching assistants," but it does not enhance the future of Bug House Square...

...H o w can anyone keep a straight face when the halls of learning open to Departments of Swahili and feature Sensitivity Training...

...Visit Sproul Hall and you will be taken by their genius...

...Of course to describe a "professor's" audiences as "willing" is more than untrue...

...Today, with insanity as one of America's highest paid professions, not even a second rate lunatic will jwrform in a drafty Chicago park, when at Harvard he can create his own draft in rooms where Adamses prayed, Roosevelts dozed and Keimedys studied Spanish...

...Unfortunately contemplative Hoosiers down here amongst the lazily grazing hoofers, bellowing porkers, limestone artisans and the English "professors" have yet to hear of this crucial matter...

...They retired to the campus, for as w e all know politicians are thoroughly congenial with madmen and jackasses...

...Now it has been years since Chicagoans beheld this humorous scene, for Arthur presently holds forth at Harvard, forsaking the square not because of the insouciant pigeons, guffawing cab drivers or abusive hoboes, but because Harvard pays him $35,000 more to induce sleep in freshmen, befuddle graduate students and counsel deranged politicians...

...It is reminiscent of the days when neophyte Sioux warriors had to fondle a buffalo's brow to prove their courage, or when a m a n was to have read the American Constitution before sitting on the Supreme Court...

...The roots of the former mix inextricably with what ignorant Americans persist in calling Liberalism (actually a primitive fetishism), and the roots of the latter convolute with inertial conservatism and with socialism leading to wretched conditions like those that support the seat of a southern senator or northern Black (Negro) congressman...

...Working in cooperation with the Brookings Institute we aver this plan: A ) Major corporations should refuse to hire college graduates and B ) "Professors" should receive a bonus for not teaching...

...N o intelligent student willingly listens to his slow-witted "professors" yodel rubbish...

...Bug House Page 5 Square might become a national shrine to the American intellectual, but I know for a certitude it will never compete with Harvard's "Little Theatre" or any of the other American asylums of higher learning...

...Academic freedom encourages moonshiners like N o a m Chomsky, John Galbraith and Staughton Lynd whose bizarre cerebral antics have matched anything the depraved Nero ever spilled into his Circus...

...Nevertheless once such a "professor" succumbs to intelligence he is ousted, tenure notwithstanding...

...Every year the universities attempt to enlarge their budgets, every year they must increase their realm of interest and every year they create phony departments devoted to the study of absurdities like Urban Affairs or Sociology...

...An antiquated American ritual, diplomaism requires young people to prove themselves by living under dunderheads for four years...

...If thirty-six million Americans writhed in hunger, the savants of the square would inform us...

...Historian Staughton Lynd is a seedy misanthrope whose repulsive behavior has caused superintendents to ship him from one asylum to another...

...by George Nathan A furious discussion bestirs all of Chicago...

...Unfortunately the result is not as glamorous as this idealistic definition implies . "Professors" are generally lazy oafs who find truth in the first garbage can they dip into, and as it seems to intoxicate them, it elicits from them only the most exotic bosh...

...Harvard's Galbraith is a "professor" of the numbers racket and delusively considers himself a masterful politician...

...Exactly...

...Nitwits gathered from all over the Great Republic to shriek the virtues of prohibition, dipsomania, Coueisme, phrenology, the N e w Deal and other even more exotic nostrums...

...And perhaps the Schlesingers and Galbraiths might wander back to Bug House Square...

...Yearly he would journey to Chicago to deliver a series of lectures, "The N e w Deal's Legacy to Andrew Jackson...

...All the frauds, madmen and crazed world savers once resident at Bug House Square have taken opulently endowed chairs in Wonderlands like Harvard, Yale, Indiana and other such monuments to the mind...

...I expect one moron even discussed eliminating the electoral college...

...Hence hardly ever does an intelligent idea come from a university...

...It will not be in the too distant future I suspect that degrees will be offered in Astrology and S u m a Wrestling...

...And at Indiana try "Professor" Bernard (Shuffle Step) Morris' class in Vicarious Revolution...

...Students do it because they must do it much like interns must change bed pans...

...If the cyclamate czars were threatening America's mouse population, their designs would.be exposed...

...Unfortimately the politicos and "professors" have intwingled themselves in what The Alternative's Standing Committee on National Lunacy calls the political educational complex (P-E-C), and this privileged network laces the Republic...

...It was a happy time, a more relaxed more dulcet time, an era more consonant with the ambitions of an A d a m Clayton Powell or Edward (Teddy) Kennedy...

...Rostow, who had held tenure at M I T before joining President Johnson's staff, could no more regain his position than could MIT's Chomsky gain employment as a spittoon in the State Department...

...He recently ran for president of the American Historical Society on a platform more appropriate to the Mattachine Society than to a coven of scholars...

...Every great salon in that enlightened city-state vibrates with it...

...Though I a m uncertain of P-E-C's ancestry, I can tell you that politicians support it more ardently when they get the feeling that their constituents, growing tired of their side show, are about to cash them in for a better act...

...If in those days of yore violence had plagued the land or guns were to be outlawed, it would be discussed at Bug House Square...

...Di plomaism is paralyzing the development of a host of serious, idealistic, young people — persons ever looking to new horizons, to executive positions with G.M...

...it is slander...

...And with the multitude of presidents and administrators fleecing the campuses, I imagine a large number of crooks are kept from urban centers...

...These gifted young men and women are growing alienated under P-E-C, and it is this frightening development which moves your favorite journal of opinion to suggest an Alternative...

...Consider Arthur Schlesinger II...

...It has seized the literati, engrossed all the great journals and rings from every pulpit...

...They then advanced two ideas that though palpable moonshine, have nonetheless besotted and addicted the taxpayers...

...Cynics will think this argument extravagant, but where was it that the defeated politicians of our last administration retired...

...Yearly the great universities charm us with their increasingly bizarre bulletins driving more joke books off the market...

...Like St...

...W h y do our politicians continue to allocate such munificent educational budgets...

...The postwar period might have.been hard on farmers and afforded slim pickings for con men, but the brassy blare resoimding from the universities suggests that it has been an era of unmatched prosperity for the screwball...

...Tenure's insulation however is not irrevocable, for some "professors" have attained tenure only to lapse inexplicably into a catalepsis of intelligence (perhaps post-menopausic delusions...

...Operating much like the military-industrial-complex (M-I-C), it guarantees politicians a university position so long as they vote the educational budget's yearly increase...

...Throughout the Enlightened 'twenties and Dark 'thirties Bug House Square, a small idyllic park tucked into Chicago's near north side, served as a world renowned forum where all ilk of maniac and charlatan conducted lectures, seminars and scholarly pageants, freely expounding their latest crackpot panacea and mellifluous boondoggle...

...History has not as yet recorded a revolution led by an overpaid university "professor," and as today's vanguard seems to consist of nothing more than an effete corps of impudent snobs I doubt any of the "professors" will usher in their dictatorship of the adolescent...

...Bug House Square's future is about as encouraging as that of West Virginia, and not even a Sugar Daddy like the Ford Foundation can save it...

...W h e n intelligent m e n like Walt W . Rostow or Dean Rusk in a fervor of humanitarianism seek employment in the Academe, they are about as likely to become "professors" as Hugh Hefner is to become a nun...

...Like varicose veins on a beauty queen's calf it is as impregnable as it is unseemly...

...Yet lamentably, weaker pupils — Page 6 imable to withstand exposure to the wanton nonsense of academic freedom — break under its influence and turn to drink, women of the streets, drugs, homosexuality, thievery, false gods and finally as their last vestige of self-respect dissolves, they too become Ph.D.'s, sinking to the depths of disgrace...

...But alas, those halcyon days have slipped intq antiquity, and now Bug House Square lies a desolate waste, a pitiful and filthy cathedral of crippled urban trees, under whose decrepit arches stumble Rush Street's degenerate swingers, mUggers, nostalgic liberals and invalid squirrels...

...Plainly stated P-E-C offers politicians insurance against that grim day when they may have to work for a living...

...Recently in spite of doctor's orders he began composing long superstitious epistles to all the nation's newspaper editors which are generally published on what we in the business call a "slow news day...

...If throughout their political careers, they have supported all the educational boondoggles and celebrated the quackery of higher education, universities will offer them lavish positions as "Professor" of Incivism or Currency Tampering, perhaps Chairman of the Department of Gibberish or Relevance...

...In fact I expect the keepers of the American Dream are preparing to preserve it for all time by embalming it in an "Unbiased C B S Documentary...

...Beyond serving as an utterly humane way of dealing with the insane, it also provides a dignified welfare program for those clods who are just too shiftless to work...

...In those far away years there was no Tee Vee news to enlighten the jcitizenry, and no Department of Health, Education and Etceteras policed our welfare...

...In the public interest I pass it to you...

...N o w the intelligent reader will wonder why it is that m a d m e n repose in our universities...

...Indeed anyone familiar with the international treatment of mental health knows that America has the best appointed insane asylums in the world...

...Tenure is nothing more than a precept which assures that universities will maintain their traditionally low standards...

...In the early part of this century an odd collection of con men, politicians and persons sincerely interested in the mentally ill inflated the Jeffersonian vision of an educated electorate and stuffed it into the American Creed, consequently making the role of the imiversity about equal to that of the Bill of Rights and motherhood (it has since surpassed the latter...

...Whispered pianissimo by the politicians, it is blasted fortissimo on the television news Punch and Judy shows...

...Further, when an intelligent idea is spotted on the campus its conspicuous author is immediately adjudged sane and ipso facto exiled...

...D Page 7...

...A thirty-thousand-doUar-a-year chair generally will dampen the ardor of the most zealous Marcuse, and if not, one can always increase the bribe to thirty-five...

...Senators had the decency to spend their time playing golf or chasing painted women rather than fussing around with committees and all the other foolishness on which they now exhaust the taxpayers' monies and amiability...

...I must hasten to add that I do not disapprove of P-E-C — to the contrary...

...Now academic freedom as posited by the dons means that at a university a properly certified boor may freely pursue truth down any dark alley, and once apprehended he may dispense this garbage to anyone willing to listen...

...Students would luj) longer have to suffer their indignities...

...After years of scholarly research at many of the most distinguished universities in our Supermarket Republic I believe to be in ambience with the answer...

...And why do they not inform us of this ghastly situation...

...After last springe's epicene panty raids I wept with laughter as I listened to bemused university "professors" solemnly describe student protests as incidents oh so profound...

...And if academic freedom will not keep them out tenure will...

...and to the presidency of say, the Chase Manhattan Bank...

...These are some of the Academe's big league morons, but for every one there exist a thousand minor leaguers, striving to outdo their hero's foolishness...