If one notices few campus riots or protests these days, except by organized minority groups whenever affirmative action is under threat or their special privileges are to be revoked in the name of greater equality and fairness, one must wonder what has changed about Academia that is has become such a tranquil atmosphere. Professors are far too busy these days managing cattle classes and publishing and perishing to be concerned with what is right or wrong with the rest of the world. The restructuring of higher education was a critical component of the realignment of the American political economy from above. It occurred very specifically within the first few years of Reagan's tenure in office, though it was clear that those who secretely orchestrated this move had spent several years before in masterminding it. . Some of the things that seems to have been really lost in the transformation were: 1. The openness of higher education as a clearing house for social mobility, especially for the working and lower classes; 2. Freedom of press, speech and hence genuine independence of thought; 3. The loss of self control and power of professors and scholars in every discipline to define for themselves their own standards and their own courses for teaching and action. The failure of scholars of higher education, of professors, to form their own unions to protect their professional interests has lead to a systematic undermining of these interests by the real powers who control and dictate school policy. I believe that those who orchestrated this transformation during the "Great Communicator's" brave new regime had it in their minds that something like the 1960's would never happen again on America's campuses. The president of the average university (there are no colleges anymore) is now more like the dictator of a small country, as he looks from the window of his office upon the campus grounds, often remodeled and manicured to present to himself the most pleasant and ideal state, or as s/he tours the campus with their growing entourage of wo/men in business attire.

The analytical argument is continuously made that the rising costs of everything new--of real estate, of construction, of books, of personnel, is eating up traditional everything, and that therefore Academia and many other institutions serving the public (i.e., read the people) have had to be "restructured." It is difficult to understand how "restructuring" in order to make more profit in education is tied to greater and greater bankruptcy or reported debits of these institutions, as they are generating more and more revenue than ever before, and they have cut their own operating costs to what can be considered a bare skeletal budget, at great sacrifice to the quality, if not the quantity, of student's education. It is clear that one must look beyond the reported rhetoric and political propaganda and observe what people are doing and what is happening on campuses these days to get at the truth of the matter.

Structurally, higher educational institutions are institutions of the state that serve important functions in research and development and in the organization and transmission of knowledge, and in the symbolic legitimization and valorization of the states interests. Professors themselves may believe themselves whatever they want to believe, that they are above all this muckety-muck, that they are the vanguard of liberal idealism in the world, but in terms of what they are doing, and how they are in fact living, and their social-class positioning and identification within a larger system, this structural profile defines precise and explicitly their real function in the world regardless of their own systems of belief. No academics are sacrificing their careers for their liberal beliefs, for they know that to begin acting on their words is the shortest distance to the way out of paradise and back out onto mean street. Perhaps I should not be too harsh on these people, as they are at least many of them at least well intentioned, over all. It is only their sense of self-fulfilling hypocrisy and intellectual arrogance that I find increasingly insuffferable, especially when they consistently themselves have a hand and play an important functional role in the promotion of the status quo of globalization.

Academia serves the status-quo of globalization primarily by the promotion of what is known as the brain drain from undeveloped countries. This brain drain phenomenon is real and systematically promulgated, especially in the higher educational institutions of the developed world. The brain drain takes many forms in countries like the US, and it consequence of its promotion in Academia has been the biasing towards the hiring of foreign professors, which has reached at least fifty percent. It has led to the deliberate bottle-necking of the academic job market for home-grown scholars, who are subsequently devalued and delegitimated by what can be considered to be unrealistic gate-keeping mechanisms. Domestic academics of a younger generation are finding the road to academic paradise blocked at the gates, with a longer, more windy road filled with more obstacles even to get to the gates. At the same time, many foreign based or born scholars are finding the quick side-door into paradise, often without having to wait in too many lines.

The prejudices of the brain drain reflect the prejudices of radical multi-culturalism and the pseudo-liberalism. The devaluation of the domestic and homegrown "non-minority" scholar is based upon the implicit belief that foreign brains are necessarily better and brighter than homegrown brains, a belief that is unfounded and often ridiculously applied. Behind this is a sense too that foreign-born scholars will be more manipulable and will be easier too lead by the administrative nose. It is unlikely, in other words, that these scholars who are inherently insecure in their new found homeland and their new American identity, will join the ranks of a campus protest movement.

The brain drain is to some extent confused with more ethical (and unethical) agendas that promote greater integration and dissemination of critical knowledge in the world, what might be called "reverse brain drain" but one does not have to become very deeply involved in issues of foreign development to realize how stopped up the channels of knowledge and information are when it comes to the opposite direction. Like the brain drain, the reverse brain drain takes several different guises. One of the most invidious for instance, is the theft and exportation to home countries by foreign scholars of critical information that is protected by copyright or patent law and that may have strategic value in terms of technological development and military arms race. China and Chinese scholars are a notorious example of this, but I believe those nuclear scientists working to build bombs and other weapons of mass destruction in many countries these days were originally trained and educated in the liberal countries like the US and Great Britain. There are positive examples of reverse brain drain, such as the exchange of scholars and their students to undeveloped regions and involvement of scholars in development projects in these regions. But these examples, though numerous, are weak and miniscule in terms of their logistics in comparison to the brain drain and negative reverse brain drain that are orchestrated and promulgated by different governments and the university systems of these states.