THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Exciting archeological discoveries, breakthroughs in history, are happening all over the place. Discoveries are popping up all over the place. The history I learned in the 1950s is as out of date today as the UNIVAC computer.

But historians can't USE it. Social science today is rooted in the 1940s. So is about everybody else.

Here are some very practical problems:

1) Putting together a curriculum in history involves a huge sunk cost. Textbooks constitute a massive industry. You can't just change the history without simply tossing out a titanic investment.

2) History is a giant bureaucracy. It is exactly like the Federal Government.

When you make a decision in the Federal Government it involves a huge amount of paperwork. Every bit of past regulation must be heaped together in a huge pile and gone over. Exactly the same thing goes on in academia. This huge pile of past decisions is called "The Literature."

A professor must keep up with "The Literature," which means the journals which go step by step through different opinions and interpretations. A professor gets paid to "add to The Literature," which means he must add an article to the pile already there. He must know exactly the point at which "The Literature" is right now and know how to fit in with it.

This, in turn, is exactly like the respectable conservative. The respectable conservative makes his living by knowing exactly where "both sides," current political discussions, is TODAY, right now. He must know how to debate within those parameters without any deviation or heresy.

Meanwhile heresy is pouring in from all sides with each new discovery.

Academia is a giant, clunking bureaucracy. It is not a conspiracy of geniuses, it is a mass of inertia based on print media. What is happening to it is what happened to the Soviet Empire. Instead of an atomic war or a massive civil war,the Soviet Empire collapsed simply because, the minute it got its heel off the neck of its subjects, they took a look at it and laughed it out of existence.

The academic bureaucracy only survives because it keeps its foot on the people's necks. Only that bureaucracy can give people a degree they LEGALLY have to have. If you took away its legal monopoly, it would collapse.

The academic bureaucracy is the same as the Post Office. Only one thing keeps the Post Office going, and that is its legal monopoly. If the law that gives the Post Office a monoply on mail were removed, that expensive, cumbersome dinosaur would collapse within a month.

Some years back, the Post Office said the only reason it was not efficient was because of all the "junk mail." Instantly a group of companies announced that they would be GLAD to deliver that same junk mail at a lower rate, faster, and pay taxes on their profits. The Post Office instantly stopped using that excuse.

So you stand in line during strictly limited postal hours to get your mail through that clunking, outdated, overregulated dinosaur. The academic bureaucracy is the same thing, but far, far bigger.

The Preamble Party would get rid of the Post Office AND the academic bureaucracy. It would remove their monopolies and watch them both go down, overnight, just like the Soviet Empire.