Wherefore Art Thou America ?
Paul Craig Roberts
When I attended Georgia Tech, it was an engineering school with math, physics, and chemistry departments, a school of architecture, a school of design, and a school of industrial management. The student body totaled about 5000 and consisted almost entirely of Georgia young men. There were a handful of foreign students, and a handful of women in master degree programs that were not offered at women’s colleges.
Georgia Tech was supported by Georgia taxpayers. As a Georgia resident, my tuition was about $450 a year, a price most parents could afford. For those who could not, Georgia Tech offered co-op programs. At that time, Georgia Tech was on a quarter system, not a semester system. The co-op program operated by attending school a quarter and working for a firm for a quarter. The work quarters produced the income for the students education. It took longer to graduate, but many graduates ended up working for the firms where they had been co-ops. In those days there was a demand for graduates that does not exist today. Every graduation at Georgia Tech was accompanied by recruitment booths setup by many American corporations in an effort to recruit Georgia Tech graduates as employees.
There was no such thing as, and no need for, student loans. No students in my day graduated in debt with loans equivalent to a mortgage payment.
In those days, if you graduated from Georgia Tech, the only employment question you faced was which of the many job offers you would accept. In my case, I decided on graduate school. My GPA was barely a 3.0, but Georgia Tech’s reputation was such that I received offers of financial support, either scholarships or paid assistantships, from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Virginia, and if memory serves John Hopkins University, the University of Minnesota and others. I chose Virginia, an absolutely beautiful campus of about 5500 students. Coats and ties were required for class attendance. And there was an honor system enforced by the students. The function of the university was to produce honorable and educated young men capable of carrying forward America’s future. Later, I sampled the coed university of California, Berkeley, a university of tens of thousands and at the time ranked with Harvard University, and then the men’s college of Merton at Oxford University. Compared to Georgia Tech, All subsequent universities were cakewalks.
I continue to receive the published propaganda from Georgia Tech, and I am pleased to see that the institution that taught me life was a serious issue has continued to prosper. But in the process of prospering, I have wondered if Georgia Tech has lost its character. For example, earlier in the 21st century I attended a graduation of a relative. As we walked the campus and I relived memories, we came upon call stations that said push the red button and the campus police will come to your rescue. I asked what this meant. He said that it is ordinary for tech students to be mugged on campus, allegedly by Atlanta blacks, not their own foreign students. I could not believe what he said. It was inconceivable to me that the tough Georgia boys of my day were so intimidated by muggers from outside the Tech campus that they needed to call for police support. At the subsequent graduation ceremony, I understood the need for the red button call centers. A significant percentage of the graduates were petite Asian women.
As we walked the campus, we came upon my fraternity house, Phi Delta Theta. The colonial home sits on the hill, dominating the campus, as did the members of the fraternity in my time when there was no need of the massive combination lock on the front door. Phi Delta Theta was the home of the smartest Tech students and the football team, which in those days was nationally ranked every year. Wade Mitchell, Tech’s quarterback and my fraternity brother, led Georgia Tech’s team to four bowl victories during his four years and graduated with a 4.0 point average. In those days to be a football player at Georgia Tech you had to be smart as there was no alternative curriculum. In those days there were only five postseason bowl games–the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, and the Gator Bowl. Only the very best teams of the football season were invited to these events. Today there is a plethora of bowl games which amounts to nothing except a continuation of the football scene.
In those days, there were department chairman, a dean of students, a dean of faculty, and a president. Today there are endless administrative positions. From the latest information I receive as an alumni of Georgia Tech, the institution continues to evolve from the engineering and scientific origin that earned its reputation. Georgia Tech now has a School of History and Sociology and will offer Archaeology classes beginning in the spring of 2026. Georgia Tech has degrees in international relations and other such soft subjects, such as the Jimmy Carter School of Public Policy. A photo of the next generation of entrepreneurs shows Indians, Muslims, and Hispanics. The Dunn Family Professor in the Scheller Collage of Business is named Karthik Ramachandran. The President of Georgia Tech is Spanish born Ángel Cabrera Izquierdo, born in Madrid Spain. Even in the deep south American ethnics are disappearing from societal institutions.
The United States has evolved, or devolved, into a Tower of Babel, in which ethnic Americans are increasingly displaced in the society’s institutions.
To be clear, Georgia Tech president, Angel Cabrera, and the Dunnn family professor Ramachandran perhaps are the most competent holders of these positions, but they illustrate the multi-cultural Tower of Babel that is displacing the United States of America.
Wherefore art thou America?