Sentence:  … if it neglects to maintain the physical plant which is decaying visibly and shockingly around us while refusing to upgrade the indispensable resources of teaching and learning — textbooks, encyclopedias, atlases, journals, scientific apparatus, that is, libraries and laboratories — then it is nothing more than an outright deception. As such, it remains a disingenuous exercise in crude politics, a blatant cultural scam which will do nothing but accelerate our already precipitous descent into mediocrity, incompetence, and desuetude. In short, it will become nothing more than the new <WSD>thanatocracy</WSD> of learning. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  Endemic stagnation or decay.