Posted on 04/13/2015 10:04:28 AM PDT by Heartlander
If you ever feel like so much of what’s happening on university campuses today is a bunch of nonsense, you’re not alone and you’re not the first.
Back in 1987, American philosophy professor Allan Bloom unleashed a widespread attack on modern education.
His book The Closing of the American Mind argued that the university system was overcome by moral relativism. They weren’t teaching long-valued wisdom anymore, but subjective trends.
They were all about promoting “the political passion of the hour,” as columnist George Will described it in a review at the time. Knee-jerk activism was taking hold.
The book was an unexpected bestseller. One of those works that finally said publicly and loudly what so many people had been thinking to themselves for years. “It may be politically portentous,” Will wrote of its popularity, suggesting change was on the horizon.
Did that change occur? Nope. At least not according to acclaimed philosopher Roger Scruton in an essay “The End of the University” released earlier this month.
He laments that “Books are put on or struck off the syllabus on grounds of their political correctness; speech codes and counseling services police the language and thought of both students and teachers; courses are designed to impart ideological conformity, and students are often penalized for having drawn some heretical conclusion about the leading issues of the day.”
Like how the vaguely defined “rape culture” that’s so trendy with impressionable minds right now has brought us to the point where Rolling Stone is publishing activist features about a rape that just didn’t happen.
Or how students at the University of Ottawa forced the shut down of an Ann Coulter event because they couldn’t handle the thought of someone with ideas different from their own finding an audience.
So non-intellectual. So, to Bloom’s point, closed minded. Don’t like Ann? Don’t show up. That simple.
As Scruton notes: “Moral relativism clears the ground for a new kind of absolutism. The emerging curriculum in the humanities is in fact far more censorious, in crucial matters, than the one that it strives to replace.”
But this isn’t just about the handful of protests the student clubs get up to. The problem has leaked into all of the humanities – the once sacred home for all forms of inquiry.
It’s about dismantling anything connected to the past, anything that suggests we can learn from the people who came before us: “The Marxist theory of ideology, or some feminist, poststructuralist, or Foucauldian descendent of it, will be summoned in proof of the view that the precious achievements of our culture owe their status to the power that speaks through them, and that they are therefore of no intrinsic worth.”
In other words, too many of the departments are screwed. What do we do now?
The change George Will predicted coming almost 30 years ago never did because while he was right to note that the silent majority clearly agreed that education was going down the tubes, they weren’t the folks running the academy. All you need is enough relativists to become heads of departments and that sets the trend.
Scruton concludes “we can no longer entrust our high culture to the universities.” Who or what can we trust them to then? He points to the “private reading groups, online courses, associations of scholars, think tanks, and public-lecture series.”
In other words, knowledge has gone open source. Screw sending your kids to university or college to get a broad education. Take it to the streets. Do it on the side.
Interesting. But scary. Because it means any inquiry not approved by the politically correct has to go underground.
Plus, any problems in the university are community problems. Both the taxpayer and those shelling out for tuition are paying for this.
The closing of the post-secondary mind is a problem for all of us. The solution? Simple but hard to come by: Drop the relativism and P.C. shenanigans. Demand excellence in education.
Good article. But as with most good thoughtful essays like this it is strong on defining the problem but says almost nothing about what we can do, practically, to achieve the goals.
The universities, along with our putrid media, are an infection that is about to kill America.
If you want to fix colleges, end the federal student loan program — grandfather in people already in-progress.
The end of “free” money will kill the stupid programs and bring the price of college back down to Earth.
Send out the pink slips to the Pinkos...
And I'm serious. :)
We need to cut their financial throats and let those zombies die.
The end of “free” money will kill the stupid programs and bring the price of college back down to Earth.
Exactly right. Too often unearned federal dollars are at the root of problems we face. The federal student loan program now simply functions as a funding scheme for excessively priced liberal indoctrination.
Logical Seven Point solution to the student loan crisis:
Yes, the taxpayer takes a 30% hit up front to liquidate this crisis, but that is far better than continuing to grow this monster.
Football.
I rest my case.
The eldest goes into the family business and the other two siblings go into the religious orders, military, or humanities.
This way there is a constant trickle of conservatives into all branches of society rather than the current segregation where conservatives go primarily into business/engineering and liberals go into the humanities.
Of course that's not going to happen because there is a large chunk of conservatives that don't value the humanities. Certainly lots of libertarians seem more interested in infantile SF and Fantasy than literature.
And BTW, Allan Bloom turned out to be a fag. So obviously whatever he had to say was not worth listening too, at least according to some "conservatives".
If you don't care to pay for them, you can also buy books on CD or even borrow them from your local public library.
Universities are a place to meet and socialize and have keg parties and maybe learn something for a career but the liberals like everything they touch have ruined it.
See thegreatcourses.com
Solution: End federal student loans, stop donating money to any college privately. Starve the monster.
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