The Post-Truth Classroom

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | February 11, 2022 | Michael Samaritano

[karpov]

Veritas. Lux et veritas. Veritas vos liberabit.

Truth. Light and truth. Truth will set you free.

These are the official mottos for Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins. They reflect a conception of the university in which the dissemination and discovery of truth is the school’s main purpose. In the past, these institutions largely lived up to the promise of their mottos.

Today, these mottos are still engraved in these schools’ buildings and placed on these schools’ flags. But they stand now like relics of a forgotten past. Like most contemporary universities, these schools have abandoned the dissemination of truth as their central aim. Instead, they have adopted a pedagogical approach which affirms that moral truth either does not exist, cannot be ascertained, or is not worth ascertaining.

The leaders of our universities would, of course, balk at such a charge. “Our universities do teach truth,” they might respond, “just not personal values.” Such a response reflects the notion, presently quite fashionable in academe, that the only kind of truth that exists (or is worth teaching) is empirical truth. Under such a conception, truth is limited to facts, i.e. statements about things that can be directly observed or verified in a laboratory. Normative claims, those which concern value judgments (such as “stealing is wrong”), are not made candidates for truth or falsity. They are relegated to the realm of personal values, judgments that students may choose to accept, but that cannot be taught by the university as something that is either true or false.

[oldtech]

God’s word is truth. Much of it looks like value judgments, so how do they square that? Is God’s word an opinion? Of course, an individual has to decide to accept it or not.

[castlebrew]

In cerivisia, veritas!