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June 13, 2005
Our Ailing Univesities, Our Ailing Culture
Dr. Sanity read her copy of the new Policy Review before I had a chance to, and she has a post up on this review of a new book by Donald Alexander Downs entitled Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus.
By way of introduction, reviewer Peter Berkowitz notes how an academy ostensibly dedicated to multiculturalism has nonetheless failed, for instance, to graduate students who have a knowledge of any foreign language; and he correctly observes that the transmission of the collected knowledge of our civilization, along with the practice of free and open inquiry, has been vigorously suppressed, usually with contempt:
The last 25 years have witnessed the return of what Downs calls the “proprietary university,” which sees its central mission not as the transmission of knowledge and the pursuit of truth but rather as the inculcation of a specific — in this case ostensibly progressive — moral and political agenda. Another involves a transformation in the progressive sensibility itself. As late as the mid-1960s, the dominant opinion on the left was that free speech and due process were essential to the creation of a more inclusive and just society. But belief in the progressive character of liberal principles has been under intense attack by influential scholars since the glory days of Martin Luther King Jr.
The emphasis is mine. Of course the difference, as Roger Kimball has shown, is that the academy has aggressively promoted postmodern relativism and the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt school at the expense of the ideas of knowable truth and certainty of knowledge.
Meanwhile, postmodern critics, believing themselves to be following Nietzsche, argued that individual rights were fictions invented by the strong to control the weak (never mind that Nietzsche decried modern liberalism as an invention of the weak to tyrannize the strong). Taken together, these opinions encouraged the idea of “progressive censorship,” the policing of speech to ensure that it conformed to standards deemed necessary to lift up and liberate the oppressed.
But Professor Downs' intent is not to explore the philosophical tectonics of the progressive movement, but rather to catalog concrete examples of the egregious suppression of speech and expression on our campuses.
Berkowitz note that Downs argues convincingly that our universities will continue to decay unless there is 1) a return to an appreciation of truly free speech--speech that is the result of honest skeptical inquiry; and 2) a reevaluation of the real intent of a university education. Berkowitz:
Universities can start by reestablishing — or establishing — the teaching of a solid core of learning that defines an educated person. The alternative, which has been widely adopted and involves “distribution requirements,” or special courses that focus on “methods of knowing” or “approaches to knowledge,” does not work and should be replaced.
Here is the key--"a solid core of learning". As I have said before, this should not be a politically polarized topic. It is as vital to the Democrats as it is to Republicans. That is, the Democrats of the traditional two-party US system.
I think the Very Important Point of this review is: the postmodern academics who remain in control of our universities are not interested in traditional Democratic/Republican politics. They are dedicated to advancing the cause of cultural Marxism--and the first phase of this campaign has been to attack the Western canon with its attendant principles of disinterested inquiry and established truths. They have been successful beyond their wildest dreams.
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Tracked on June 14, 2005 06:56 AM
Comments
My last class for my English major was a class in literary criticism, and I hated it. I thought it was too abstract, too anti-creative. Some of the ideas in some of the methods were interesting, like Derrida's deconstructionism, but most of them seemed like self-serving crap. The kind of stuff dreamed up to put food on self-important professors' tables.
That's what I see as the real problem, and you mention it above. Opinion is opinion, and you can't stop professors from having it. If anything, it's good for conservatives to be bombarded with liberal views so that they can hold their own views up against them, and in so doing strengthen them. But there's got to be a balance struck. Educational emphasis recently has been on more abstract methods rather than rote memorization. That's a good idea, but it's gone too far and needs to come back to an equilibrium. You can know like crazy how to read something critically, but sometimes you just need to know what year Shakespeare died, or something.
In short, as a former educator, I think that so long as opinions are not presented as fact, and so long as they're not presented in inappropriate fora, there's nothing really to be done about professors having opinions with which you don't agree.
Posted by: Fargus at June 14, 2005 08:05 AM
I agree, and I can't emphasize strongly enough that I think it should be a nonpolitical problem. And the progressivist educators have confused technique ("rote memorization") with theory ("facts and figures are evil"). Facts and algorithms are not evil; they can be taught creatively and that's where the skill of the teacher comes in.
All new knowledge is discovered at the outer boundaries of existing knowledge. You have to master the existing before you can create. Duh.
Posted by: Jeff at June 14, 2005 11:44 AM
I agree to a point, but just.
I have been initiated into this stuff through years of seminars and readings - and sure, it turned me into a raving commie loon ... for about eighteen months. It wears off, at least for some people.
And the young'uns - the kids being taught by the grad students - are, at least 50% of them, thoroughly sick of this B.S. by now. The youth, from my experience in graduate school teaching them, are split almost exactly down the middle - but mostly what they are is apathetic. And apathy may not be good for chomskyite fantasies of "true democracy," but it's mother's milk to a republic. [debatable, but i'm in a half-full mood today]
This is a generational thing - the older generation of radicals was able to indoctrinate the current grad student/young professoriate, but the postmodern flu has debilitated my generation too much for us to really believe in spreading the Word anymore. IOW, it's in irrelevant/decadent phase, instead of being a viable threat.
I'm in Berkeley, so maybe it's just that the epicenter of the movement has burned away while the shock waves continue to spread outwards, but I don't think this stuff has much of a future. Which is the point, I suppose. After us, the flood ...
Posted by: Knemon at June 14, 2005 06:00 PM
I'd like to think you're right, but the problem remains that, at the very least, all of this is a distraction from returning to the classic idea of a liberal education. It's great that a lot of students blow this stuff off, but the faculty believes in it to a religious degree; and it precludes anything useful being taught.
And perhaps most damaging, it definitely leaches down to the ed schools, and thus you wind up with a fairly direct link from Derrida to your child's kindergarten teacher. There are less degrees of removal than you might think.
Posted by: Jeff at June 15, 2005 12:27 AM
