The national media has discovered that today’s typical college campus is full of muddled thinking and bad faith.
And that many college presidents are themselves allergic to clear thought and speech.
It took three Ivy League presidents, testifying in the congressional fun house, and failing to muster a smidgen of outrage or compassion over campus antisemitism for this to be acknowledged.
Really?
Our universities have been a morass of blather and posture for years.
They have been failing many of our young and overcharging them for years.
They have failed to prepare, teach, and challenge for years.
University executives are typically paid, often in the millions, to do little more than dress well and mutter about “diversity” and the football team.
They are not expected to lead, but to raise money and to do public relations.
Few even attempt to develop intellectual diversity on campus.
Few defend intellectual rigor, higher truths, or even factual truth. They are not in that business.
One report claims that one in five young Americans think the holocaust is a myth.
Can this be?
I can believe that very few know much about the holocaust.
Why? Because we do not teach it.
Not in high schools, in which we use sanitized, lightweight textbooks.
Not in colleges, in which we teach literary theory instead of literature; feminist theory instead of the history of women’s rights; and critical race theory instead of the history of civil rights in America and the struggle for human rights in the world.
Much of what is offered academically on our college campuses today is pompous drivel and we have known this for a long, long time.
College students are not given much to do with their minds because they are now savvy and particular consumers whose parents are paying a lot of money to warehouse them for four or five years.
College professors are too often either play- acting ideologues or scared rabbits, living in constant fear of being called racists, misogynists, or sexual predators.
They are not inclined to challenge students who may accuse them of creating “unsafe” spaces.
Well, guess what? Liberty is an unsafe space.
Much like life.
Much like the world.
As we dive further and further toward the intellectual bottom, defining ignorance down, it is perhaps not surprising that any number of outrages, disguised as answers, should take some hold – antisemitism, America as a racist country, hostility toward traditional religions, especially Christianity, to name three.
White supremacy would grow on campus too, if there were faculty sponsors.
The young are not being given a real foundation to build their lives upon.
But it’s not just a matter of lack of respect for “the best that has been thought and said.” The other part of the equation is lack of respect for free speech and free inquiry.
Free inquiry is the planting ground of the university.
Values tested by time and criticism are the seeds.
But the campus administrators of today have failed BOTH to be outraged by hatred and stupidity AND to defend free speech.
The campus has at once become a cesspool of antisemitism and the cancel culture – the worst of all worlds.
In an open society, and in higher education in particular, the antidote to ignorant speech is informed speech; the antidote to hate speech is love speech; and the antidote to the ahistorical is the teaching of history.
It won’t help to cancel some college presidents. Especially when the Grand Inquisitor is herself a product of ignorance and reaction. The cure is more speech, but serious speech.
The university itself must be reformed.
And reform starts with both negatives and positives.
The negative: Rid the university of slogans, superstition, posturing, and gimmicks.
Stop playing to the students and student groups and talking down to them.
The positive: Commit fully to empirical tests, to evidence, to debate, and to reason.
Thus could we restore actual thought to campus, and with it the art of making distinctions. Not every bit of pro-Palestinian rhetoric is an antisemitic assault. Not every defense of the family is racist. Not every defense of America is chauvinistic.
And not every passing intellectual fad, like the inexplicable and repugnant sympathy for Hamas, is humane because it is new.
A university cannot be worthy of the name if its commitment to free thought is not robust.
But that thought will be nothing but toxic, or and insultingly banal, if it is not tested and based on the high points of humanity’s intellectual history.
Look for the university president who will personally confront the bigot or conspiracy theorist – with argument. And defend his right to error.
And consider sending your high school graduate to a values-based college or university or one of the service academies – if you want him, or her, to be ready for the world and a helpmate in it.
Sorry Sheila, but that particular aspect so readily forgiven as Pittsburghese is just so jarring, especially when seen in ads, on TV--spoken by news commentators, and others sufficiently educated to know better. If you can bring attention to it with your professional background, it would be doing this great city a great favor. I should have been more polite in my comment. My sincere goal is to let people know it is grammatically incorrect, unlike much of Pittsburghese that is simply cute local vocabulary. It is surprising to see how many people do not know this until told.
I was pretty much with you until your “solution” was to send students to a “values-based” university. Since when do Religious colleges teach/ discuss values and beliefs other that the ones they espouse?