Just hours before writing this, some colleagues of mine at a local community college in New Jersey where I teach philosophy were busy lamenting their students\u2019 utter lack of interest in the liberal arts.\u00a0 Indeed, the phenomenon to which my colleagues refer is one of which educators everywhere are all too familiar.\u00a0 They are further correct in recognizing it for the tragedy that it is.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Even more tragic, though, is that their analysis of the problem is a function of the problem itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You see, the reason why college students have zero interest in reading Shakespeare, Plato, or any of the classics of Western civilization, according to them,\u00a0is because of developments that transpired within American society during the last couple of decades. The name of Bill Bennett\u2014Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan\u2014was dropped during this conversation.\u00a0 One of the parties to it also spoke of what he evidently thinks is the mutually antagonistic relationship between \u201cfree market capitalism\u201d and liberal learning.\u00a0 \u201cRight wing radio\u201d too was identified as one of the culprits behind the state of neglect to which the liberal arts have been reduced.<\/p>\n
So, what my colleagues are basically saying is that roughly since the time of Reagan\u2019s presidency, non-leftists have succeeded in affecting a radical paradigm shift in higher education.\u00a0 Thanks to their efforts, the contemporary university has transformed itself from a place of classical liberal learning to one that is now modeled on the pattern of a business.\u00a0 Courtesy of \u201cthe right wing\u201d with its commitment to \u201cfree market capitalism,\u201d the university no longer exists to promote knowledge for its own sake. It now exists for the sake of promoting its students\u2019 careers.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
That the university is in a state of ill repair is undoubtedly true.\u00a0 And that there is a sense in which students are treated as customers is equally true.<\/p>\n
But the proposition that it is those on the right\u2014<\/em>Republicans!\u2014who have managed to visit all of these changes upon\u2014of all places!\u2014academia and only within the last twenty to thirty years, is just laughable on its face.\u00a0<\/p>\n The university has been and remains a bastion of leftism.\u00a0 Any analysis of the state of education today that fails to mention this stone cold fact is fatally flawed.\u00a0 Any analysis that both fails to mention this and that lays the blame for all of the challenges facing higher education solely at the feet of those on the political right is preposterous.<\/p>\n In reality, there are many things that account for the poverty of imagination from which far too many of our college students suffer.<\/p>\n First, it is true, I think, that what my colleagues call \u201cfree market capitalism\u201d indeed has something to do with students\u2019 anti-intellectualism. But this is just another way of saying that, from its inception,America herself may not have been the most hospitable clime within which to foster a love for the liberal arts.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFree market capitalism,\u201d mind you, is not an \u201cism\u201d at all, for \u201cfree market capitalism,\u201d strictly speaking, no more exists than does some thing <\/em>called \u201cthe weather.\u201d Rather, in America, where liberty has historically been prized above all other goods, what we have had is a set of institutional arrangements that diffuse power and authority widely.\u00a0 <\/em>One way\u2014the only way\u2014to insure this is by seeing to it that every individual citizen has a right <\/em>to private<\/em> property.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cCapitalism\u201d refers to nothing more or less than a situation comprised of countless people exercising their property rights.\u00a0<\/p>\n That is, \u201cfree market capitalism\u201d is nothing more or less than freedom. <\/em><\/p>\n Now, that being said, freedom\u2014as Americans have traditionally conceived it\u2014may very well inhibit students\u2019 interest in the liberal arts. America, after all, is a relatively new country, a country that prided itself on parting ways from the ancient traditions of the Mother continent of Europe.\u00a0 It is not by accident that as American freedom grew in favor so too did the notion of \u201cpractical knowledge\u201d grow among Americans.<\/p>\n In glaring contrast, the classical ideal of liberal learning affirms knowledge for its own sake\u2014not <\/em>the sake of some material satisfaction regarding which knowledge is a mere means.<\/p>\n Second, the liberal arts presuppose a particular orientation toward time. More specifically, since they compose the inheritance that is our civilization, to study the liberal arts is, necessarily, to center our attention primarily upon the past.\u00a0 This doesn\u2019t preclude present enjoyment, but it is utterly incompatible with the obsessive focus on the future that marks those \u201ccapitalists\u201d who are beholden to the god of \u201cpractical knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n Ironically, though, the \u201ccapitalist\u2019s\u201d leftist critics, like my colleagues, are just as obsessed with the future as is the object of their critique.<\/p>\n Leftist professors tend to be activists. <\/em>\u00a0Not unlike \u201cthe capitalists\u201d who they despise, their eyes are always looking off into the future, for it is in the future where the next utopia is to be found. And because this as-yet-unrealized promised land requires for its realization a particular set of political<\/em> arrangements, what this means is that the leftist professor, in being an activist, can\u2019t resist politicizing education.<\/p>\n But politics is as topical and transitory as any enterprise, and the political activist is as preoccupied with the next <\/em>achievement as are consumers and entrepreneurs (i.e. \u201ccapitalists\u201d).\u00a0<\/p>\n When he turns toward the past and the present at all, it is for the purpose of conscripting them into the service of bringing to fruition the future of which he dreams.<\/p>\n Whether, then, we are dealing with \u201cfree market capitalists\u201d or leftist academics, it appears that the classical ideal of learning for its sake\u2014the <\/em>principle of the liberal arts\u2014is obsolete.<\/p>\n There is, though, but another respect in which students\u2019 disinterest in the liberal arts may just be one of the leftist academic\u2019s chickens coming home to roost.<\/p>\n Both academic and popular leftists have labored inexhaustibly to convince the inhabitants of the Western world that their civilization is incorrigibly oppressive. And this is but another way of saying that the whites, the white men especially, with whom it had historically been identified, are evil.<\/p>\n But if Western civilization is the cesspool that leftists make it out to be and if whites are responsible for the lion\u2019s share of wickedness in the world, then on what basis can we convince the young (or anyone else) that Western civilization is something to be learned and preserved?\u00a0 On what grounds can we hope to persuade them that some of the most wicked men in the world\u2014such dead white males as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Shakespeare,Canterbury, etc.\u2014are fonts of wisdom and virtue?<\/p>\n In politicizing the study of the liberal arts by making it all about the study of racial, gender, and class oppression, the academic leftist has chopped off his proverbial nose to spite his face.<\/p>\n If we truly wish to understand the condition of the liberal arts today, we need to abandon the silly notion that the American right or Republicans have anything to do with it.<\/p>\n This, in turn, means that we need to know a thing or two about the larger American culture, yes, but, even more importantly, the leftist ideologues who teach the liberal arts.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just hours before writing this, some colleagues of mine at a local community college in New Jersey where I teach philosophy were busy lamenting their students\u2019 utter lack of interest in the liberal arts.\u00a0 Indeed, the phenomenon to which my colleagues refer is one of which educators everywhere are all too familiar.\u00a0 They are further…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n