My interest was piqued recently when I encountered at Townhall.com the title of Kurt Schlicter\u2019s article: \u201cLet\u2019s Help Academia Destroy Itself.\u201d\u00a0 The author, a self-described conservative, levels a visceral assault against the university. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Schlicter offers an essentially two prong attack against academia.\u00a0 The first we can call \u201cthe tick argument.\u201d\u00a0 Academia, he says, is like \u201ca liberal tick\u201d in that it divests society of its \u201cblood\u201d while producing nothing in return.\u00a0 The second argument centers on the politicization of higher education.\u00a0 Schlicter calls academia \u201cthe College-Progressive Complex,\u201d for it is \u201ca reservoir of leftism\u201d that American taxpayers are forced to subsidize while it insures a bottomless supply of liberal, and largely underemployed, Democratic voters. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
While Schlicter oversimplifies some things, as an academic who also happens to be a conservative, I know as well as anyone that, sadly, there is also much truth in what he says. In fact, in some respects, he actually understates the extent to which leftist ideology saturates the contemporary academy.<\/p>\n
Not only is \u201cthe disinterested pursuit of truth\u201d an ideal that leftist academics have long abandoned.\u00a0 This is an ideal that they regularly mock.\u00a0 Moreover, it is more frequently than not treated as a Eurocentric social construction by which white men have traditionally bludgeoned into submission women, non-whites, homosexuals, non-Christians, and the environment.<\/p>\n
To those outside of the academy, this may sound like hyperbole.\u00a0 I assure you, it is not.\u00a0 One of my professors from graduate school actually referred to the Western philosophical tradition as \u201cthuggish\u201d for its assumption that truth was real and discoverable.\u00a0 Think about this: with one proverbial stroke of the pen, he dismisses most of the West\u2019s brightest lights, from the ancient Greeks through the Christian medievalists to the moderns, as a bunch of bullying thugs.<\/p>\n
Yet this is not an anomaly.\u00a0 World famous philosophers, like Jacques Derrida, make it their task in life to \u201cdeconstruct\u201d Western civilization so as to convict it of \u201clogocentrism\u201d\u2014its faith in reason to access reality.\u00a0<\/p>\n
However, even when the academic is not a self-sworn post-modernist, the contempt for his or her <\/em>civilization is expressed in other ways.\u00a0 Indeed, what one can\u2019t fail to discover upon spending any bit of time in today\u2019s university is that contempt for Western civilization has assumed the standing of a creed.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n All that has been said and thought in the West is routinely brought before the tribunal of what one commentator once aptly called \u201cthe holy trinity\u201d of race, sex, <\/em>and class.\u00a0 <\/em>Actually, it is even worse than this, for it isn\u2019t just racism, sexism, and classism for which academia condemns the West. The latter is also guilty of \u201cspeciesim,\u201d bias against non-humans; \u201cableism,\u201d bias against the handicapped or \u201cdifferently-abled;\u201d and \u201cageism,\u201d bias against those of a specific age group.<\/p>\n Many commentators on the right regularly charge leftists generally, and leftist academics in particular, with endorsing \u201cmoral relativism.\u201d\u00a0 It should be clear by now that this charge is misplaced.\u00a0<\/p>\n Of course it is correct that there is no short supply of leftist academics who disavow \u201cabsolutism.\u201d And there are many who claim to be relativists.\u00a0<\/p>\n But I have never met or even heard of an academic who really<\/em> is a relativist.\u00a0 The leftists who dominate the academy, whether they style themselves \u201crelativists\u201d or not, are like jihadists or crusaders when it comes to their creed.\u00a0 As far as they are concerned, either others convert to their cause or risk a kind of social\u2014and\/or professional\u2014death:\u00a0 ostracism and demonization.\u00a0 Leftist academics are absolutists in the worst sense of this word.<\/p>\n Before deciding as to whether they want to pledge to a university their precious time and treasure, aspiring college students and\/or their guardians need to know what life in academia is really like.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My interest was piqued recently when I encountered at Townhall.com the title of Kurt Schlicter\u2019s article: \u201cLet\u2019s Help Academia Destroy Itself.\u201d\u00a0 The author, a self-described conservative, levels a visceral assault against the university. \u00a0 Schlicter offers an essentially two prong attack against academia.\u00a0 The first we can call \u201cthe tick argument.\u201d\u00a0 Academia, he says, is…<\/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-767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n