The ideal of liberal learning is among the most noble, the most beautiful, that has ever been thought.\u00a0 Though never perfected, it was an ideal toward which generations of academics strived.<\/p>\n
Academia was always supposed to be a place devoted to \u201cthe disinterested pursuit of truth and knowledge,\u201d a place where prejudice is subordinated to reason, wishful thinking to the demands of logic and a cultivated sensibility.<\/p>\n
And because it is the pursuit <\/i>of truth\u2014and not Truth itself\u2014for which a \u201chigher education\u201d prepares students, a liberal arts education, then, has always been interpreted, at least in part, as an education in certain types of habits, <\/i>excellences of character or virtues <\/i>without which the pursuit could never get under way.\u00a0 <\/i>In pursuing truth, students (and teacher alike) cultivate the virtues needed to pursue truth.<\/p>\n
In short, liberal learning is designed to produce a certain type of person, a person who, to put it in the terms in which the educated of the eighteenth century described it, could effortlessly navigate his way around \u201cthe conversible world.\u201d\u00a0 A liberal arts education, that is, is an education into a conversation <\/i>between the many academic voices\u2014disciplines\u2014that have defined and, in ways yet unbeknownst to us, will continue to define Western civilization.<\/p>\n
Yet one disposition that is indispensable to this quest for truth is a particular orientation toward time.\u00a0 <\/i>More exactly, liberal learning presupposes partiality toward the past and the present: to be \u201cconversible,\u201d to be conversant in the inheritance of his civilization, the educated person obviously needs to know its past.\u00a0 However, beyond this\u2014well beyond this\u2014he needs to genuinely appreciate his ancestors, for there can be no conversation with those toward whom one is contemptuous or dismissive.\u00a0 If his reverence may be too much for his ancestors to ask of him, his honor is not, for in paying them with this coin the educated person humbles himself\u2014an act in the absence of which he can hope to learn nothing.<\/p>\n
The present is also of value for the educated person, for the pursuit of truth, this conversation across the generations, is not valued on account of anything other than its own intrinsic pleasures: it is delightful, even exhilarating, in itself.<\/p>\n
How things have changed.<\/p>\n
Whether today\u2019s academic trains students for the labor force or for political activism, the point is that, all too frequently, students are supplied with a training\u2014<\/i>not an education.\u00a0 <\/i>And whether it is for the sake of making money or saving the world, this training focuses on\u2014indeed, is obsessed with\u2014the future.\u00a0 <\/i>The past is either neglected or disdained, and the present is viewed as, at best, an unavoidable stepping stone to future bliss; at worst, a hindrance to be surmounted.<\/p>\n
The great tragedy to have befallen our times is that liberal arts programs throughout the West have succumbed to this love for the future (at the cost of marginalizing the past and the present).\u00a0 But here, for the most part, academics are interested in producing good little activists.<\/p>\n
And what this amounts to is good little political leftists.<\/p>\n
The University of Pennsylvania\u2019s Anthea Butler is beyond a classic textbook illustration of the activist academic. In fact, she\u2019s bordering on being a caricature.<\/p>\n
This past summer, immediately following George Zimmerman\u2019s acquittal of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Butler\u2014a professor of religious studies\u2014blogged that God is \u201ca white racist god with a problem.\u201d She added that \u201che is carrying a gun and stalking young black men.\u201d<\/p>\n
Racism in America has its underpinnings in Christianity, Butler wrote, and \u201cthe good Christians of America\u201d are \u201csome\u201d of the country\u2019s \u201cbiggest racists\u201d \u201cwho clearly are not for human flourishing, no matter what ethnicity a person is.\u201d\u00a0 She likened Christians to the KKK and blamed Republicans like Governor Rick Perry of Texas, the NRA, \u201ccapitalism,\u201d and the Koch brothers for bringing about Trayvon Martin\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
Now, Professor Butler is at it again.<\/p>\n
According to Campus Reform, she has recently tweeted that the Republicans<\/i> have shut down the government for no reason other than that of Barack Obama\u2019s race.\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n
Unlike Bill Clinton, our country\u2019s first \u201cfake black president\u201d under whom the last shut down transpired, Obama is America\u2019s \u201cfirst real black president\u201d that the GOP has had to \u201cmess with.\u201d Butler told her followers that they must \u201cbe blind to think race does not play into this stupidity.\u201d If only Republicans like House Speaker John Boehner\u2014who Butler charged with being \u201cdrunk\u201d\u2014\u201cwould quit trying to regulate vaginas they could practice governance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sadly, Butler is not at all atypical of today\u2019s academic.\u00a0 For this reason, perhaps like the Western world itself, academia\u2014traditionally the place <\/i>where students could engage in the unhindered pursuit of knowledge by learning how to become conversant in the modes of imagination that compose their civilization\u2014will be destroyed from the inside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The ideal of liberal learning is among the most noble, the most beautiful, that has ever been thought.\u00a0 Though never perfected, it was an ideal toward which generations of academics strived. Academia was always supposed to be a place devoted to \u201cthe disinterested pursuit of truth and knowledge,\u201d a place where prejudice is subordinated to…<\/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-949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n