A CASE FOR DIVISION OF LABOR IN THE ACADEMY?

Or, more pungently, what business do professors of English have dabbling in political economy?

We might think, in our professorial way, that the rejection of the high—the disparagement of great artists, serious thinkers, and wonderful writers—is without a doubt the worst thing that our colleges and universities have done. But if we want to measure the decline of the liberal arts in the public imagination, we might want to focus on the stigmatization of the ordinary instead of the high.

What I mean is this: Along with the political denigration of what had always been regarded as the peaks of humane learning and the literary and philosophic achievements of the West, there were other attacks and erosions. These stemmed from the view that it is not merely the highest expressions of our culture that need to be toppled but this culture’s more ordinary manifestations—its “bourgeois values,” the common views of right and wrong held by ordinary citizens, their everyday questions and concerns, their pride in their country, and the ethics promoted by conventional Western religious understandings. Regularly, it was not that these views would be “examined” and certainly not that they would be “understood.” More often the agenda was that they would be overthrown.

Eventually, dear reader, you will miss them.

The problem is not that political correctness stops racist speech or ethnic slurs but that, under its sway, the most ordinary things—ordinary questions, ordinary views—are disdained, ridiculed, and often condemned. That people shouldn’t be judged on the basis of race has surely become or is becoming a commonplace, ordinary, standard view. Except on many college campuses, where race-based affirmative action and preferencing is often the rule and where “anti-racist” curricula and procedures are in force—where the solidification of group identities and the ever-present view of American society as a battle between oppressors and the oppressed are what pass for an understanding of our principles and our history.

The greater loss, John Agresto argues, is the conventions and discipline of scholarly inquiry.

Although they live and grow on the basis of freedom of thought and investigation, higher education and the liberal arts in particular do not and should not have to rally to the defense of students who want to use racial slurs or hurl scurrilous comments. Neither students nor faculty have any right to slander, ridicule, or shout down others and claim they are covered by “free speech.”

But, while epithets, obscenity, and even common vulgarity may well be out of bounds, the free exchange of ideas and the right to ask any serious question—and follow where the argument leads—may not be abridged. Liberal education exists to help us understand, as best we can, the truth about the universe and ourselves within it. But if we believe that protecting “diversity” means preventing students and faculty from asking serious questions—or even ordinary questions—about certain human issues for fear that offense might be taken by some or by many, or if we think our view of social justice demands that we treat our universities as seminaries inculcating the new religion of cultural awareness or view our colleges as the new re-education camps for ethically crippled students, then again we see how the spirit of enforcing “correct” beliefs and the spirit of liberal education have become opposite.

That is, bourgeois conventions ought enable members of the scholarly community to marginalize the cancel mob and the troll alike.  The contemporary academy, on the other hand, will be judged for the monuments it has destroyed.

The last 30 years have seen the vandalizing of ever so much of higher education. The supposed reformers have entered the storehouse of centuries of accumulated knowledge, torn down its walls, thrown out its books, and toppled its monuments. For all their brave talk of justice, they have carried out what has to be seen as one of the most intellectually criminal act of the ages, the modern equivalent of burning the libraries of antiquity. Today, acts that were unthinkable, unimaginable, just years ago now seem so very ordinary.

Mr Agresto concludes with a challenge.  "Is any of this reversible? In part, I think so. But this requires us to have a clearer idea of where we intend to go."

It is reversible.  Cold Spring Shops's favorite retired college administrator, Peter Wood, argues, though, that deconstructing the academy simply because it is a nest of deconstructivist nihilists will not turn out well.

Abandoning academia due to the prominence of left-wing orthodoxy within it and the totalitarian means by which it is enforced abandons American institutions beyond college to those who hate America. Left-wing hegemony already prevails in popular culture, the news media, and governmental bureaucracy. The left-wing orthodoxy increasingly found in these domains, however, is fed by academia. Abandoning the factories of ideas to anti-Americanism means those ideas will find still more homes elsewhere in American culture, and they will do so to the detriment of America’s standing and values.

It's on higher education to get the job right, and, unfortunately "transgressive hermeneutics" and a misunderstanding of "critical thinking" will not do the job.

America needs non-academic skills to thrive, but such skills are not all we need. We also must have a citizenry capable of seeing through lies and deception; understanding the principles of self-government and the pursuit of justice; and distinguishing between comfort and actual freedom. Acquiring technical skills is important but will not by itself empower citizens to argue for the natural rights of America’s founding documents against the ideas of socialism. The fruits of a successful small business can be taken away by the votes of indoctrinated masses.

Academia is as critical of a national resource as hard infrastructure. Doctors who are versed in the theories of racial “equity” that now abound in medical schools will be ill-equipped to treat patients who suffer from actual ailments, as opposed to figments of the social justice imagination. Economists who live in the cloud of climate change illusions will wander in ignorance when they eventually staff the Federal Reserve. Journalists who are trained to seek out stories of identity group inequity will have faint ability to recognize any of the other injustices and harms that deserve to be brought to public attention. Consider the readiness of our press to downplay the current recession or its eagerness to present monkeypox as a general threat rather than a disease spread almost exclusively among gay men. Such distortions are the fruit of college classrooms that immerse students in the need to conform to progressive narratives rather than pursue the truth, wherever that may lead. Such students graduate into positions where they will ultimately shape public policy, and those policies shape America’s future. Left-wing politicians and mobs do not come from nothing. They come from the classroom.

It remains to be seen, though, whether the higher education sector will experience a bout of disruptive creative destruction, or collapse of its own hubris, or if, perhaps, people in charge of the regional comprehensives and mid-majors where most of the higher education takes place will brace themselves to their duties.