THAT CONTINUAL AND FEARLESS SIFTING AND WINNOWING.

Is the Hamas-mania on display at institutions of higher learning you might have heard of the evidence that convinces the people that our universities are being run by terminally stupid people?  Campus Reform contributor Rob Jenkins suggests it might be.  First, he submits a bill of particulars.

What’s to blame for this sad state of affairs? Competition from the private sector? Budget-slashing politicians? Students who are just too dumb to know what’s good for them?

No. The main culprit is the institutions themselves, individually and collectively. As Obi-Wan Kenobi told Annakin Skywalker, when the young Jedi blamed his former mentor for the loss of his beloved Princess Padme, “You have done that yourself.”

Colleges and universities have driven away students, and are on the verge of making themselves irrelevant, because they have abandoned their core mission of pursuing and disseminating truth. Instead, they insist reality is both subjective and malleable and objective truth does not exist.

It’s as if the American Dental Association suddenly announced that tooth decay is no longer a thing, thereby repudiating its own raison d’etre. How long would the profession survive?

But it’s worse than that. Colleges don’t just waffle on truth; they actively embrace lies. Like the lie that any racial disparity must be due solely to ingrained “systemic racism.” Or the lie that “gender is on a spectrum.” Or the lie that “transwomen are women.”

Transgressivity for its own sake eventually undermines higher education's credibility.

Colleges have become so invested in these “narratives”—which any rational person can see are false—that they have lost all credibility with wide swaths of the population. What is the advantage of an “education” if practically everything you “learn” simply isn’t true?

These last few weeks, however, may drive the final nail into the proverbial coffin, as many institutions have revealed to the world that they not only eschew truth and embrace lies—they reject common decency and actively celebrate evil.

I am referring, of course, to the way campuses like Harvard, Stanford, and Penn (just to name a few) have reacted to the slaughter of innocent Israeli civilians, including children, by Hamas terrorists: pro-Hamas rallies, social media posts from terrorist-sympathizing faculty, anodyne “both sides” statements penned by morally bankrupt administrators.

The mask has been ripped off; they ripped it off themselves. It is now beyond dispute that most “institutions of higher learning” are no longer about learning, nor are they “higher” than, say, your average bloodthirsty street mob. They are radical left-wing indoctrination centers, pure and simple, and everyone can see it—including, as it turns out, wealthy donors.

Left-wing indoctrination? Suppose what he interprets as indoctrination might be asking difficult questions, which is notionally why we have the universities in the first place.

Current Affairs contributors Matt McManus and Nathan J. Robinson take up the case for asking those questions.  "We don’t just need job training; the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake is everyone’s right."  That presupposes standards of inquiry and criteria for reconsidering priors.  Mr Jenkins suggests an academic climate hostile to those things.  Is it?

Conservatives tend to go back and forth between arguing that universities simply need more “ideological diversity”/neutrality and arguing that a real or “classical” education would mean teaching the “objective truth” of their own ideology. Ben Shapiro, for example, will attack universities one day for “brainwashing” students, and the next day defend an approach to education focused on the twin peaks of “Athens and Jerusalem,” claiming we more or less got the right political principles down circa some combination of Locke and Burke in the 18th century. In The College Scam, Charlie Kirk recommends most students not go to college since it is potentially a waste of money and will ensure they get brainwashed by “woke” and “Classical Marxist” professors. But if they do go to college, Kirk thinks they should avoid “indoctrination” by going to a transparently partisan school like Hillsdale, whose president Larry Arnn “unapologetically contends for truth, liberty, and the development of good character” and which has been described as a “shining city on a hill” for conservatives.

In light of all this, it’s tempting for a leftist to say that  conservatives just don’t like college because learning too much makes it harder for ordinary people to accept the right’s worldview. If the success of their ideology depends on ignorance, of course they want to discourage people from getting too educated. We do know that four years of college education makes students slightly more likely to identify as politically liberal, although one study found that the shift is not huge. (Furthermore, “at the time of their graduation, students were just as likely as when they began college to report that political conservatives make positive contributions to society and are ethical people, as well as agreeing that they share things in common with political conservatives and have a positive attitude toward political conservatives.”)

If you are a conservative, this is proof of brainwashing, while if you’re on the left, it may be confirmation that learning more about the world and thinking harder makes you less likely to be a reactionary. If you actually dive into the facts of, say, America’s history of white supremacy, or the way major corporations exploit the world’s poor, your investigation will make it considerably harder for you to accept conservatives’ arguments that racism is a thing of the past or that capitalism is an unambiguous good for everyone.

I don't have many opportunities to recommend colleges to youngsters these days, but I'd suggest that a matriculant of a conservative bent consider someplace with a leftish reputation, whilst the matriculant of a liberal bent consider Hillsdale.  That's a way to expose your priors to the strongest counter-arguments, something that people who stay in their ideological siloes never get.

Messrs. McManus and Robinson then take a provocative turn.

But another reason conservatives don’t much like college comes from the very heart of their worldview. From the beginning, conservatives have idolized what Roger Scruton approvingly called “unthinking” people. The most sophisticated right-wing intellectuals are often admirably more candid about this than their sloppier populist counterparts. There is a strongly anti-democratic current in right-wing philosophy which does not believe that the people ought to think for and govern themselves. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke insisted that “sublime principles ought to be infused into persons of exalted situation” because “whenever man is put over men, as the better nature ought ever to preside, in that case more particularly, he as nearly as possible be approximated to his perfection.” By this, he meant that those at the top of social hierarchies ought to be seen as deserving of their power. Too much “light and reason” might cause the people to decide that “a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman.” By contrast, Burke admires the men and women who are content with staying in their “little platoons” and who submit themselves to his sublime authorities happily and willingly.

What, though, are the Ivies, if not institutions that infuse a different set of "sublime principles" into people who fancy themselves as worthy of that "exalted situation?"  A little "light and reason" might cause people to be skeptical of either the royalty or the intelligentsia claiming a special vision.

Those with “unconstrained vision” think that humans are malleable and can be perfected. They believe that social ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better. To subscribers of this view, poverty, crime, inequality, and war are not inevitable. Rather, they are puzzles that can be solved. We need only to say the right things, enact the right policies, and spend enough money, and we will suffer these social ills no more. This worldview is the foundation of the progressive mindset.

By contrast, those who see the world through a “constrained vision” lens believe that human nature is a universal constant. No amount of social engineering can change the sober reality of human self-interest, or the fact that human empathy and social resources are necessarily scarce. People who see things this way believe that most political and social problems will never be “solved”; they can only be managed. This approach is the bedrock of the conservative worldview.

One can grant those unpleasant facts Messrs. McManus and Robinson call attention to and yet fear that higher education does not acknowledge the constrained, or is it tragic, vision, or as I have it, reality batting last.

The conservative wariness of higher learning, then, is natural, because higher learning may inculcate students with a critical disposition that will inspire them to regard the hierarchies and systems of power in their society as just so many “pleasing” (or not so pleasing) illusions. When these ideas (the sacredness of the Constitution, the fixed nature of gender roles, the moral exceptionalism of the United States, the existence of God, the fairness of capitalism) can be interrogated and evaluated rationally, they are destabilized. Educated students who have been encouraged to think for themselves will not regard their society as consisting of “sublime” and eternal institutions and embodying perfected values. Instead, they’ll see them as emerging within history, the inevitable product of compromises, injustices, and all too human failings. Furthermore, what emerged historically and contingently is not inherently necessary, and so can (and perhaps should) be reconceived and remade. A little learning can therefore be a very dangerous thing.

Again with that annoying "interrogated" notion, which is amusing under an intellectual paradigm that denies the existence of a truth to be discovered the way the perpetration of a crime is.  And, as the authors confess, it's so easy to go from critique to subversion to remaking, no matter how unpleasant that remaking is.

The events of the last two weeks have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power. And after the last two weeks, there can be no doubt about how these people will use any power they seize: they will seek to destroy, in any way they can, those who disagree.

This unpleasant conclusion is surprising only if you are still clinging to the unconstrained vision. But if there is any constant in human history, it is that revolutionaries always feel entitled to destroy those who stand in their way.

McManus and Robinson pray we don't notice.

College can be quite the opposite of an indoctrination center. It can be a mind-expanding place where students are exposed to ideas, facts, and even basic questions that they had never considered before. At its best, college is a place where young people can spend four years letting their mind wander freely, exploring whatever intellectual and practical avenues they like (even, yes, the infamous “underwater basket-weaving”), experimenting and figuring out who they are, what they like, and what they think.

In fact, the conservative caricature of colleges is radically out of step with the reality of life on campus. Some of what conservatives complain about—like the “canceling” of the classics or criticism of Western civilization—is better seen as the application of rational criticism to sacred dogmas.

That might be, but you deconstruct the Western intellectual tradition at your peril. "If our civilization is allowed to collapse, it will not be replaced by a progressive utopia. It will be replaced by chaos and barbarism." Look no further than Chicago or San Francisco.