The academic community is suddenly asking the right questions about who it has become and why. Just titled” We Asked for It,” a brutally honest op-ed about what went wrong in education was just published by The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Numerous college officials made statements about the problem when Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, but only a few have done so so far. The Trump presidency has declared it will take a knife to higher education, and the public mind of the American higher education system has reached new highs.
American professor Michael W. Clune acknowledges in the content in the flagship magazine of American higher education that some scientific fields have lost their unique purpose in favor of democratic activism. According to Clone,” Professors began to recognize the classic values and methods of their fields— such as the thorough weighing of information and the determination to expressed standards of reasoned debate — as complicit in histories of oppression.” Some professors and areas began to redefine their job as a form of political activism as a result.
As Clune notes, almost every doctor, executive, scientific journal, and organisation then tries to justify their function on political grounds. Valid, thorough, and interesting intellectual work is that which relates in some way to identifying injustice and enacting social change — generally of a left-wing, usually neo-Marxist character.
The impunity with which academics have imposed politics ( and one particular brand of politics ) into the classroom and conference room is astounding. I’ll never forget the transgender class I took in literary theory. We were studying so-called “queer theory” one day, and the professor slapped the textbook down on the desk and declared,” This is not theory, this is gospel“! With obvious glee, he then proceeded to explain that he would be” transitioning” to a female the following summer. At first, I thought I must be misunderstanding him, but it was no joke.
It was acceptable to study the queer theorists, a group of malcontent academics from the 20th century who dressed up their own fetishes and sexual deviances in academic jargon. However, the fact that the professor blatantly used this lesson as an opportunity to expose the inner workings of his sexuality and personal life was even worse and horribly unprofessional. However, of course, because his personal life complied with the current and respected academic orthodoxy, he was perfectly safe in this radical academic irresponsibility. Any attempt by the university to discipline this individual would have been met with accusations of oppression and bigotry, and contradicted the university’s own motto of” tolerance”, the queen of virtues for the progressive left ( although that” tolerance” extends only to correct positions, beliefs, and behaviors ).
I could draw many examples from both my own experience and that of my father, who spent the majority of his time teaching English at a state school with an atmosphere that grew more Orwellian each year.
But for most readers, I’m not telling them anything new. Only 36 percent of Americans have a lot of confidence in our higher education, which is attests to this. Americans have awakened to the “woke” mind-virus that is roiling our universities and slogging the minds of numerous otherwise intelligent people.
Universities Begin to Recognize the Issue
What’s new is that universities are starting to acknowledge and, in some cases, acknowledge that they made a mistake. The Chronicle’s publication of Clune’s critique of higher education is one piece of evidence for this claim. Would the country’s top magazine have published the following words on higher education five or ten years ago?
Even if one completely agrees with every political opinion held by the faculty, there are still many compelling arguments against using such opinions as the foundation of one’s academic work. The first is that while academics have real expertise in their fields, we lack no particular expertise when it comes to political judgment. No one should interpret my opinion on any issue as being more authoritative than anyone else. It is simply an abuse of power for English professors to pontificate to their captive classroom audience about the dangers of capitalism, how to deal with climate change, or fascist tendencies of their political opponents.
The publication of Clune’s article is proof of the potential sea-change in academia. But there are other indicators. Since the House of Representatives ‘ hearings on antisemitism and the corresponding resignation of Harvard University President Claudine Gay, Claudine notes that grand political proclamations by university administrators have ceased. Even more surprising, a number of universities have begun phasing out their DEI positions and departments.
The Humanities Herald Change
The New Yorker published a story about the decline in enrollment in humanities classes in February 2023. Nathan Heller makes the observation that the politicization of the field may lead to a decline in interest in the humanities. Heller writes,” Once, in college, you might have studied’ Mansfield Park’ by looking closely at its form, references, style, and special marks of authorial genius … an intensification of the way a reader on the subway experiences the book. You might want to write a paper about how the text’s descriptions of landscape both subtly undermin and construct an imperial patriarchy. What does the general reading behavior of people have to do with this?
Rita Felski, a critic who spearheads the charge against this kind of reading, has challenged what she refers to as the “hermeneutic of suspicion” in literary studies, a theory that views everything in terms of power dynamics and oppression, without considering the emotional triggers that trigger a person’s initial love for literature. Her books like” The Limits of Critique” have challenged what she calls the “hermeneutic of suspicion” in literary studies. She’s helped launch an interpretive movement called “postcritique“, which, in many ways, returns to an older, saner way of reading and studying.
Notably, the humanities programs that continue to thrive are frequently those that adopt a more postcritical approach. They’ve abandoned the cliched neo-Marxist syllogisms in favor of what literature has always been about: discovering the good, the true, and the beautiful in the mystery of human existence. Universities lost their function as a result of the 19th and 20th centuries ‘ academic opposition to objective truth. To fill the void, politics were introduced. However, politicized academic failure may provide hope and a step toward truth restoration.
In the end, reality will have its way. Bankrupt ideas lead to bankrupt institutions, and there’s no hiding from that anymore. The universities will need to conduct some serious soul-searching, and I anticipate that those who successfully return to their original purpose, which was to pursue truth, will survive and prosper, while others fade into irrelevancy and financial collapse.
