The Groves of Academe Get Some Needed Weeding Clearing the noxious ideological weeds that are choking our youth. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-groves-of-academe-get-some-needed-weeding/
After fifty years of pedagogical malpractice and trillions of squandered taxpayer dollars, Donald Trump has begun to rid our public schools of their destructive politicization. He’s directed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to start dismantling the Department of Education, and has commenced “pausing” funds given to rich, prestigious universities that promote transgender voodoo, tolerate anti-Semitism, and enable supporters of terrorism.
Most important, he’s acting to reverse the failures of our public schools to teach foundational skills and knowledge necessary for citizens living in a free state with unalienable rights and political equality.
And he’s starting with the exorbitant public funding of private universities flush with huge, tax-free endowments, and taxpayer subsidies distributed through government-backed student loans managed by the Department of Education–– “a student-loan boondoggle,” the Wall Street Journal writes, “with a $1.6 trillion portfolio, while harassing schools, states and districts with progressive diktats on everything from transgender bathroom use to Covid-19 mask rules.”
Moreover, universities with bulging endowments have been raising tuition costs far beyond the rate of inflation, at the same time they create politicized programs, even as completion and graduation rates decline, administrator outnumber tenured faculty, GPA inflation skyrockets, and fundamental skills and knowledge are replaced with leftist ideological fads like illiberal identity politics programs.
Trump’s cutting back on federal funds is a good way to fight back against this degradation of curricula. Taking back $400 million from Columbia is a good start. Its indulgence of violent protests against Israel, replete with anti-Semitic, genocidal slogans, swastika graffiti targeting Israel, and violence against Jewish students, epitomize the ideological corruption of our once-most prestigious universities.
But Trump also is offering a smart way to get the funds back: by requiring universities to agree to meet his nine demands, including “banning masks, empowering campus police and putting the school’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies under ‘academic receivership,’” the Journal writes, which means such programs would no longer be controlled by the faculty. After some grousing, Columbia has acceded to Trump’s conditions.
Trump’s demands are specifically aimed at one of the most consequential and bloody corruptions of the universities: the willful ignorance about the doctrines and history of Islam that justify for traditionalist Muslims the murder and rape of Israelis, and the glorification of both featured in Hamas’ rampage on October 7.
Ground zero of this deformation of history and tolerance for murder has been the many Middle East Studies programs in numerous universities. This curricular pollution explains as well the despicable, illiberal, ignorant response of privileged bougie college students to Hamas’ savage attack on Israel, as well as the surreally incoherent merger of Islamic jihadist doctrines and the cultural Marxist “woke” left, every one of whose political and social beliefs and causes–– except its virulent hatred of Israel–– are capital crimes to traditional Muslims.
This intellectual and moral nihilism is the offspring of Edward Said and his 1978 book Orientalism, a mash-up of bad history, postmodern radical relativism, and illiberal identity politics fairy tales. As British Middle East historian Robert Irwin wrote, Orientalism is “a work of malign charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes for willful misrepresentations.”
The clichéd demonization of imperialism and colonialism, both viewed through the Marxist lens, along with the use of question-begging epithets like “racist” to characterize Western Middle Eastern scholars, dominates Said’s work. Western histories of Islam are not, Said claims, a record of the pursuit of the true history and understanding of the region and its relig, but actually “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Thus, Said alleges, “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”
Given its anti-Western oikophobia, Said’s work quickly came to dominate and corrupt the nascent Middle East Studies programs. As Martin Kramer, in his 2001 study Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, wrote, Said’s influence “crippled” the discipline, which “came under a take-no-prisoner assault, which rejected the idea of objective standards, disguised the vice of politicization as the virtue of commitment, and replaced proficiency with ideology” ––all confirmed by the chants and violence of the university students protesting against Israel.
Trump, then, is correct to demand that Columbia’s Middle East Studies program inter alia be put into “academic receivership,” meaning the evangelizing faculty won’t run it. Such distortions and corruption of curricula, moreover, don’t just damage universities, but have a wider range.
General Education courses requirements, for example, focused on identity politics subjects like Middle East Studies, reach not just majors, but thousands of other students. Many of those students end up teaching in state colleges and universities, which typically teach and certify most of the students who become K-12 teachers–– who in turn transmit what they’ve heard and learned in their own studies into their curricula and lesson plans, thus infecting their impressionable students in a sort of trickle-down curricular corruption
I speak from first-hand experience. In my university teaching career, I had thousands of credential students in my classes, many of whom repeated the mangled history of identity politics, and the postmodern “higher nonsense” that I suffered through in graduate school. I also spent time “volunteering” ––actually, monitoring––in some of my sons’ courses in grade school. Occasionally, at home I had to correct the misinformation and patent nonsense they had heard from some of their teachers.
Finally, the politicized subjects like Middle East Studies crowd out the legitimate curricula that focus on the foundational skills and knowledge necessary for living in a political order that gives citizens unalienable rights, freedom, and political equality. In short, what used to be called a “liberal education,” which as Alan Bloom says “means precisely helping students to pose this question [what is a human being] to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not a continuous concern. . . . Liberal education provides access to these alternatives, many of which go against the grain of our nature and our times. The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.”
Donald Trump and his administration are clearing out the noxious ideological weeds that are choking off the intellectual development of our young people. The University of Pennsylvania, due to its transgender policies–– another creature of the universities––such as allowing biological males to compete against women athletes and violate their privacy and dignity, is on track to lose $175 million unless it reforms. Other prestigious universities like Harvard, UCLA, and Michigan may be next.
Cutting off taxpayer money that funds academic programs violating the canons for establishing truth, as well as practical wisdom and common sense––and also the Constitution and its foundational philosophy––is a good place to start reforming our schools and training our teachers to educate our youth to become good citizens ready for political freedom.
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