RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/23/the-sickness-of-our-universities-and-the-cure/

The sheer madness that has gripped many elite universities since October 7 and the butchery, rape, torture, and mutilation of some 1,000 Israeli civilians by Hamas murderers have shocked the public at large.

Campus craziness is, of course, nothing new. But quite novel for campuses was the sudden jettisoning of prior campus pretenses. Universities have brazenly dropped their careful two-faced gymnastics to reveal at last–unapologetically, proudly, and defiantly–the moral decay that now characterizes American higher education.

Recent news stories have exposed this rot to the world, and will have grave repercussions for higher education in the next few years.

The Nazis once desecrated the tombstones of dead Jews. Our campuses have updated that hatred. Students now tear down pictures of Jewish captives kidnapped or murdered by Hamas. University presidents do not condemn the hate-filled rallies supporting the killing of Jews in Israel, even though, according to their own safety-first ideology and prior proclamations about systemic hatred, these rallies instill a “climate of fear” in some students.

An instructor at Stanford separated Jewish students from their belongings, ordered them to stand in the corner, boasted about denying the Holocaust, and singled them out for unhinged rantings. Screaming campus activists and professors openly support Hamas even after its brutal killing of hundreds of Israeli women, children, and infants. That for more than two weeks thousands of rockets—barrages initially designed to enhance the surprise mass murdering of October 7—daily continue to shower down upon Israeli cities is of zero concern to loud campus activists.

An even bolder Cornell history faculty member bragged that he was “exhilarated” on news that Jews were butchered on October 7. A UC Davis professor threatened to go after the children of “Zionist journalists.” “Savages”, “excrement” and “pigs” are the adjective and nouns one professor at the Art Institute of Chicago posted to describe Israelis.

At rallies and protests, hundreds shout about eliminating Israel altogether; students, faculty, and throngs in general occasionally wear masks or wrap their faces in keffiyehs, as if conceding that most would find anyone identifiably mouthing such advocacy despicable. In some sense, such campus haters have become the equivalent of anti-Semitic sheet-wearing Klansmen.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-campus-peril-to-western-civilization
When I interviewed in 2022 for the job of Dean of Intellectual Foundations at the just-founded University of Austin (UATX), Pano Kanelos, the university’s founding president, asked me what I thought the new institution’s mission was. “To save civilization,” I said. “And here I thought the mission was to save American higher education,” he replied.

Informed observers have known for some time that our universities are broken. But the cheerleading on American campuses for terrorists who unleashed a pogrom of a magnitude and viciousness not seen since the Holocaust has made it clear that the collapse of higher education imperils Western civilization itself. Without real higher education, we would forget the past and stumble blindly into the future. Without universities worthy of the name, there would be no civilization.

Higher education exists to preserve, transmit, and extend knowledge, including the sound judgment and knowledge of the whole we call wisdom. Universities stand at the threshold between past and future, self and society, the eternal verities above and the flow of time below. Their job is to join what would otherwise fall apart: to remember the past, fructify the present, and incubate the future. At their best, they are modern temples of Janus, the two-faced Roman god who looks backward and forward, inward and outward—a symbol of wakeful, vigilant minds that receive tradition with gratitude, seek knowledge with grace, and face challenges with grit.

But in the United States, universities have never been worse than they are today. Barbarians have invaded the temples of teaching and learning, ransacked the sanctuaries, and defiled the sacred scrolls. For decades, students have been steeped in a postmodern intellectual culture of repudiation, relativism, and reductivism. They’ve been taught to “deconstruct” the great books and noble ideals of the West; to regard morality, and even the criteria of scientific truth, as social constructions; and to understand politics and society as “discourses of power” illuminated by the doctrines of “critical theory” and “intersectionality.” Bereft of precious civilizational compasses and maps, they have learned to regard fundamental social relationships as zero-sum games of domination and servitude.