RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bushfires must seem very different from atop the ivory tower. The layman easily grasps that more fuel means bigger fires, and bigger fires inflict greater damage on the biota. To grant-nurtured professors and researchers in step with the Green Establishment, there is no co-relation whatsoever
A unique feature of the bushfire scene in Australia (as compared with other countries I have examined) is the extent of the opposition within Australian universities to fuel reduction burning in Australian forests. This oppposition is a source of discontent among firefighters, foresters, bushfire scientists and land managers. They find themselves assailed by self-confident academics who publish their thoughts on internet sites like “The Conversation”, invariably promoting bushfire policies that are doomed to fail, and discounting policies that are known to succeed. It is not just that the hard-won practical experience of bushfire practitioners in the field is rejected. The real tragedy is that opposition to burning:

undermines the work of the men and women trying to minimise bushfire damage to Australian communities and forests;
confuses the public who can’t work out who to believe; and
leads directly to more and worse bushfire disasters.

It almost seems as if there are two parallel worlds.

The suffocating sense of guilt that afflicts university life has beenwhipped into a cocktail of self-congratulation, on the one hand, and menacing intolerance, on the other. Doubtless it portends many things, but support for liberal education or liberal society, properly understood, is not among them
Who says the guild system is dead? In New York, these days, you seem to need a licence for everything. The prominent Catholic journalist Ross Douthat discovered this mournful truth recently when he practised theology without a licence in his column for the New York Times. The offending column, “The Plot to Change Catholicism”, was published on October 18 and sparked an immediate rebuke from the Fraternal Order of Snot-Nosed Leftish Academic Theologians, Ltd. (I may not have the name exactly right.)

Here’s what the brotherhood had to say (as an aid to the reader, I italicise a few phrases):

Aside from the fact that Mr Douthat has no professional qualifications for writing on the subject, the problem with his article and other recent statements is his view of Catholicism as unapologetically subject to a politically partisan narrative that has very little to do with what Catholicism really is. Moreover, accusing other members of the Catholic church of heresy, sometimes subtly, sometimes openly, is serious business that can have serious consequences for those so accused. This is not what we expect of the New York Times.

This effusion was signed by more than fifty academics and many more have subsequently weighed in to denounce Douthat for practising theology without a licence. The “Twitter war” that erupted is partly comical, partly alarming, as such public displays of intemperateness often are. “Own your heresy,” Douthat recommended to one left-wing interlocutor, a piece of advice that sent the groupthink brigades over the edge.

The case of Douthat is actually more complicated than a bare recitation of the events might suggest. The reason the brotherhood refused to issue the old nihil obstat to Ross Douthat was not really because he violated the cardinal guild rule against freelance theology. The guild suffers many interlopers to wax theological, provided that they come to the right conclusions.

Ross Douthat’s real sin was not so much theo­logising as expressing the wrong opinion about certain sensitive subjects dear to the brotherhood’s collective heart (and other organs). Specifically, when writing about the recent Synod on the family in Rome, Douthat expressed the heretical view that the Catholic Church ought to abide by Catholic teachings. If that seems elliptical, let me explain that by “heretical” I mean “orthodox”. Douthat, as a traditionalist Catholic, had the temerity to point out that Pope Francis aimed to use the Synod to advance the Left-liberal view that marriage is a relationship of convenience that can be revised or abrogated at will without incurring ecclesiastical censure. Specifically, Douthat charged, the Pope “favors the proposal, put forward by the church’s liberal cardinals, that would allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion without having their first marriage declared null”. Douthat continued:

The entire situation abounds with ironies. Aging progressives are seizing a moment they thought had slipped away, trying to outmaneuver younger conservatives who recently thought they owned the Catholic future. The African bishops are defending the faith of the European past against Germans and Italians weary of their own patrimony. A Jesuit pope is effectively at war with his own Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the erstwhile Inquisition—a situation that would make 16th century heads spin.

The university generates more invective than paeans. In Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” the author’s etiology of the university’s malaise was a German invasion of Marx, Weber and Freud, smuggled in through works by French authors. But while we might remember Bloom deriding “the Nietzschean left,” in fact what he lambastes is the left’s misappropriation of Nietzsche. “Nietzsche’s call to revolt against liberal democracy,” Bloom commented, is a call “from the Right.” Few today would be comfortable with his answers to the nihilism he diagnosed.

The record might be set straight with the publication of this curious little volume, “Anti-Education.” It might have just as easily been titled, “The Closing of the German Mind.” Billed as lectures “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions,” this is instead a dramatic dialogue. A renegade group of students take flight from their “pleasure-loving” confrères” into the woods, where they happen to overhear a conversation between a great philosopher (who sounds a lot like Schopenhauer) and his assistant about what constitutes “true education.”
Anti-Education

By Friedrich Nietzsche
New York Review, 124 pages, $14.95

Already in 1872 Nietzsche is criticizing a twofold tendency: toward expansion and dissemination on the one hand and narrowing and weakening on the other. As education aims to reach everyone, it gives up its “highest, noblest, loftiest claims” and contents itself “with serving some other form of life, for instance, the state.”

The latest federal education reform sends more power back to states and local districts, but that poses risks to the extent they are captured by teachers unions. Witness New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo is retreating on teacher accountability.

In a bid to snag Race to the Top funds in 2010, New York adopted Common Core standards and required that 20% of teacher evaluations be based on student scores on state tests and another 20% on local objective measures of student learning. Student scores on the tougher new tests plunged. Proficiency dropped to 31% in reading and math in 2013 from 69% and 82%, respectively, in 2009.

Yet even as student measures plunged, local school districts in cahoots with the unions rigged evaluations to ensure that nearly all teachers got good marks. One tactic: Unions collectively bargained for easier local tests to be part of their evaluations. Lo, 96% of teachers statewide were rated “effective” or “highly effective” last year while only about a third of students passed state reading and math tests.