https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/high_cultures_iminent_surrender_to_the_woke_.html
Not at all surprisingly, the classical music world is now squarely in the sights of the woke mob. So now the gang of callow American Maoists is going to teach us that excellence in classical music — composers and performers — is also a white male plot. I suppose that soon great American symphonies will be hiring violinists who might just barely be able to cut it in a small-town community orchestra. And the Metropolitan Opera? As an opera lover I can attest: Few sounds are more grating to the ear than opera badly sung, and to sing it well takes extraordinary talent and a lifetime of devotion.
For lovers of classical instrumental music and opera, prepare yourselves for mediocrity and worse. Can the legitimate stage and museums be far behind?
Of course, in the current revolutionary environment, the culmination of 50 years, this had to come.
It’s important to see this ongoing cultural revolution in some kind of historical context.
America’s rapid cultural collapse, as distinct from its gradual decline, started with an attack on a key cultural — not political or economic — institution, the university. It began in earnest in the fall of 1964 at UC, Berkeley. This writer was present, a 19-year-old junior, participated as a dissenter, and followed events closely in amazed disgust, as President Clark Kerr surrendered the university to the radical left and handed them a tactical roadmap for the next 60 years.
The events at Berkeley in 1964 and Kerr’s handling of them provided the template for the left’s destruction of the American university: Take over the Dean’s office, employ a mob to bring normal university functions to a halt, make “non- negotiable” demands, and then, as a reward, get anything you want from administrators and faculty prepared to sell out the functions of the university – imparting knowledge and pursuing truth – for (temporary) peace.
The depth of UC President Clark Kerr’s confusion, weakness and cowardice in October of 1964 — an important story for another time — shocked even the left. But leftists quickly drew the correct lesson from Kerr’s fecklessness: Universities are easy to mug. And, employing the Berkeley model, mug them the left did over the next two decades. By 1985, perhaps earlier, American universities were unrecognizable as the institutions they had been. The worst consequence of that period was the creation of an entire array of politicized and intellectually vacuous new departments and majors focusing on grievance and specializing in victimology, all born at the gunpoint of the Berkeley tactics that had been validated by Clark Kerr in 1964. For at least 30 years those new departments have been spreading the lie of American and western civilizational evil, tarted up as academic theory and gradually oozing outward to infect all aspects of campus life with the new university ethic: Ideology over rigorous analysis, mandatory beliefs over rational inquiry, and — above all — feelings over facts.
