https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-death-of-liberal-education-and-the-birth-of-the-woke/
Last fall I taught my last class, ending a teaching career that began in the fall of 1977. During that time I watched as higher education deteriorated under the pressures of leftist ideology, rank careerism, bureaucratic inertia, and philistine utilitarianism. The humanities––English, foreign languages, philosophy, history, the arts––have been particularly corrupted.
Worse, liberal education, the passing on of the traditions, foundational ideas, and collective wisdom of the West, has been virtually banished from most of our schools and colleges. Universities, with a few exceptions, no longer ground students in liberal education, and teach them “to know the best that has been known and thought in the world, irrespective of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other consideration whatsoever,” as Matthew Arnold put it, and “through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.”
Those days are gone. Today our educational institutions are grubby, rent-seeking businesses, and propaganda organs for illiberal, incoherent ideologies based on the “higher nonsense” that has captured “higher education,” and from there trickled down into K-12 schools. No wonder the majority of the products of those failed institutions, like Generation Z, support letting murderers go free, censoring speech that challenges their “stock notions and habits,” joining the anti-carbon “green” cult, and subjecting children to drag-queen shows and inappropriate sexual curricula.
The most important tool in this demolition has been the dishonest idea of “diversity” created out of thin air by the 1978 Bakke decision. The legalization of Constitutionally forbidden discrimination in university admissions and hiring put the weight of federal power behind illiberal identity-politics. As a corollary to the increasing numbers of “protected” classes eligible for affirmative action, there was soon spawned attacks on liberal education for being the products of “dead white males”––not just irrelevant for contemporary students “of color,” but absolutely toxic in their promotion of the defining principles of a peculiarly destructive, racist, imperialist, colonialist Western Civilization, global history’s most heinous villain.