Although I was happy to have left American academia, and have been out of that world for almost a decade, I continue to idealize what academia is at its best: a haven for serious reflection on the timeless, central issues of being human. I still get a thrill walking through old universities, thinking about those who labored within those walls, anonymously and with little thought of worldly gain, except in what mattered most: wisdom and knowledge. I wrote a reflective piece about that ideal world when I first visited Merton College, Oxford, the very first of the collegiate communities that led to our modern system of higher education.
The reality, of course, is different. Far from the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, the academy has politicized its teaching, research, and outreach. It has marginalized voices with which it disagrees, and believes that its job is to indoctrinate its students in concepts of social justice, communitarianism, and anti-capitalism. The result is an experience in which American students find themselves alienated from the larger society of which they are a part, radicalized in many of their opinions, under-educated, and ill-equipped to deal with viewpoints and beliefs different from their own.
We saw the fruits of all of this last year in the student protests that rocked campuses from Yale to Missouri. Their intolerance, sense of grievance, and almost pathological sensitivity revealed a deep rot at the core of our universities.
There is no one cause for the perversion of the academy, but over at National Review, I wrote a long essay on perhaps the main source of the problems in today's university: the professors themselves. You can read it here.
The reality, of course, is different. Far from the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, the academy has politicized its teaching, research, and outreach. It has marginalized voices with which it disagrees, and believes that its job is to indoctrinate its students in concepts of social justice, communitarianism, and anti-capitalism. The result is an experience in which American students find themselves alienated from the larger society of which they are a part, radicalized in many of their opinions, under-educated, and ill-equipped to deal with viewpoints and beliefs different from their own.
We saw the fruits of all of this last year in the student protests that rocked campuses from Yale to Missouri. Their intolerance, sense of grievance, and almost pathological sensitivity revealed a deep rot at the core of our universities.
There is no one cause for the perversion of the academy, but over at National Review, I wrote a long essay on perhaps the main source of the problems in today's university: the professors themselves. You can read it here.
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