From The Wall Street Journal:
The debate over antisemitism at elite universities has largely missed the point. The most important question isn’t how academic administrators respond to antisemitism but why the educations they provide seem to foster such hatred. For American Jews, the question cuts deeper: Given our traditional love of learning, do we care about the quality of education or only the prestige of the institutions providing it?
. . . .
Menacing mobs on campus suggest an absence of what has, since Socrates, been recognized as the essential prerequisite for learning: a readiness to acknowledge one’s ignorance. Students once aspired to learn what they didn’t know. At some institutions, it now appears the purpose of education is to express views of which the putative learners are already certain.
Universities that take seriously their duty to teach will turn out students ready to grapple with difficult moral and political questions that can’t be reduced to slogans. That our elite institutions are producing students who think otherwise is a more acute embarrassment than the failure of college leaders to condemn the predictable result.
American Jews thus must re-evaluate whether elite institutions—whose obsession with selectivity perversely grounds their prestige in the proportion of students they refuse to teach rather than how they actually educate—truly reflect our belief in the importance of learning. These institutions have largely abandoned their responsibility to form morally circumspect and intellectually curious citizens by engaging the permanent questions of the human condition.
Those tending the lamp of this education are often Catholic, such as Assumption University, where I serve as the first Jewish president of a Catholic college in the U.S. Most of us aren’t elite by common metrics, and many effectively combine the liberal arts with professional preparation. These institutions haven’t, by and large, been scenes of raging antisemitism. That isn’t because Catholic schools oppose bigotry or because their intellectual traditions share many premises and sources with Jewish ones, though they do.
Rather it’s because they avoid the heat of contemporary events and instead fix their attention on enduring questions. Their students are invited to ancient and continuing conversations about the true and good. They confront challenging books, not politicized mobs.
. . . .
The Catholic intellectual tradition is one of open inquiry. Like its Jewish counterpart, it sees human beings as oriented toward reason expressed in language with one another. In the Torah, words are the instrument of creation. God doesn’t simply create light: He says, “Let there be light.” Similarly, in the Gospel, St. John retells the creation story of Genesis by stating that “in the beginning was the word.” In the original Greek, “word” is logos—the idea of reason expressed in speech, one of the foundations of Catholic education.
. . . .
Academic freedom should protect speech, but speech without open inquiry is prone to arrogance. Those engaged in inquiry do so because they assume they can learn from one another. That leads to genuine friendship rooted in a shared pursuit of truth. By contrast, when elite universities become incubators of activism and gateways to privilege, they inevitably produce excessive moral certainty.
. . . .
For Jews in the U.S., admission to elite universities has historically meant a hard-earned entry into the American mainstream. Now that we are finding we are less welcome than we had assumed in these universities and the mainstream, we might consider which institutions will fulfill our traditional love of learning.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
Sorry, but today’s “Catholic” universities are, for the most part, just as steeped in Leftist indoctrination (with the exception of Jew hatred) as any other.
Climate Catastrophe, White Privilege, One Hundred Genders, Men Can Give Birth – all taught in their classrooms.
Agreed. I am Catholic, an$ I am horrified at the depths to which many allegedly Catholic institutions have fallen.
As for the students:
1 Corinthians 13:11
King James Version
11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
These age-adults have not put away their childishness.
In the US, I think they became followers rather than leaders.
Without defending anything relating to choose-whichever-discriminatory-axis-you-like problems at the largely-self-selected (irony intended) “selective” colleges and universities:
They’re a least-bad circumstance. Most of the other institutions are worse. Don’t even think about the antisemitism — often oh so genteel but far more pervasive — at either obvious places like Hillsboro College, Bob Jones University, and Baylor… and less-obvious places like [names of three flagship state universities omitted]. And more to the point, most of these problems are not coming from the faculty, but from the athletic programs, administrators, and trustees (and all too often the local communities… which I’ve seen up close and completely impersonal). Choose another dimension, and there are similar problems.
It’s all unacceptable. But because the faculty at the selective schools tend (collectively) not to be the ideological allies of the WSJ‘s ownership or editorial board,† the WSJ is all too happy to criticize those schools to the exclusion of other places that the problem is worse… but less likely to actually, overtly, even formally oppose, in publications and in public and most especially before government bodies and courts, the ideological predispositions of that ownership and editorial board.
They’re all sleazebuckets. I resent that the contest is over who’s the worst sleazebucket instead of trying to fix the discrimination problems. <sarcasm> Except discrimination against dumbass pro-slavery Lost Cause advocates — they deserve it. </sarcasm>
† Yeah, the faculty at the Air Force Academy and Vanderbilt — both of which proclaim themselves selective schools — is so liberal that it hurts. Riiiiiiiiiiight.
The whole “prestige” university problem is only a problem to the extent you care about the graduates they produce. And, lets be honest, the Ivy League long ago stopped producing much of anything beyond politicians, activists, and money managers.
It is the smaller regional colleges that need (or don’t need) scrutinizing. Those are the ones producing the bulk of professionals that will keep the country running.
Consider that in november Ohio State had a “demonstration” interupt a meeting of the Board of Trustees. When they didn’t stop, the *50* demonstrators were removed.
Purdue had *almost* 200.
Carnegie-Mellon didn’t have one; a couple hundred Pittsburgh demonstrators marched to the campus, “spoke” and walked away.
Those schools have bigger and more immediate concerns. Football, for one. 🙂
Just because Harvard and MIT, both in “Bahstahn” (more or less) are a problem doesn’t mean every other university has the same problem. The issues elsewhere are more localized and focused on other, more pernicious and immediate matters, mostly in the “illiberal Arts” Schools like Oberlin and their ilk in the coastal metropoli.
The “vocational” schools despised by the former roll merrily along, however.
A lot of the handwringing is justified but it is also obscuring the bigger issues like marxist indictrination, snowball coddling, and cancel culture. Their graduates are in for a world of hurt once they leave their groupthink bubbles and the world of 1968 ideologies and encounter the crisis of the ’20’s with 6 figure loan anchors.
Deprogramming, real world style, ain’t pretty.
(“Do you want cheese or fries with that?”)
Schools have always had the dichotomy of two aims:
– Encouraging learning and scholarship
– Credentialing graduates
Of recent times, the second has taken precedence. If schools are focused on learning, it’s both reasonable and possible for teachers to give evaluations/grades that indicate the student hasn’t achieved competency, through THEIR efforts.
If they are focused on credentials, there is no excuse for teachers to give less than stellar grades to students, for that would signal that the person isn’t worthy of being awarded that credential. Worse, should there be some sort of perceived bias, the teacher is SOLELY responsible for that failure.
I think it’s clear that the second goal is the only important one in today’s schools.
With all due respect to the writer of this article and his primary audience, why did it take them until now to notice that American academia was going absolutely bonkers?
Because they were only going after one party’s values and not the one the media props up.
If so, that was foolish of them. If there are Jews in a society, identitarians always eventually go after them.
(To clarify, because this is the Internet: this indicates a problem with the identitarians, not with the Jews.)