the traditional forms of the college serve the genuinely higher forms of liberal education that conservatives often champion. The study of philosophy in light of great texts always serves viewpoint diversity by reminding us that what just is is a perennial and invincibly difficult question that has a variety of plausible answers. When the study of justice is replaced by the activist or engaged championing of “social justice,” viewpoint diversity always suffers, because those with different views of the place and significance of justice are marginalized or worse. It’s the true study of philosophy that keeps “academic freedom” from being displaced by some dogmatic or partial and endlessly questionable view of “academic justice.”
As I see it, he is saying is that conservatives should not be focused on getting more conservatives onto the faculty at elite schools. Instead, just focus on academic rigor. If students take real courses, not “___ studies” courses, then they will learn to think for themselves. I agree.
That is amazing.
There’s been a buzz around technology and alternate credentialing systems taking over the traditional place of the university. But I’ve been skeptical, the University signalling system is so entrenched, how can it be dislodged?
Perhaps we’re seeing the beginning of it right now. Universities are allowing their students to destroy their brand. Out the various colleges and Grad schools my wife and I attended only one doesn’t currently have a student group occupying the presidents office in the last week. That remaining school has an engineering focus, I know where I’d want my son to go.
It would be nice if avoiding the -studies classes was all that was required. But is there a freshman comp class that doesn’t have some “theme” the professor pushes over actually teaching good writing?
Conservatives should encourage students to read, but not to waste their hard borrowed tuition dollars on courses that are at best hit or miss and whose value can be acquired simply by reading a diversity of books, but few recommended by the average Liberal Arts department.
The passionate endeavors to eliminate the classical studies from the curriculum of the liberal education and thus virtually to destroy its very character were one of the major manifestations of the revival of the servile ideology.
—Mises, Ludwig von, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, 1956
The revival of the servile ideology was already well on its way by the time Mises wrote that.
I graduated college just a year ago, and I majored in philosophy. Having taken a couple classes on ethics and political philosophy, I became skeptical of the concept human rights… Thus when I had conversations with more liberal minded or SJ type students and human rights came up, I would ask how they know human rights exist. They never had the slightest clue how to argue that point.
The author above identifies that understanding is overtaken by conformance.
I wonder how many of those professors would poo poo the answer “human rights come from God.” Now that might be the wrong answer, and it might be a poor answer, but it is a better answer than silence.