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What follows when a belief in objectivity and truth dies away in higher education? In time an educated person comes to doubt that purpose and meaning are discoverable—he doubts, finally, that they even exist. It’s no mystery why fewer and fewer students in higher education today bother with the liberal arts, preferring professional training in their place. Deprived of their traditional purpose in the pursuit of what’s true and good, the humanities could only founder. The study of literature, for example, was consumed in the trivialities of the deconstructionists and their successors. Philosophy curdled into positivism and word play. History became an inventory of political grievances.
-- Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard
Andrew Ferguson is touting the reissue of Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. The book blames liberalism for the woes of today’s intellectual climate, particularly when it comes to college education. And liberalism doubtlessly bears its share of the blame, with the backlash against the dead white men that have dominated and ruled Western civilization.
However, conservative Republicanism also shares in the blame, reducing everything to business and dollars, notwithstanding its demagogic bow to religion and Christianity. One reason why ‘the big questions’ do not draw college students anymore is because such study does not pay. It does not even pay well enough for colleges to continue providing such instruction, much less for the students who must then go out and make a living. Students are focused more on Wall Street than on Plato and Shakespeare, because the big questions and pure intellectualism do not pay in our mega-corporate world, save for a few exceptions, such as Allan Bloom.
-- Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard
Andrew Ferguson is touting the reissue of Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. The book blames liberalism for the woes of today’s intellectual climate, particularly when it comes to college education. And liberalism doubtlessly bears its share of the blame, with the backlash against the dead white men that have dominated and ruled Western civilization.
However, conservative Republicanism also shares in the blame, reducing everything to business and dollars, notwithstanding its demagogic bow to religion and Christianity. One reason why ‘the big questions’ do not draw college students anymore is because such study does not pay. It does not even pay well enough for colleges to continue providing such instruction, much less for the students who must then go out and make a living. Students are focused more on Wall Street than on Plato and Shakespeare, because the big questions and pure intellectualism do not pay in our mega-corporate world, save for a few exceptions, such as Allan Bloom.
