American education’s new dark age – UnHerd

Finally, the schools are different, too. Having searched for decades for a rationale for their existence that is more respectable than training workers for the labour force, they ve embraced the cause of wokeism as the new institutional mission. We have entered the era of the social-justice college. Schools now bill themselves as places to learn, not to understand the roots of contemporary society or contribute to the stock of human knowledge, but to change the world.

And everybody understands that the world means only in one direction. I was speaking with an old friend who works at Columbia. She asked me why we shouldn t teach our students how to instrumentalise the things they learn from us. I said, fine, as long as you re okay if a student instrumentalises what they learn from you to try to overturn Roe v. Wade. She looked at me in horror; the possibility had clearly never crossed her mind.

I spent some time a couple of years ago at the University of San Diego, a private institution. The campus was adorned with banners bearing slogans such as Be The Change and Shape a better World . One young man I met there, one of the few students who seemed intellectually alive, likened them to prayer flags. The faculty member who brought me to campus remarked that schools were in danger of turning themselves into madrassas. The New School university in New York, founded as the New School for Social Research in 1919 at the height of the Red Scare, as a bastion of free intellectual inquiry, now employs a Senior Vice President for Social Justice. From social research to social justice: that pretty much sums up the trajectory.

Is there any real learning still happening at American colleges and universities? Of course there is: in the interstices, the institutional cracks, where it can evade the surveillance of the diversity deanlets and the persecutions of the PC police. It survives behind the doors of the classrooms and in the quiet of the offices of the dwindling minority of true teachers who remember what it looks like and are committed, come what may, to keeping it alive. It persists inside the dorm rooms and the brains of the few recalcitrant students the real campus subversives who insist on being individuals, on thinking things through for themselves. May it live to see the end of this new dark age.

via unherd.com

USD gets mentioned! And our prayer flags! You have to admit, they are extremely cute. But the author is speaking of our undergraduates and the faculty presumably. Our law students, or at least those in my admittedly small classes, seem quite bright. I can’t speak for anyone else.