Hopeful News in Higher Ed

A new university devotes itself to seeking truth

 
A few years ago, I’m told, the president of Dartmouth College remarked to a professor that “we have to get out of the knowledge game.” Mission accomplished. The self-destruction of the American academy—its repudiation of education, the core business of universities since their inception a millennium ago—is well under way. But American higher education got some rare good news today, with the establishment of the University of Austin (UATX).

Pano Kanelos, who formerly headed St. John’s College in Annapolis, will be the university’s president. Kanelos maintains that all education is either liberal or illiberal; if it is illiberal, it isn’t even education. Plato’s Republic makes this clear. Before we are educated, Plato famously teaches, we resemble prisoners chained to the bottom of a cave, watching shadows play across a wall. We trust the shadows and the stories they tell because they are the only things we know. We have no idea that they are cast by unseen puppeteers competing for power and wealth, much less that higher realms of truth and existence lie above and beyond us.

Education—from the Latin educare, to lead out or bring up—liberates us from the shackles of ignorance and leads us into the light and warmth of reality. It makes us capable, as St. John Henry Newman wrote in The Idea of a University, of forming an “instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us.” But today’s universities are hell-bent on leading students down, not up. Everything is domination and servitude, power and oppression: the cave is all that exists. In the dim and pervasive light of critical theory and intersectionality, everything appears small and flat and grey. Heroism is toxic masculinity; mathematics and English are instruments of racial oppression. Interpretive charity and intellectual humility, once cardinal academic virtues, are now as dispensable as Greek and Latin are for classics majors at Princeton, or Shakespeare and Chaucer for English majors at Yale.

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Πηγή: city-journal.org