Enjoying the view from Limbo
Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published May 31, 2022 · Last modified June 26, 2022
The primary aims of the university, from its medieval foundations until about fifty years ago, were to prod a young person into doubting his youthful certainties, to shake the foundations of his most cherished and comforting assumptions, to push him into a vast, confusing marketplace of ideas and sensibilities, where…
America Descending / Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published May 17, 2021
I just read the following headline from the Associated Press: “Fauci says pandemic exposed ‘undeniable effects of racism.’” And Dr. Fauci’s self-serving deference to the latest trends in neo-Marxist race politics is worth discussing because…? A couple of days back, I read of an adjunct instructor in literature at St. John’s University in New York who uttered “the n-word” during an online lecture...
President Joe Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki, asked during an official White House propaganda session to address Senator Tom Cotton’s concerns about U.S. colleges being used to “indoctrinate” students, replied smugly — I did not hear her voice, but how else can a progressive sound when defending totalitarianism? — with the following: “Well, without much detail on where he thinks our youth are...
In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning...
Allan Bloom was a great teacher. A great teacher is a man whose manner of framing the important questions continues to inform his students’ thoughts long after they have left the teacher behind. A great teacher’s lasting impression is not his “personality,” that collection of idiosyncrasies which make him memorable in the way of a good vacation, but his mind—the way his reasoning...
A Kansas University professor who used the n-word during a class discussion about race is on leave while the university investigates a discrimination complaint against her. Thus begins an article about one Andrea Quenette, a thirty-three year old assistant professor of communications, whose career has just been permanently blemished, if not ended, because a small group of KU graduate students decided to “expose”...
Those who wonder how the modern university could have become so fundamentally disdainful of political liberty should consider that the entitlement mentality that is destroying western civilization began in academia. Academic tenure is the original entitlement program. Conservatives rightly fear that civilization could reach a tipping point at which a majority of citizens are subsisting on government redistribution programs, and hence have a...
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