Posted on 01/27/2009 6:56:20 AM PST by Davy Buck
"Thus impoverished, writers and intellectuals generally veered sharply to the left in these years. Indeed, 1929-1933 was a great watershed in American intellectual history. In the 18th century American men of ideas and letters had been closely in tune with the republicanism of the Founding Fathers. . ."
(Excerpt) Read more at oldvirginiablog.blogspot.com ...
Should be “Academia”, not “Academic” - sorry!
When was it in the middle, where it should be?
While I was in college. My junior year ROTC cadets were stoned and had bottles and snowballs thrown at them if they wore their uniforms. This was 1966 at UMass/Amherst, which has long ago descended into a hell-hole of screeching militant lesbians, violent Social Justice majors, Bill Ayers wannabes chairing all social science and humanities departments, and forced student funding of anti-military groups. UMass is now $hit.
“When was it in the middle, where it should be?”
At the time of the Founding, for the first 50 years of the Republic, even after the Civil War for a while. The shift began in the later 1800s with the adopting of the German research university model and the shift to legal positivism out of disillusionment (Oliver Wendell Holmes) and the class warfare of the so-called “Gilded Age” and the countering “Age of Reform”(imported Marxism and anarchism from Europe), gained momemtum around WWI, tipped in the ‘30s. Just because it’s so obvious today doesn’t mean it was always that way.
If one simply dismisses it as “that’s the way it’s always been” one loses one weapon in the struggle against it: an accurate reading of history and the hope of changing the status quo.
....and around that same time, the law exempted teachers from the draft. Many went into that field in order to avoid conscription, stayed, and rose through the ranks leading to the profusion of anti-American sentiment we see in academia today.
bookmarked
You’re right on the money.
The commencement of industrial funding of education, and the simultaneous abandonment of the confessional nature of most colleges seeking industrial funding, was the proximate cause of the embrace of “Progressivism” as an overarching political programme and logical positivism as the default philosophical perspective of the modern university.
It took a century for that shift to work itself fully through the system, and for nearly all the previously regnant philosophies to be expelled, but here we are.
The founding of Stanford, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins were the bellwethers; everybody else just wanted a piece of the action.
Thanks
I need to find time to read that. I think the country has already "lurched" into socialism for the most part. Now the radicals seem to be seeking a "final solution," silencing opposition by any means necessary. Alinsky did his work well and his techniques seem second nature to most people of Baby Boomer age and younger. The Left has learned it can shout down any opposition, and the notion of truth has become quaint and outmoded. I had an experience with that just last week and it made me realize how close we are to the Brown-shirted police state you describe.
It was also the case by the late 20’s and thirties that all the mainline denominations seminaries shifted over to “higher criticism”. The consequence of this was that the person of Christ was degraded from being both fully God and fully Man to being just a good man. This was a heresy that had been gaining momentum since Newton embraced it back in the late 17th century. Its first incarnation was back in the 4th century with the Arian Heresy for which which the Nicean creed was written.
when people wonder how the Archbishop of Canterbury could embrace aspects of the sharia law—what they don’t understand is that that liberal protestant denomination doesn’t have any serious theological dispute with moslems about the person of christ. both believe that Jesus was a good man. and that’s about it.
The 1920s and ‘30s were the period in which the faculties of nearly all colleges were completely purged of pre-industrial faculty by the “silent artillery of time.”
By 1930, nearly every professor at every university was a lifelong product—from “kindergarten” on—of the German secular research university model.
When they were dodging the draft during ‘Nam?
jeez louise you read 19th century german philosophers and they sound like total doofuses.
by 1848 or so the german seminaries were teaching some version of the arian heresy in their seminaries while the philosopy departments were teaching atheism.
the arian pastors didn’t have strong defenses against atheist philosophers. their congregations drifted away because who would follow a pastor who didn’t actually believe in his own God.
so we are entering the post industrial age. you happen to
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