Retaking the Universities

Catholic Educator's Newsletter ^ | May 2005 | ROGER KIMBALL

[Coleus]

---

The sea is far from full, but the current still can serve. The tide, ebbing for decades, has begun to flow. It is time to seize the initiative lest we miss the moment and lose our ventures.

---

 

"After the Vietnam War, a lot of us didn't just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while — to the unobservant — that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest."

 

— Jay Parini, Chronicle of Higher Education     

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures."

 

— Shakespeare, Julius Caesar     

The old Marxist strategy of "increasing the contradictions" — a strategy according to which the worse things get, the better they really are — is a license for thuggery. It excuses all manner of bad behavior for the sake of a revolution that will (so it is said) finally transform society when all the old allegiances have finally collapsed. If one or two tottering institutions require a little push to finish them off, so be it. Shove hard: You cannot, as comrade Stalin remarked, make an omelet without breaking eggs.

As with anything to which the word "Marxist" applies, there are at least 87 things wrong with this strategy. Morally, it is completely irresponsible. Intellectually, it depends upon a fabricated "contradiction" to confer the illusion of inevitability. In real life, the only thing inevitable is the certainty of surprise.

Nevertheless, as one looks around at academic life these days, it is easy to conclude that corruption yields not only decay but also opportunities. Think of the public convulsion that surrounded the episode of Ward Churchill's invitation to speak at Hamilton College earlier this year. The spectacle of a highly paid academic with a fabricated background comparing the victims of 9/11 to a Nazi bureaucrat was too much. Mr. Churchill's fellow academics endeavored — they are still endeavoring — to rally round. But the public wasn't buying it. Such episodes, as Victor Davis Hanson noted in National Review recently, were like "a torn scab revealing a festering sore beneath":

Ward Churchill's plight gives us a glimpse into the strange world of the contemporary postmodern university of tenured ideologues, where professed identity politics, ethnic or gender chauvinism, and a disbelief in empiricism allow a con man to bully his way to guaranteed lifetime employment, and a handsome salary, and the right to say anything at all, no matter how inflammatory.

Something similar happened — is still happening — at Harvard in the episode of Larry Summers and "Why Aren't There More Women in the Sciences?" Female biologists in Cambridge may oscillate between threatening to faint and demanding Mr. Summers's head. But many outside academia were outraged not by Mr. Summers's original comments but by his cravenness in the face of the PC juggernaut that followed. It would be easy to multiply examples. Familiar outrages in academia are beginning, in some cases, to elicit unfamiliar responses. It is not a matter of things being better because they are worse, exactly; only a Marxist (or his older brother, a Hegelian) could believe that. But it may just be that things are so bad that, in society at large, exasperation will finally get the better of indifference.

In my book Tenured Radicals — first published in 1990 and updated in 1998 — I noted:

With a few notable exceptions, our most prestigious liberal arts colleges and universities have installed the entire radical menu at the center of their humanities curriculum at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. Every special interest — women's studies, black studies, gay studies, and the like — and every modish interpretative gambit — deconstruction, post-structuralism, new historicism, and other postmodernist varieties of what the literary critic Frederick Crews aptly dubbed "Left Eclecticism" — has found a welcome roost in the academy, while the traditional curriculum and modes of intellectual inquiry are excoriated as sexist, racist, or just plain reactionary.

---

Traditionally, a liberal arts education involved both character formation and learning. The goal was to produce men and women who (as Allan Bloom put it) had reflected thoughtfully on the question " 'What is man?' in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs."

---

Tenured Radicals is a frankly polemical book. In some ways, however, it underestimates if not the severity then at least the depth of the problem. What happened to the universities was part — a large part — of that "long march through the institutions" that the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci recommended and whose American lineaments I chronicled in The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (2000). "The Age of Aquarius," I wrote in the introduction to that book, "did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock. It lives on in our values and habits, in our tastes, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives on especially in our educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog."

Whether American culture has begun to recover from that assault has become a matter of debate. That the situation has become debatable may be an encouraging sign. Even five years ago, few serious observers were registering signs of cultural health in American society. The terrorist attacks of September 11 changed that. The fires at the World Trade Center were not yet extinguished when some commentators proclaimed that the cultural revolution of the 1960s was, at long last, finally over. In his new book, South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias, Brian C. Anderson of City Journal reinforces the optimism, citing the rise of conservative talk radio, the popularity of Fox News, the new visibility of conservative publishers, and the spread of interest in the Internet with its many right-of-center populist Web logs. Taken together, these and kindred phenomena have helped to inspire the thought that, at last, there is beginning to be a widespread counter to the counterculture.

These are heartening signs. Nevertheless, as it was with Mark Twain's announced demise, I suspect that reports of the death of the counterculture have been greatly exaggerated. Something changed on 9/11 — of that I have no doubt — but it seems to me to have affected the assumptions of elite culture sporadically at best. Moreover, the institution that has proved the most resistant to change was the one most publicly committed to "innovation": the university.

It is a peculiar moment in academia. In many ways, things have never been worse. All those radical trends that got going in the 1960s and gained steam in the 1970s and 1980s are now so thoroughly entrenched that they are simply taken for granted. Consider, for example, the case of "transgender" students at Smith College. As the Financial Times reported last month, the whole issue of "transgender" is a growth industry at Smith — as indeed it is at many colleges and universities around the country. "Transgender"? The term, as the FT notes, "is a catchall that includes a wide spectrum of people who don't identify with their birth sex; from transsexuals, who use surgery to change their sex, to those who change their appearance cosmetically — cross-dressers, as they used to be known, though such a term is considered old-school today."

There aren't — not yet, anyway — many university health services that will cover the cost of hormone therapy and surgery for those who wish to make the "transition" to another (I suppose I should say the other) sex, but the FT reports that the University of California is considering covering the procedures. (Arnold Schwarzenegger take note: A breast reduction alone can cost $10,000.) The subject is particularly complicated — or, depending on how you look at it, particularly risible — at Smith, the elite, all-female college whose founder, Sophia Smith, wanted the college to be a place where women "could develop as fully as may be the powers of womanhood."

---

The English novelist Kingsley Amis once observed that much of what was wrong with the 20th century could be summed up in the word "workshop."

---

"All-female"? There's the rub. What does a progressive institution like Smith do when Barbara decides to become Bert? It's a problem. I thought it was a joke when someone told me that Stanford had added "other" to the checkboxes "male" and "female" on its application form. According to the FT many schools now eschew the old "binary way" of looking at sex and make do with the catchall "gender," a much more plastic term: "M," "F," "Neither," "Both," "Trans" (the preferred shorthand). Wesleyan College in Middletown, Conn., has experimented with a "gender blind" dormitory in which "transgender" students could live in a single room or with roommates who didn't care if it was Robert or Roberta in the bunk above. Some Smithies complain that if people "want to be boys, they should go to a coed school." But the Smith administration, being progressive, nervously embraces its two dozen or so "transgender" students. The college, the FT observes, "has long been tolerant of sexual difference. Notably tolerant."

No doubt. Still, the phenomenon of "transgender" raises all sorts of questions. Can the person who's born Bob but decides that he really is (or would like to be) Roberta successfully apply to an all-female college? I believe the answer is "No." But if gender, a k a "sex," is "socially constructed," as we are assured it is, then why not? There are also a host of pragmatic questions. How, for example, do you label the bathrooms? And for parents, there is the deeply pragmatic question of why they should spend approximately $40,000 a year to finance such "experiments in living" (to borrow John Stuart Mill's forward-looking expression).

It may seem that in wandering into the issue of "transgender" we have arrived at some bizarre byway of contemporary university life. This is only partly true. As Irving Kristol observed in his essay "Countercultures":

 

"Sexual liberation" is always near the top of a countercultural agenda — though just what form the liberation takes can and does vary, sometimes quite wildly. Women's liberation, likewise, is another consistent feature of all countercultural movements — liberation from husbands, liberation from children, liberation from family. Indeed, the real object of these various sexual heterodoxies is to disestablish the family as the central institution of human society, the citadel of orthodoxy.

Yesterday the slogan "free sex"; now, ironically, it is something closer to "free from sex." The FT quotes Paisley Currah, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and a board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute: "Just as Herbert Marcuse's theories were important on campus in his day, gender theory is important now." Ms. — or is it Mr.? — Currah is quite right to conjure up Herbert Marcuse. The German-born radical, who died in 1979, was indeed an important '60s guru. But he was more than that. In his "protests against the repressive order of procreative sexuality" and insistence that genuine liberation requires a return to a state of "primary narcissism," Marcuse sounds a very contemporary note. Such a "change in the value and scope of libidinal relations," he wrote in Eros and Civilization, "would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family." Marcuse would be as at home at Smith College in 2005 as he was at Brandeis in the 1960s.

The chief issue is this: Should our institutions of higher education be devoted primarily to the education of citizens — or should they be laboratories for social and political experimentation? Traditionally, a liberal arts education involved both character formation and learning. The goal was to produce men and women who (as Allan Bloom put it) had reflected thoughtfully on the question " 'What is man?' in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs."

Since the 1960s, however, colleges and universities have more and more been home to what Lionel Trilling called the "adversary culture of the intellectuals." The goal was less reflection than rejection. The English novelist Kingsley Amis once observed that much of what was wrong with the 20th century could be summed up in the word "workshop." Nowadays, "workshop" has been largely replaced by the word "studies." Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Afro-American Studies, Women's Studies, Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Studies: These are not the names of academic disciplines but political grievances. They exist not to further liberal education but to nurture the feckless antinomianism that Jacques Barzun dubbed "directionless quibble."

 

---

The middle range, in which behavior is neither explicitly governed by rules but is not entirely free, is that realm governed by ..."Obedience to the Unenforceable." It is a realm in which not law, not caprice, but virtues such as duty, fairness, judgment and taste hold sway. In a word, it is the "domain of Manners," which "covers all cases of right doing where there is no one to make you do it but yourself."

---

Think back to Ward Churchill. He was invited to Hamilton College by "the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture," a left-wing, activist redoubt that for the decade of its existence has devoted its considerable resources to transforming a liberal arts education into an exercise in radical repudiation of American society, its manners, morals and political filiations. It was the Kirkland Project, for example, that invited Susan Rosenberg, the felon and former member of the Weather Underground, to be an "artist- and activist-in-residence" and teach a seminar on "Resistance Memoirs: Writing, Identity and Change." It was a satellite of the Kirkland Project that a couple of years ago invited Annie Sprinkle, the former prostitute and porn star, to preside over a workshop (but of course) designed to educate "students and faculty on how better to pleasure themselves."

Now the point about the Kirkland Project is not how extreme it is but how ordinary. (I use the term in its statistical, not its normative, sense.) There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of similar organizations at American colleges and universities. Their undeclared goal is to radicalize American society by betraying the intellectual and moral standards whose general observance they depend upon for their very existence. When challenged, proponents of such organizations will instantly retreat to the mantras of "free speech" and "academic freedom." But it has long been obvious that the academic notion of "free speech" is like the academic notion of "diversity." It means strict intellectual and moral conformity on any contentious issue: Free speech for me but not for thee. As the historian Robert Paquette — perhaps the only self-identified conservative at Hamilton College — observed, in all of its history the Kirkland Project has never invited anyone to Hamilton who was "libertarian, conservative or even centrist." In other words, "academic freedom" has mutated from being a protection into being a weapon.

John Silber, the former president of Boston University, summed up the fate of academic freedom in his essay "Poisoning the Wells of Academe." Originally, Mr. Silber observed, academic freedom "entailed an immunity for what is said and done by dedicated, thoughtful, conscientious scholars in pursuit of truth or the truest account":

 

Now it came to entail, rather, an immunity for whatever is said and done, responsibly or carelessly, within or without the walls of academia, by persons unconcerned for the truth; who, reckless, incompetent, frivolous or even malevolent, promulgate ideas for which they can claim no expertise, or even commit deeds for which they can claim no sanction of law.

This is what Mr. Silber referred to as "the absolute concept of academic freedom," according to which "the academic can say whatever he pleases about whatever he pleases, whenever and wherever he pleases, and be fully immune from unpleasant consequences." The case of Ward Churchill — and this is a bit of good news to emerge from this sorry scenario — suggests that that may be about to change.

 

  The use and abuse of academic freedom to indemnify not the expression of unpopular opinions but political incitement of various kinds is one symptom of the degradation of American academic life. The newfound impatience with some extreme examples of that abuse is a heartening sign. Nevertheless, the whole issue of academic freedom is only part of a much larger phenomenon. Academics have an unspoken compact with society. As scholars, their charge is to pursue the truth in their chosen discipline; as teachers, their charge is to help preserve and transmit the truth by encouraging thoughtful study and candid discussion. The largely unspoken nature of this compact was part of its glory — it underscored the element of freedom that has always been a central ingredient in liberal education. To a large extent, that freedom has been violated. How has this happened?

 

---

The repudiation of obedience to the unenforceable is at the center of what makes academic life (and not only academic life) today so noxious.

---

Academic life, like the rest of social life, unfolds within a frame of rules and permissions. At one end, there are things that one must (or must not) do; at the other end, there is rule of whim. The middle range, in which behavior is neither explicitly governed by rules but is not entirely free, is that realm governed by what the British jurist John Fletcher Moulton, writing in the early 1920s, called "Obedience to the Unenforceable." It is a realm in which not law, not caprice, but virtues such as duty, fairness, judgment and taste hold sway. In a word, it is the "domain of Manners," which "covers all cases of right doing where there is no one to make you do it but yourself."

A good index of the health of any social institution is its allegiance to the strictures that define this middle realm. "In the changes that are taking place in the world around us," Moulton wrote, "one of those which is fraught with grave peril is the discredit into which this idea of the middle land is falling." One example was the abuse of free speech in political debate: "We have unrestricted freedom of debate," say the radicals: "We will use it so as to destroy debate."

The repudiation of obedience to the unenforceable is at the center of what makes academic life (and not only academic life) today so noxious. The contraction of the "domain of Manners" creates a vacuum that is filled on one side by increasing regulation — speech codes, rules for all aspects of social life, efforts to determine by legislation (from the right as well as from the left) what should follow freely from responsible behavior — and on the other side by increased license. More and more, it seems, academia (like other aspects of elite cultural life) has reneged on its compact with society. What, as Lenin memorably asked, is to be done?

As with any disease, the malady besetting academia requires two stages of therapy: first accurate diagnosis, then effective treatment. In some ways, the diagnostic stage is the most difficult, because it is the hardest to sustain. One corollary of society's natural obedience to the unenforceable is the tendency to assume that those institutions in which we have invested great trust are inherently trustworthy. "Academic institutions are expensive, socially respected bodies whose imprimatur is a powerful door-opener and tool of accreditation, ergo they must be doing a good job." Some such sentiment is the prevailing one, so when someone like Ward Churchill comes along to remove the scab, the shock is great — and unwelcome. One of the chief tasks for critics of what has happened to academic life in this country is to show the extent to which Ward Churchill, the Kirkland Project, the transgender follies at Smith College and elsewhere, and similar deformations are not exceptions but the predictable result of institutions that have gradually abandoned their commitment to education for the sake of radical posturing. The prime difficulty facing the aspirant diagnostician is not the elusiveness of symptoms — they are florid and ubiquitous — but the patience required to set forth chapter and verse repeatedly and in language that effectively conveys the depredations on view.

 

  The bright side of the Ward Churchill affair was the fact that public scrutiny brought dramatic, if local, changes. The melancholy side of the affair lay in the fact that the scrutiny had to be enormous and unremitting, and that, as the media's attention wandered, so did the public's interest. If real change is going to come to academic culture, criticism must be ceaseless, pointed and deep. It is not enough to expose Ward Churchill. The academic culture that breeds and rewards such figures — and their name is legion — must be exposed for what it is: a thoroughly politicized rejection of the principles that inform liberal learning.

 

---

Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral decivilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians?

---

In one sense, the diagnosis of the calamity that has befallen academic culture is inseparable from the task of treatment. Which is to say that the job of criticism is never finished. Basic questions, the answers to which one could once have assumed were taken for granted, must be asked anew. To whom is the faculty accountable? To the extent that it holds itself accountable to its pedagogic duties, it is accountable to itself. To the extent that it repudiates those duties, it is accountable to the society in which it functions and from which it enjoys its freedoms, privileges and perquisites.

Faculties often take it amiss when critics appeal over their heads to alumni, trustees or parents. But ultimately teachers still stand in loco parentis, if not on everyday moral issues then at least with respect to the content of the education they provide. Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral decivilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians? Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a world view that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold? These are questions that should be asked early and asked often.

It is time to revisit several large issues. The issue of tenure, for example. An arrangement that was intended to protect academic freedom and intellectual diversity has mutated into a means of enforcing conformity and excluding the heterodox. For those few conservatives who have managed to obtain tenure, it doubtless functions to protect them. But for the faculty in general it seems to have become a prescription for political correctness and lassitude.

The American academy is not entirely bereft of positive examples. Robert George's Madison Center at Princeton, for example, and Hadley Arkes's Colloquium on the American Founding at Amherst College provide real alternatives to the politically correct establishment that dominates most campuses. Such initiatives are still rare and tend to be beleaguered. They deserve to be emulated elsewhere. The sea is far from full, but the current still can serve. The tide, ebbing for decades, has begun to flow. It is time to seize the initiative lest we miss the moment and lose our ventures.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Kimball, Roger "Retaking the Universities." The New Criterion (May, 2005).

Reprinted with permission of Roger Kimball and The New Criterion.

The New Criterion, founded in 1982 by the art critic Hilton Kramer and the pianist and music critic Samuel Lipman, is a monthly review of the arts and intellectual life. Written with great verve, clarity, and wit, The New Criterion has emerged as America's foremost voice of critical dissent in the culture wars now raging throughout the Western world. A staunch defender of the values of high culture, The New Criterion is also an articulate scourge of artistic mediocrity and intellectual mendacity wherever they are found: in the universities, the art galleries, the media, the concert halls, the theater, and elsewhere.

[guitarist]

Reading list (pardon the misspellings):
-Illiberal Education by D'Souza
-Whatever Happened to the Human Race (that's an oldie!) by F. Schaeffer and Dr. Koop
-Mere Christianity, The Abolition of Man, The Screwtape Letters (and much more!) by CS Lewis
-The Bell Curve by Murray
-Privilege by Douthat
-God on the Quad by Naiomi Schaeffer-In God's Underground by Wurmbrand
-Foxe's Book of Martyrs

[guitarist]

Great booklists; look for yourselves:

http://members.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=743
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/mikeadams/printma20040209.shtml
http://www.northparkchristianacademy.com/PDF/WORLD%20MAG%20-%2012-4-99%20-%20'Century%20Top%20100%20books'%20-%20Vieth'.pdf
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20040623.shtml
http://www.gcc.edu/news/publications/bookstorenew.htm
http://www.gcc.edu/news/publications/littorenew.htm

JUST FOR STARTERS!

[Coleus]

thanks, I often though about doing or looking for a thread where freepers favorite books are listed.

[fatima]

I am sick of you bump.

[ken21]

>It is time to revisit several large issues. The issue of tenure, for example. An arrangement that was intended to protect academic freedom and intellectual diversity has mutated into a means of enforcing conformity and excluding the heterodox. For those few conservatives who have managed to obtain tenure, it doubtless functions to protect them. But for the faculty in general it seems to have become a prescription for political correctness and lassitude.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

amen.

the taxpayers who support universities have no job security.

the commies of the 1950's invented tenure to protect themselves and their descendants, the new left, etc.

[ReadyNow]

I don't agree with muslims on much, but their treatment of the "trans" is right on the mark.

[ken21]

ironic that the 13th c moslems hate america and hate the blatent sexuality the most, but the university liberals side with the moslems against israel and the u.s.

the moslems would kill the trans if they had the opportunity.

[guitarist]

The far left's parternship w/Radical Islam is strategic and temporary! Even though burqua-Afghan-type Islam is more antithetical to their liberalism, they consider us a bigger threat now, so they concentrate their fire in our direction...

[guitarist]

Your wish is my command:
from 2002, FReepers' book recommendations/lists...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/645354/posts

[ken21]

how "temporary"?

i was talking to a university archaeologist who works in the sudan and he wouldn't even admist that the moslems were persecuting the christians and animists.

he said, what christians and animists!

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

There definitely needs to be an organized effort to restore dignity and sanity to formal education.

[cgbg]

Should our institutions of higher education be devoted primarily to the education of citizens — or should they be laboratories for social and political experimentation? Traditionally, a liberal arts education involved both character formation and learning.

This is a good article but I think it fails to understand the concept of what the leftists really mean by a sexual revolution or institutional revolution.

They are not idle critics and experimenters. Their leaders, at least, have a dangerous ideology that seeks to "perfect" mankind, to "transform" mankind, so we are ready to live in their socialist Utopia.

Their fanatical support of fetal experimentation, cloning, transexuality are clues to their agenda. They will settle for nothing less than the elimination of sexuality and reproduction. They want to create sexless children in their laboratories and brainwash them from birth.

They want to abolish individuality, thought, pleasure.

What they seek is what all totalitarians throughout history have desired--obedience.

[kitkat]

BUMP for tomorrow's reading.

[warchild9]

I started my first semester teaching two sections of W Civ at a Triangle University (to avoid stalkers, I won't say which, but everybody would recognize the name). Most of my colleagues are pretty middle-of-the-road-to-Libertarian, or I wouldn't have accepted the position. Note, though, that few are Christian (including Yours Truly).

[SandyB]

American colleges are a feminine instution, most students are female - male students are becoming a smaller and smaller minority - not only at the undergraduate level, but now also at the graduate level, denistry school, med school, law school, nursing school, etc.

If anyone "retakes" our colleges, it must, by necessity , be the females that do it since our colleges are mostly female.

[guitarist]

How temporary? Excellent question. Probably can't be answered with a given time frame (5 yrs, 20 yrs, etc.) It is until they view jihadi Islam as a bigger actual threat than us. Of course, millions of them did get that revelation on Sept 11, but some have flipped back to worrying about us more. I would say that it would take a big event, God forbid (big war w/Israel, another attack here, something unpredictable w/Iran,Iraq,Pakistan, etc.), to change the current equation, which, to them, says that we Christians are anti-multi-cultural, and are thus unfair to Muslims!!!! Your story about the "blind" archeaologist is quite instructive.

[guitarist]

I'm glad you are pro-life and you love your wife, but you say you're not a Christian. Do you not belive that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and was resurrected?

[warchild9]

That defines "not" being a Christian.

[guitarist]

Do you figure you are here by accident, some cosmic good (or bad) luck? Then why bother with anything, other than eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die?

[warchild9]

Guess you'd call me a deist. I believe in God, the Creator. I see no proof that Christianity is other than another interpretation of same. Faith is not the same as proof.
(Note: my first undergrad degree was from a theology school associated with the Methodist Church, my father is senior deacon in his Southern Baptist Church, and the Mrs. is Catholic. So, I'm no long-haired, uninformed college-type atheist.)
I don't see any reason why the Creator didn't initiate evolution as a natural process in the world.
Remember, Christians don't have a lock on the concept of God. That's a common conceit here in the Bible Belt.

[warchild9]

Oh, and it's pretty obvious that a karmic-type law is at work here on our beautiful planet. In our Western culture, the equivalent law is "what goes around comes around." You get back what you give. God made things that way.
The afterlife? You get what you earn. Other than to believe in a sort of cosmic justice is to live an empty life.

[Wombat101]

Easiest way to retake the universities is to get the Federal Government out of them, and return them to what they are supposed to be: institutions that turn out thinking individuals. Remove federal funding and things like Gender and Ethnic studies disappear overnight and the universities return to their core subjects.

Second prong of the same attack: there needs to be a movement of parents (you know, the ones who actually pay for their child's education?) to engage in a campaign to return actual learning and knowledge to the university curriculum. If parents actually used their economic leverage against their children's schools, the kids would get a much better education.

Abolish the Depratment of Education altogether, since it does not actually educate anyone, does not set standards for teacher qualifications, set a curriculum, or otherwise do anything except influence what is taught by giving or withholding tax dollars from institutions which are already taxpayer supported. The DOE is simply a jobs program for bureaucrats.

[PaRebel]

There are some liberal arts colleges that never, never bought into the counter-culture tripe; see Grove City College!

[Diago]

I would really like to see someone set up an organization for orphaned alumni.

For instance, Catholic graduates of Georgetown or John Carroll, could choose a new honorary alma mater which they could financially support until Georgetown or JCU returned to the Catholic faith.

The organization would not need to have any formal connection with any of the schools but would serve as a conduit notifying the schools that Mr. Smith was making a $5,000 donation to Ave Maria instead of Georgetown because GU was no longer Catholic.

As more orphaned alumni joined the organization, the dollars would quickly become material.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Thanks. Fair enough.

The "counter-culture" is not the only manifestation of liberal secular humanism. The other serious problem is the training, educational preparation, and moral character of faculty and administrators. The ideological problems in higher education predate the 1960s counter-culture. God and Man at Yale came out in 1951 and was about problems rooted in the 1940s and 1930s.

Also, not every allegedly "conservative" alternative offered in college education is a bowl of cherries. There are kooks, nuts, and mental midgets on the right who make a mess of things in the classroom. There always seem to be a few arrogant self-impressed dorks and wackos from Harvard and Yale for some reason. [irony] And if the students have been programmed by the NEA lobotomy factories (statist public schools)and Hollyweird TV culture, it can be almost impossible to overcome that just within the context of a four-year college. A lot of the damage occurs in K through 12. The whole Deweyite, statist, Columbia Teachers College secular humanist system of public education needs to replaced with a completely different kind of educational content, structure, teaching style, and method of evaluation.

Education needs to be "liberated" from the NEA, the Deweyites, the sanctimonious liberal Ivy League, the literary Marxists, and the cabals of secular humanist "foundations" that try to control the funding, etc. Most colleges and universities right now are a mess with all sorts of rascals and mind control con artists manipulating the students, depriving them of a genuine education, and furthering the moral wasteland throughout American society. Any type of education that does not value "moral character" and have that among its faculty is flawed. The examples that Buckley cites in God and Man at Yale are pretty sad and pathetic cases. This drama has a long and unfortunate history. The "idols" of the power structure in American education are what need to be confronted, demolished, and replaced.

[PaRebel]

Completely agree with you. Those things you write about are some of the reasons my wife and I home-schooled our four children.

I realize that withdrawing from the "system" does not fix it, but at least we (my wife and I) have contributed four sane, grounded, individuals to contribute to the process of fixing the "system".

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

What I dislike intensely is the way the schools and the teachers attempt to arrogate to themselves the control of the student's education, insinuating all sorts of bizarre social engineering into it. Frankly, it's up to the student and parents to decide what courses the student should take, the content they would like included, and how they should be taught. We do need "choice" in education. The silly left-wing ideologies should just be eliminated completely from the educational landscape. No one should submit to an educational system that denies the moral order and belittles or ridicules our Christian culture.

We need a "Declaration of Independence" and July 4th for American education and the American mind. The right to "free speech," "freedom of religion," and "free assembly" needs to be asserted proudly in the area of education

[PaRebel]

If you have not already, I suggest reading some of John T. Gatto. He has done some significant work to expose the corrupt side of public education in America.

Of course when we attack public education, we are attacking perhaps the strongest union extant!

Wasn't it John Dewey who said, and I paraphrase, that "...the purpose of public education is, of course, not to educate, but to produce compliant workers...".

[PaRebel]

If you have not already, I suggest reading some of John T. Gatto. He has done some significant work to expose the corrupt side of public education in America.

Of course when we attack public education, we are attacking perhaps the strongest union extant!

Wasn't it John Dewey who said, and I paraphrase, that "...the purpose of public education is, of course, not to educate, but to produce compliant workers...".

[Coleus]

That's the problem, alumni keep contributing to their lousy colleges. I never gave to mine for two reasons: I paid for everything I got and I don't support the hidden agenda in my college.