PoliticalChic
Diamond Member
It is one of the great errors of our time to relate the terms 'education' with 'universities.' They no longer educate.
They turn out cookie-cutter formed Liberals, and provide one of the pieces of paper that prospective employers require.
That's all.
1. Yale classicist Donald Kagan: "Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values." He counseled schools to adopt "a common core of studies" in the history, literature and philosophy "of our culture." By "our" he means Western.."
a. He was called a racist—or as the campus daily more politely editorialized, a peddler of "European cultural arrogance."
2. Democracy, wrote Mr. Kagan..., is "one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience." It relies on "free, autonomous and self-reliant" citizens and "extraordinary leadership" to flourish, even survive. These kinds of citizens aren't born—they need to be educated. "The essence of liberty, which is at the root of a liberal education, is that meaningful freedom means that you have choices to make," Mr. Kagan says. "At the university, there must be intellectual variety. If you don't have [that], it's not only that you are deprived of knowing some of the things you might know. It's that you are deprived of testing the things that you do know or do think you know or believe in, so that your knowledge is superficial."
3. As dean, Mr. Kagan championed hard sciences, rigorous hiring standards for faculty, and the protection of free speech....The elite universities after the war opened to minorities and women, not to mention Brooklyn College grads like himself—then "it was all about merit," he says." The Weekend Interview with Donald Kagan: 'Democracy May Have Had Its Day' - WSJ.com
4. The death knell was the ascension of the radical generation of the 1960's. They not only assaulted the universities, but cowed the administrations. Consider the talented and tireless Ira Magaziner.
“As a student activist at Brown University in the late 1960s, he helped codify the no-requirements approach of the so-called New Curriculum (few grades, lots of self-discovery) and changed the face of modern academics."
Goldberg, "Liberal Fascism."
a. The radicals of the sixties did not remain within the universities…They realized that the apocalypse never materialized. “…they were dropping off into environmentalism and consumerism and fatalism…I watched many of my old comrades apply to graduate school in universities they had failed to burn down, so they could get advanced degrees and spread the ideas that had been discredited in the streets under an academic cover.”
Collier and Horowitz, “Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About The Sixties,” p. 294-295.
5. “…The fate of the modern university and the fate of Western civilization are inextricably intertwined.”
Brigette Berger, “Multiculturalism and the Modern University,” from ‘The Politics of Political Correctness,’ in the Partisan Review (1993) pp. 516, 519
And there you have it. For political power the Left has ended the hegemony of Western civilization.
In Obama's America we can see the elements of a backwater banana republic, where might makes right, and laws are made malleable.
That's all, folks.
They turn out cookie-cutter formed Liberals, and provide one of the pieces of paper that prospective employers require.
That's all.
1. Yale classicist Donald Kagan: "Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values." He counseled schools to adopt "a common core of studies" in the history, literature and philosophy "of our culture." By "our" he means Western.."
a. He was called a racist—or as the campus daily more politely editorialized, a peddler of "European cultural arrogance."
2. Democracy, wrote Mr. Kagan..., is "one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience." It relies on "free, autonomous and self-reliant" citizens and "extraordinary leadership" to flourish, even survive. These kinds of citizens aren't born—they need to be educated. "The essence of liberty, which is at the root of a liberal education, is that meaningful freedom means that you have choices to make," Mr. Kagan says. "At the university, there must be intellectual variety. If you don't have [that], it's not only that you are deprived of knowing some of the things you might know. It's that you are deprived of testing the things that you do know or do think you know or believe in, so that your knowledge is superficial."
3. As dean, Mr. Kagan championed hard sciences, rigorous hiring standards for faculty, and the protection of free speech....The elite universities after the war opened to minorities and women, not to mention Brooklyn College grads like himself—then "it was all about merit," he says." The Weekend Interview with Donald Kagan: 'Democracy May Have Had Its Day' - WSJ.com
4. The death knell was the ascension of the radical generation of the 1960's. They not only assaulted the universities, but cowed the administrations. Consider the talented and tireless Ira Magaziner.
“As a student activist at Brown University in the late 1960s, he helped codify the no-requirements approach of the so-called New Curriculum (few grades, lots of self-discovery) and changed the face of modern academics."
Goldberg, "Liberal Fascism."
a. The radicals of the sixties did not remain within the universities…They realized that the apocalypse never materialized. “…they were dropping off into environmentalism and consumerism and fatalism…I watched many of my old comrades apply to graduate school in universities they had failed to burn down, so they could get advanced degrees and spread the ideas that had been discredited in the streets under an academic cover.”
Collier and Horowitz, “Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About The Sixties,” p. 294-295.
5. “…The fate of the modern university and the fate of Western civilization are inextricably intertwined.”
Brigette Berger, “Multiculturalism and the Modern University,” from ‘The Politics of Political Correctness,’ in the Partisan Review (1993) pp. 516, 519
And there you have it. For political power the Left has ended the hegemony of Western civilization.
In Obama's America we can see the elements of a backwater banana republic, where might makes right, and laws are made malleable.
That's all, folks.
