The mission of a university is to discover truth and transmit that essential knowledge to future generations. That has been achieved by what we call in the West the Socratic Dialogue — that is, ferreting out what is good, true, and beautiful by testing ideas in an academic setting.
None of that is possible in an educational environment controlled by a Marxist Left that denies the existence of truth , that seeks to stop the transmission of past traditions to future generations, that decries Socrates and Western concepts, and that wages war on beauty .
Now that this Left is entrenched in academia, it uses myriad ways to impose its views and suppress others.
The concept that the good, the true, and the beautiful are transcendental “properties of being” goes back to Plato , Socrates’s disciple. It was explored further by St. Augustine in the transition between Antiquity and the Middle Ages and by St. Thomas Aquinas in the High Middle Ages.
Quoting Aristotle recently, Peter Berkowitz rightly noted that the purpose of right education consists of “cultivating the virtues and transmitting the knowledge that enables citizens to preserve their form of government and way of life.”
But the leftists running America’s institutions no longer want such preservation. Rather, they see it as its quest to “decolonize” the university from Western thinking and believe that class time must be used instead to study non-Western (read “victim”) ways and works.
This particular Left, which focuses on culture, has gained ascendancy in universities since the 1980s when the student radicals of the 1960s discovered that they could carry out their revolutionary mission culturally by taking over academia.
See full article at the Washington Examiner.
Jack McPherrin ([email protected]) is a managing editor of StoppingSocialism.com, research editor for The Heartland Institute, and a research fellow for Heartland's Socialism Research Center. He holds an MA in International Affairs from Loyola University-Chicago, and a dual BA in Economics and History from Boston College.
