Commentary
Universities have been particularly affected by a politically correct ideology and awakening as a result of the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s and the long march of decisions within the institution by the Cultural Left. This is the dominance of neo-Marxist and postmodern-inspired ideologies, in which decentered academics in various subjects dominate English-speaking faculties and faculties.
A study conducted by the US-based Heterodox Academy concluded: A survey of campus climate also revealed a decline in openness to neoliberal perspectives. “
The Adam Smith Institute, a British think tank, has come to a similar conclusion.
Historically, university education has centered around liberal education. It has its origins in Europe and England and can be traced back to ancient Greece and philosophers such as Aristotle, Socrates and Plato.
Such an education, as Cardinal John Henry Newman argues in The Philosophy of the College, inculcates certain habits of the mind, including “freedom, fairness, sobriety, moderation and wisdom.” Or what I dared to call philosophical habits in my earlier discourse.
British poet T.S. Eliot, in his “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,” writes that the university should be “the preservation of learning, the pursuit of truth, and the pursuit of truth as far as man is capable, as far as man is capable of it.” in a similar tone when proposing that we should stand for the pursuit of attainment of wisdom. “
This was the devastating effect of the cultural left takeover.
The concept of liberal colleges has changed
Sinologist Pierre Rickmans, who taught at the Australian National University, argues that the liberal concept of the university no longer exists.
In the 1996 Boyer Lectures, Ryckmans describes a young scholar attacking a visiting speaker for his “narrow bourgeois elitism” for boldly discussing the importance of Chinese literati painting. .
In addition to rehashing slogans made popular by Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, young scholars find it impossible to be discriminatory or objective because all value judgments are relative and subjective. claimed.
Rickman’s reply was, “To deny the existence of objective values is to deprive the university of its spiritual means of operation.”
This is his disgust and hostility to what college education has been curtailed. He concluded:
Rickmans not only summarizes the impact of cultural leftist ideology and the pernicious influence of critical theory and its recent offspring in a pessimistic and disturbing way.
Marv Bendle, Senior Lecturer in History and Communication at James Cook University, also submits to cultural left theory and Australian scholars for “simplified default positions of class, gender and race”. criticized that
In detailing what he saw as the constant assault on Western culture caused by the “ideological contagion of shame and self-loathing,” Bendl notes that this “nihilist worldview is now pervasive throughout Western academia.” It has been institutionalized in the
The deterioration of art leads to the collapse of values
John Carroll, formally of La Trobe University, said that Australia’s cultural elite, including its universities, school curricula, museums and art galleries, is no longer a “Western tradition since classical Greece.”
In How I Became a Political Conservative, Carroll argues: Therefore art must be shocking. You have to decompose the value. Meaning must be revealed as a rationalization of established wealth and privilege. “
British art critic and scholar Giles Ortie, who has settled in Australia, also denounces the cultural left’s takeover of the Academy and the detrimental effects of what he describes as postmodernism and political correctness. , describes postmodernism as a “deeply anti-democratic political and cultural movement.”
Auty concludes in “How the West Is Really Lost”: culture. “
Awakening as a college silencer
American campuses have been victims of the culture wars since the late 1960s, when they were booming.
As Alan Bloom pointed out in The Closure of the American Mind, published in 1987, “American universities in the ’60s, like German universities in the ’30s, sought to dismantle the structures of rational inquiry. No longer believing in their higher professions, both gave way to a highly ideological student body.
Subsequent authors, including Roger Kimball, Dinesh D’Souza, and more recently Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, in “Critical Theory,” argue that as the awakening becomes the new orthodoxy and suppresses all opposition, scholarly impartiality and reason steadily rise. It details that it is declining to
The aims of education and what constitutes a worthwhile curriculum are also being fundamentally redefined in British universities. Cultural commentators such as Roger Screton, Douglas Murray, and Frank Freddy have described in some detail the nature and impact of the Left’s long marches on institutions.
In Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone, Freddie warns against the effects of awakened postmodern relativism and subjectivity. A radical view that denies that knowledge has any intrinsic meaning or value, that there is no such thing as truth, and that the purpose of education is limited to that which is directly relevant and practical.
The strangest example of awakened post-colonial ideology concerns the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield, where British science is accused of being “inherently white”.
Awakened scholars have argued that the European Scientific Enlightenment “was both a fundamental contributor to European imperialism and a chief beneficiary of its injustice… It is clear that one cannot be” and therefore believes that a non-Western scientific perspective needs to be adopted.
The above is an edited excerpt from Sky News Australia’s Chris Kenny’s “The Dictionary of Woke” to be presented in Sydney on September 20th. https://www.trybooking.com/CCBUP
Views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Epoch Times.
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Kevin Donnelly is a Senior Fellow at the PM Glynn Institute at The Catholic University of Australia.