Universities Are a Conspiracy Against the Public
Matt Goodwin, earlier this year, published Bad Education. He is doing a good job in making himself the critical voice of civilisational desperation, and doing so, not only as an academic, now former academic, but a fully-fledged public figure. Goodwin is making himself the tip of a spear of a grinding recognition and growing realisation: one which is still not admitted very often inside the universities. This is that the universities are privileged, guilty, degraded, pandering institutions heading towards expansion and heat death.
However, the arguments back and forth get very tangled. And I don’t think it is very helpful to blame the Left for the problems of the university. Goodwin blames the Left. So does Peterson. Well, one can blame the Left if one wants: but it comes at a cost: it alienates everyone who thinks the Left is beautiful, truthful and honourable. So I think the argument should be subtler. Plus, we don’t want a university to be Right either. Not unless we define Right and Left very carefully. Which no one does. ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ are political words, and therefore about as helpful in analysis as a custard pie or grapeshot.
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Not sure Chaucer or Shakespeare went to university. Coleridge drop out.
During the period of the oral tradition no one “wrote” anything. Fortunately, a great deal of material was written down and it’s fascinating stuff. Long live the humanities because human nature does not change and students need to know that.
Better to be right than wrong
Great read and thanks for citing my piece. The rise of the social sciences is a major phenomenon in our culture since at least the 1960s – it acts as the basis for the worst contemporary political arguments.
No one with a sane mind can think ‘the Left is beautiful, truthful and honourable’. The sheer weight of evidence (in every field) destroys this instantly.
The Left at best, are naive dreamers, but many are far worse. Their only instinct is to destroy: institutions, traditions, families and social norms.
I frankly don’t care if I alienate people like this.
I don’t mind what they do as long as they don’t expect me or others to contribute financially from taxation. If people want universities, in whatever form, or they serve a purpose, then the people who think they are useful can pay for them.
As I have mentioned (often, elsewhere, hughwillbourn.com/book) the fundamental flaw of modernity is the default of valuation of abstractions above concrete solutions – which is more or less the curriculum of Social Sciences. MacIntyre takes the long way round in After Virtue but, in calling for another St Benedict he is pointing, in an obscure, academic way, in the same direction.
Where as Physical Scientists test their theories on Reality, in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, many treat their theory as Reality and, because Humans are so adaptable, the theories can be made to work – until they don’t.
There are exceptions, like many Climate Scientists, but that is another story altogether.
Have you seen the prospectus for St Martin’s Academy Kansas? Boys study the classics, but also do farmwork. The website explains why.
“The development of the intellect through mathematics, languages, natural sciences and literature is obviously a critical component of this education. But this academic work must be connected to tangible things or it is in great peril of becoming hollow. That connection to reality happens when senses, memory, and imagination have been in contact with real things– like plants, animals, and dirt; or birth, life, and death.”
Someone, at least, doesn’t think study should necessarily be time out from reality.
I went to University from 1971-74. Gosh, it must have changed. I don’t recognise anything from Mr Alexander’s descriptions. We had two 10-week terms – in which a mass of material was transcribed onto a blackboard by a remote chap in front of you – and an exam term, which was over after 6 weeks or so. You then disappeared for the summer, returning four months later to a place you barely recognised.
If the place had a serious function defining and protecting civilisation, it was a mystery to me. We spent a lot of time drinking, water-fighting, pursuing sex, playing cards and snooker. Many staff had serious drink problems.
“The natural sciences have to be reduced in status ….”
The Natural Sciences underlie Engineering, from Mechanical, Electrical, Marine, to Civil Engineering, and Medicine, a type of human Engineering.
The only reason that the Natural Sciences have had such high status is that the competition has been so poor. If its high status
distorts our sense of what academic understanding is, I take ‘our’ to be predominantly Arts, Humanities and Social Science graduates that think Intelligence is a valid substitute for Knowledge and Experience in the Physical Sciences.
It might surprise you that most Scientists and many Engineers know that Science is a mode of enquiry, and any ‘fact’ is only the current level of knowledge. And then we have the BBC promoting the Climate Emergency, NET Zero policies, Masks, the Bioweapon jab, prohibiting any disagreement. It has been very revealing just how ignorant very educated people can be, and amusing, now that they are being proved so wrong.
Yes, the Humanities need to be taught to Humanities undergraduates! And then they might understand what Science can and can’t do, and the country rid of this ridiculous fear of the Green Agenda.
“If I had my way, short of destroying the social sciences, I would say that no one would be allowed to study anything before, say, 1960. In an instant, no ‘academics’ would be allowed to pretend to academic authority in any declaration of views about contemporary society.”
Surely you mean AFTER 1960 ?