Donald Kagin in a useful article takes a look at Harvard University and the state of university education today. He sees major problems and a vacuousness which cannot be reformed from within. Kagin comments on two recent books: Harry Lewis's Excellence without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (Lewis was the Dean of Harvard College) and Harry Bok's Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should be Learning More. (Bok served as President of Harvard from 1971 to 1991 and is now interim President). Both Lewis and Bok offer incisive critiques, but Kagin thinks neither comes through with sufficient answers. He concludes his essay saying,
As things stand now, no president appears capable of taming the imperial faculty; almost none is willing to try; and no one else from inside the world of the universities or infected by its self-serving culture is likely to stand up and say “enough,” or to be followed by anyone if he does. Salvation, if it is to come at all, will
have to come from without.
Reform never comes easily. The university today reflects the advanced decadence of a tired civilization in need of intensive care and a major blood transfusion. Islam thinks Western civilization is ripe for the picking. The alternative is Christian reformation and revival. I don't see anything else on the horizon that can slow the Gadarene march to oblivion.
Update 9/15/06: David Horowitz examines the situation at the University of Colorado. He reproduces catalog course descriptions and offers his comments. Preceeding that he offers an introduction, saying he has visited hundreds of university campuses and
. . . I came
to be familiar with the massive corruption of the academic enterprise
that had occurred since I was an undergraduate in the 1950s, which had
transformed large segments of the liberal arts schools into political
parties of the academic left. This corruption was the result of a
determined campaign by Gramscian radicals to use the universities as a
platform for their “transformative” agendas of radical social change.
In pursuit of their goals, they had created entire academic departments
and fields, while subverting others in order to institute programs of
study that were ideological rather than scholarly in content and
design. To further these goals, they had instituted a system of
intolerance (“political correctness”) to de-legitimize alternative
intellectual paradigms and ideas, and had put in place the largest and
most effective blacklist in the history of the country, whose purpose
was to rid faculties of independent-minded professors, who might
interfere with their designs.
By
the time I made my university rounds, the refusal to hire conservative
academics had led to a vanishing presence of conservative faculty
members in many liberal arts disciplines. In the fields of sociology
and anthropology, for example, the ratio of leftwing professors to
conservatives was now approximately thirty-to-one. These two fields
themselves had been largely transformed into exercises in leftwing
ideology and bore little resemblance to scholarly inquiry. In these
fields particularly, but in many others that still bore some
resemblance to traditional academic pursuits there was a disturbing
absence in university courses of assigned texts that did not validate
or amplify with the professor’s ideological point of view. The net
effect was to deny students access to alternative – and particularly --
conservative ideas that would challenge the course assumptions. The
curriculum was thus transformed into a program of indoctrination. (more)
Update 9/18/06: Horowitz puts the University of Texas under the microscope. Later reports include Arizona State and Willamette University.