Editor's Note: the following excerpt has been cross-posted here with permission, the full article can be found on Doc Emet Productions.
Throughout the Western world the academy is imperiled. It faces threats of several kinds, but the principal threat is from its own turn against the civilization that gave rise to it.
This threat takes the form of a summary judgment that all of Western history is a tale of violent oppression. It depicts all of our philosophy, religion, literature, and art as tricks played to disguise injustice and lull victims into accepting their lot. It explains Western science as a tool by which the powerful dominate the weak. It treats Western prosperity as the wrongful appropriation of other people’s natural wealth. It makes of the West a murderous regime that attempted to expropriate the whole world. And it treats the rise of industry as a gross assault on health of humanity and the stability of the climate.
This comprehensive indictment of Western civilization is by no means shared by every college professor and college student, but it has become an underlying orthodoxy. The skeptical fear to dissent aloud lest they be ostracized. A relative few stand out as its explicit champions, but that few succeeded first in making revulsion towards the West a legitimate stand, and then in turning it into a shibboleth that all must accommodate.
The consequence is a university that contradicts its own premises. The fancy word for this is “postmodernism,” the rhetorical or philosophical stance that rejects the law of non-contradiction. Postmodernism allows that the world isn’t a coherent place. It is rather a collection of inconsistencies and uncertainties. What does it matter if the university denies its founding principles? It can find new ones as needed or perhaps just do without.
To declare that the academy faces such danger is to invite incredulity. Few Western institutions have survived as long as the university, which dates back in recognizable form to the eleventh century (e.g. the University if Bologna, fn. 1088) and was thriving in various cities by the mid-thirteenth century. Moreover, those institutions built on earlier traditions of disciplined inquiry that sweep back another thousand or more years. The Western university was born in the High Middle Ages in great part as an act of recovery: Aristotle’s treatises on logic and natural and metaphysical philosophy were reintroduced via contact with the Muslim world.
The educational empire that began with those fragile steps is now one of the most robust and wealthiest institutions in the world. The combined endowments of the top handful of American universities exceed the wealth of many nations. Harvard’s endowment alone is more than $50 billion. This doesn’t look like fragility or peril in any ordinary sense. And yet…
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