An individual is only as capable as his physical health and mental well-being.
An individual needs mental well-being, and so does a society. To gauge the mental well-being of an individual, you look to the individual’s psyche and mind. To gauge the mental well-being of a society, you look first to its institutions of higher learning.
One former professor, in an article entitled “Why I Quite Teaching”, recently expressed why he left his long-time role as a college professor:
To put it bluntly, the administration is venal and unscrupulous. Faculty is compromised and reprobate. The student body is a haven for ineptitude. Regrettably, the exceptions – for they do exist – cannot redress the balance. What is perhaps most troubling is that the more reputable faculties and disciplines – math, physics, engineering, astronomy, medicine, law – are gradually but inexorably being eroded by the “social justice” meme and subject to extraneous cultural forces that are political in nature. Even here, gender and race rather than scholarly accomplishment and talent are starting to predominate in hiring protocols.
Forget about left and right, liberal and conservative for a moment. Just consider the moral, intellectual and psychological state of colleges where this has happened, quite likely a majority of them.
The atmosphere is not left-wing so much as anti-intellectual. The schools are not anti-conservative so much as anti-learning. It’s not reason guiding the dissemination of knowledge — it’s politics. Yes, it’s left-wing politics. For sure. But the real crisis is that it’s politics, not reason and science, responsible for the dissemination of knowledge in an advanced civilization. We can’t go on like this and stay the kind of civilization we are.
It’s a bigger crisis than most of us seem prepared to grasp. Because when anti-intellectual attitudes move beyond the humanities and social sciences into the realm of math, physics, and engineering, how long before we see the impact not only on our governments, cultural icons and politicians, but in our airplanes, on our highways, and our bridges, as well? As political correctness — in today’s society, from the left — comes to trump science, reason and logic, then at what point does life as we know it become physically dangerous?
Neither liberalism/leftism nor conservatism — nor anything else — can survive the slow, tortured death of reason on the majority of our college campuses. Thinking is everything. Without thinking, knowledge of facts is worthless. If people who run and teach at universities stop understanding this, where does it leave us all?
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