Roger Scruton, in the American Spectator, describes how sloth, self-indulgence, and intellectual cowardice led the modern university to surrender to egalitarian relativism and thus to be politicized.

As universities expanded, the humanities began to displace the sciences from the curriculum. Students wished to use their time at university to cultivate their leisure interests and to improve their souls, rather than to learn hard facts and complex theories. And there arose a serious question as to why universities were devoting their resources to subjects that made so little discernible difference to the wider world. What good do the humanities do, and why should students take three or four years out of their lives in order to read books which—if they were interested—they would read in any case, and which—if they were not interested—would never do them the least bit of good?

In the days when the humanities involved knowledge of classical languages and an acquaintance with German scholarship, there was no doubt that they required real mental discipline, even if their point could reasonably be doubted. But once subjects like English were admitted to a central place in the curriculum, the question of their validity became urgent. And then, in the wake of English came the pseudo-humanities—women’s studies, gay studies and the like—which were based on the assumption that, if English is a discipline, so too are they. And since there is no cogent justification for women’s studies that does not dwell upon the subject’s ideological purpose, the entire curriculum in the humanities began to be seen in ideological terms. …

Subjects like English and art history grew from the desire to teach young people how to discriminate art from effect, beauty from kitsch, and real from phony sentiment. This ability was not regarded as an unimportant skill like fencing or horse riding, which students are free to acquire or not, according to their interests. It was regarded as a real form of knowledge, as vital to the future of civilization as the knowledge of mathematics, and more closely connected with the moral health of society than any natural science. It was only on that assumption that the humanities acquired their central place in the modern university.

If, however, the humanities are to avoid the cultivation of taste, it is not only their central place in the curriculum that is thrown in doubt. Given their prominence in the modern university, and the fact that increasingly many students come to university who are unprepared for any other form of study, any change in the humanities is a change in the very idea of a university. Conservatives often complain about the politicization of the universities, and about the fact that only liberal views are propagated or even tolerated on campus. But they fail to see the true cause of this, which is the internal collapse of the humanities. When judgment is marginalized or forbidden nothing remains save politics. The only permitted way to compare Jane Austen and Maya Angelou, or Mozart and Meshuggah, is in terms of their rival political postures. And then the point of studying Jane Austen or Mozart is lost. What do they have to tell us about the ideological conflicts of today, or the power struggles that are played out in the faculty common room?

The true conservative cause, when it comes to the universities, ought to be the restoration of judgment to its central place in the humanities. And that shows how difficult a task the recapture of the universities will be. It will require a confrontation with the culture of youth, and an insistence that the real purpose of universities is not to flatter the tastes of those who arrive there, but to present them with a rite of passage into something better.

Read the whole thing.

Mark C. Taylor, chairman of the Department of Religion at Columbia, hits the nail on the head describing the contradictions lying at the heart of university teaching today.

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

His proposed solutions, I’m afraid, are, on the other hand, mostly utterly and completely daft. There is no possibility that interdisciplary relevance can be achieved by abolishing footnotes and departments and assembling groups of diverse scholars to tackle topics like “Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.” It would be kind of fun though to take a few Structuralists, a Straussian Poli Sci professor, and a few Cultural Studies specialists, hand them a bucket and tell them to go study Water.

[T]here are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them. The sexual provender that lies to hand is staggering in its variety and its profusion. You would never mistake it for a happy place.
–Lawrence Durrell on Alexandria in Justine (1957).

Heather McDonald comments on the antics of Yale’s Administration in catering to the demands of its Gay (in all its permutations) constituency and on the ironies of the contemporary approaches to paideia.

In 2007, at the behest of feminist students, Yale added yet another layer of costly bureaucracy-the Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center-to its already generous sexual assault infrastructure. I asked physics professor Peter Parker, convenor of the college’s Sexual Harassment Grievance Board and a sponsor of the new S.H.A.R.E. Center, how many sexual assaults on students there were at Yale. He said that he had “no idea.” (In fact, the number of reported unconfirmed assaults can usually be counted on one hand.) So if students came to the administration demanding a malaria treatment center, would Yale build it without first determining the prevalence of malaria on campus? I asked him. “We didn’t make our judgment based on numbers, but based on concern by students in the community,” he answered.

Faced with such a pliant oppressor, students have to get quite creative in manufacturing new causes of grievance. At the opening ceremonies for the new Office of LGBTQ Resources, junior Rachel Schiff, a coordinator for the LGBT Co-op, complained: “The fact that we don’t actually have a physical space says lots about Yale’s stance towards LGBT life on the ground at a metaphorical level.”…

Today’s solipsistic university… allows students to answer the “Who am I?” question exclusively, rather than inclusively. Identity politics defines the self by its difference from as many other people as possible, so as to increase the underdog status of one’s chosen identity group.

Actually, as far back as the early 1980s, I was startled to learn from undergraduates that the Yale Political Union was not allowed to solicit members by advertising in the prematriculation Freshman mailing packet, but Yale’s LGBT organization was.

Clearly, where I went wrong was in failing to demand a special house provided at university expense, and a special curriculum focused on Redneck Polack Deer Hunter (RPDH) studies.

Hat tip to Scott Drum.

Two teenage kids get kicked out of school and put on probation for taking the name of the Obamessiah in vain. So much for free speech. And all this occurred in North Carolina. Imagine what they’d do to you in Cambridge, New Haven, or Berkeley!

Ashville Citizen Times:

A judge on Tuesday sentenced two former Western Carolina University students to probation for dumping a dead bear on campus with Barack Obama campaign signs on its head.

Brothers Marvin Caleb Williams, of Wilkesboro, who was 20 at the time of his October arrest, and Mathew Colton Williams, who was 18, said nothing in court and declined to comment after the hearing.

Their attorney, Kris Earwood, told District Court Judge Richlyn Holt that the brothers “deeply apologize” and were shocked their action was perceived as a political statement.

“This was just a very bad choice by two young boys,” she said.

The brothers were kicked out of the university, Earwood said, and are going to community college. Both pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct.

Personally, I’d be glad to buy those brothers a beer.

The Onion reports from Arkham, Massachusetts:

Arguing that students should return to the fundamentals taught in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon in order to develop the skills they need to be driven to the very edge of sanity, Arkham school board member Charles West continued to advance his pro-madness agenda at the district’s monthly meeting Tuesday.

“Fools!” said West, his clenched fist striking the lectern before him. “We must prepare today’s youth for a world whose terrors are etched upon ancient clay tablets recounting the fever-dreams of the other gods—not fill their heads with such trivia as math and English. Our graduates need to know about those who lie beneath the earth, waiting until the stars align so they can return to their rightful place as our masters and wage war against the Elder Things and the shoggoths!”

The controversial school board member reportedly interrupted a heated discussion about adding fresh fruit to school lunches in order to bring his motion to the table. With the aid of a flip chart, West laid out his six-point plan for increased madness, which included field trips to the medieval metaphysics department at Miskatonic University, instruction in the incantations of Yog-Sothoth, and a walkathon sponsored by local businesses to raise money for the freshman basketball program. “Our schools are orderly, sanitary places where students dwell in blissful ignorance of the chaos that awaits,” West said. “Should our facilities be repaired? No, they must be razed to the ground and rebuilt in the image of the Cyclopean dwellings of the Elder Gods, the very geometry of which will drive them to be possessed by visions of the realms beyond.”

West has served on the school board since 1997, when he defeated 89-year-old incumbent Doris Pesce by promising to enforce dress codes and refer repeat disciplinary cases to the three-lobed burning eye. He has run unopposed ever since.

“Charles sure likes to bang on that madness drum,” fellow school board member Danielle Kolker said. “I’m not totally sold on his plan to let gibbering, half-formed creatures dripping with ichor feed off the flesh and fear of our students. But he is always on time to help set up for our spaghetti suppers, and his bake sale goods are among the most popular.”

“I must admit, he’s very convincing,” Kolker added.

West’s previous failed proposals include requiring the high school band to perform the tuneless flute songs of the blind idiot god Azathoth and offering art students instruction in the carving of morbid and obscene fetishes from otherworldly media.

Several parents attending the meeting were not impressed by West’s outburst.

“Last month, he wanted us to change the high school’s motto from ‘Many Kinds of Excellence’ to ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,'” PTA member Cathy Perry said. “I asked if it was Latin, and he said that it was the eldritch tongue of Shub- Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. I don’t know from eldritch tongues, but I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

“We already changed the name of the school from Abraham Lincoln High to Nyalrothotep Academy,” Perry added. “What more does he want?”

Immediately before the vote on his motion, which was defeated eight to one, West gave his final remarks, arguing that the children are our future and that it’s the school board’s obligation to make sure they are fully versed in the unspeakable horrors still to come.

A student at Central Connecticut State University who had the temerity to argue that allowing concealed carry of firearms on campus might save lives in cases of violent episodes like the murders at Virginia Tech soon found himself asked to come down to the campus police station to identify what firearms he owned and where he kept them.

Questioning a fundamental article of liberal faith at many Northeastern colleges today is sufficient to brand a student as an outlaw and potential threat to society.

CCSU Recorder:

For student John Wahlberg, a class presentation on campus violence turned into a confrontation with the campus police due to a complaint by the professor.

On October 3, 2008, Wahlberg and two other classmates prepared to give an oral presentation for a Communication 140 class that was required to discuss a “relevant issue in the media”. Wahlberg and his group chose to discuss school violence due to recent events such as the Virginia Tech shootings that occurred in 2007.

Shortly after his professor, Paula Anderson, filed a complaint with the CCSU Police against her student. During the presentation Wahlberg made the point that if students were permitted to conceal carry guns on campus, the violence could have been stopped earlier in many of these cases. He also touched on the controversial idea of free gun zones on college campuses.

That night at work, Wahlberg received a message stating that the campus police “requested his presence”. Upon entering the police station, the officers began to list off firearms that were registered under his name, and questioned him about where he kept them.

They told Wahlberg that they had received a complaint from his professor that his presentation was making students feel “scared and uncomfortable”. …

Professor Anderson refused to comment directly on the situation and deferred further comment.

“It is also my responsibility as a teacher to protect the well being of our students, and the campus community at all times,” she wrote in a statement submitted to The Recorder. “As such, when deemed necessary because of any perceived risks, I seek guidance and consultation from the Chair of my Department, the Dean and any relevant University officials.”

Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.

–quipped Columbia University political science professor Wallace S. Sayre (well before Henry Kissinger).

Allen Guelzo argues, however, that those stakes, which include the opportunity to form the background assumptions and fundamental perspective of society’s educated elite, may not really be so petty after all.

The conservative revolution was supposed to be a revolution. It has not been. It has been an insurgency. And while that insurgency captured a vast swath of open territory, it failed utterly to capture the key citadels of American culture, beginning with American higher education.

The academic left likes to complain about how the conservative onslaught forced it to “retreat” to the ivory tower – but without acknowledging that the ivory tower had become the Gibraltar of American life. For better or worse, an undergraduate degree has become the prerequisite for entry into middle-class life. Academics control the narrow neck through which America’s managers, writers, thinkers, bankers, politicians, and executives must pass, and that passage has acquired an atmosphere, no matter how self-pityingly the academic left likes to deny it, in which Left assumptions are set as the default positions

The academic Left is correct when it pooh-poohs the idea that it conducts a massive ideological de-programming; but then again, it does not need to. It has merely to nudge the standard deviation of the politics of the future ruling class a few clicks to the left for conservatism to seem abnormal. Conservatives made the disastrous mistake of assuming that if they abandoned those tedious and expensive plans to lay siege to the university, they would be free to move on to the larger and more easily-annexed plains of government and finance. They were wrong. Governments change, finances crash, but the faculty is forever.

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Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Betsey Ramsdale’s Facebook photo

A young woman teaching in the middle school in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin was suspended by panicking school administrators after a busybody on the school staff discovered that Betsey Ramsdale had posted a picture of herself on Facebook aiming a gun.

WKOW-TV:

Beaver Dam school officials placed a middle school teacher on administrative leave after discovering a photograph of the teacher with a gun on the teacher’s Facebook page.

In the photo, teacher Betsy Ramsdale is training a rifle at the camera. …

[T]he Facebook photo was brought to the attention of school district officials by a concerned staff member at Beaver Dam Middle School. …
Middle school parent Jennifer Buzzell said the teacher’s decision to post the photograph was concerning.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate,” Buzzell told 27 News. “I’m not sure why this would be on the computer at all.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” school parent Mark Hagstrom said. “She’s on her time to do what she wants.”

1:55 video

Ms. Ramsdale’s pose in the photo is actually not a terribly unusual shooting photo pose. If the photographic objective is to present the subject aiming, this angle is the only way to show the person’s face aligned with the barrel and the sights. Additionally, the looking-down-the barrel viewpoint adds drama.

Beyond which, chicks and guns have a particular appeal as a combination, image-wise. Hollywood has been exploiting the iconic image of the girl with a gun forever. Some of the biggest Hollywood film industry supporters of gun control, people like Sigourney Weaver and Jodie Foster, can be found striking fierce poses-with-pieces on lobby cards

Ramsdale’s photo on a personal Facebook profile obviously has nothing to do with her job, and ought to be considered to exist in a realm outside the jurisdiction of her employers. Its supposedly alarming character is simply a case of the extreme and unreasonable fear of arms which infects the deracinated and effeminate contemporary community of fashion.

Note also the inability of the school administrators and the press to distinguish a shotgun from a rifle.

The Onion’s professional pundits discusses the very large crisis in American education.

2:17 video

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Hat tip to Scott Drum.

Demonstrating once again the American propensity to entrust the education of the young to society’s biggest fools, the eminent Wilson G. Bradshaw, president of Florida Gulf Coast University, struck a blow recently for “diversity” by issuing a proclamation banning public acknowledgment of Christmas.

Fort Myers News-Press:

Christmas is just 30 days away, but Santa Claus won’t be stopping by Florida Gulf Coast University this holiday.

He’s not allowed on campus.

FGCU administration has banned all holiday decorations from common spaces on campus and canceled a popular greeting card design contest, which is being replaced by an ugly sweater competition. In Griffin Hall, the university’s giving tree for needy preschoolers has been transformed into a “giving garden.”

The moves boil down to political correctness.

“Public institutions, including FGCU, often struggle with how best to observe the season in ways that honor and respect all traditions,” President Wilson Bradshaw wrote in a memo to faculty and staff Thursday. “This is a challenging issue each year at FGCU, and 2008 is no exception. While it may appear at times that a vocal majority of opinion is the only view that is held, this is not always the case.”

The ineffable Wilson G. Bradshaw’s Holiday proclamation. .pdf

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UPDATE

11/27: Policy reversed.

Over its century and a quarter of existence, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been generally recognized as one of the special pinnacles of the American canon, yet at the same time the book has retained a unique capacity to provoke the alarm and indignation of the godly by its failures in decorum.

Long ago, the problems were coarse language and unseemly racial fraternization. Today, it’s politically incorrect language, the dreaded N word, and a vital portrait of a racially unequal society and unequal characters which provokes the wrath of the Philistines.

Can such a corrupting and subversive book possibly be permitted to appear on reading lists in respectable American schools?

The Manchester, Connecticut school system bravely wrestled with the thorny problem, and devised a bold answer. Huck Finn could stay, but teachers must first attend special seminars instructing them in exactly how to frame and properly civilize the unruly text.

Personally, I think that Huck ought to jump back on the raft and sail off down the Connecticut River for the territories.

Eyewitness News 3

Legendary White Crane-style Kung Fu Master Pei Mei, it is said, killed twelve fully-armed Shaolin monks using only the blade from his broken pencil sharpener.

South Carolina Low Country Island Packet has a story indicating that the Zero Common Sense policies associated with America’s bed-wetting, nincompoop haute bourgeoisie have spread even to within a stone’s throw of the US Marine Corps’s recruit training depot at Parris Island.

A 10-year-old Hilton Head Island boy has been suspended from school for having something most students carry in their supply boxes: a pencil sharpener.

The problem was his sharpener had broken, but he decided to use it anyway.

A teacher at Hilton Head Island International Baccalaureate Elementary School noticed the boy had what appeared to be a small razor blade during class on Tuesday, according to a Beaufort County sheriff’s report.

It was obvious that the blade was the metal insert commonly found in a child’s small, plastic pencil sharpener, the deputy noted.

The boy — a fourth-grader described as a well-behaved and good student — cried during the meeting with his mom, the deputy and the school’s assistant principal.

He had no criminal intent in having the blade at school, the sheriff’s report stated, but was suspended for at least two days and could face further disciplinary action.

District spokesman Randy Wall said school administrators are stuck in the precarious position between the district’s zero tolerance policy against having weapons at school and common sense.

“We’re always going to do something to make sure the child understands the seriousness of having something that could potentially harm another student, but we’re going to be reasonable,” he said.

Pious blithering letter to parents from school dated 9/11.

Police report (!). These idiots actually called the police over this!

Principal McAden “clarified” today, defending the school’s insanity and asserting that the child was “not suspended for having a pencil sharpener. He had an exposed blade which created a dangerous setting for the student and other children. The student was suspended for one day for inappropriate behavior in the classroom.”

Dangerous? Maybe a legendary martial artist could do something effective with a weapon of the sort (especially in the Hong Kong cinema), but an elementary school kid is going to do what with a marginally-edged one inch piece of metal?