Reinventing Education

A Necessity

With this post, I begin what I intend to be an occasional series on reinventing education.

One may rightly ask why reinventing education is necessary.  There are any number of venues for education, which have multiplied and become more available as online education has expanded and that suddenly under the goad of COVID (one of the silver linings of the dark cloud of that pandemic).

I am thankful that the increased options make reinventing education more feasible, but we need to reinvent education nonetheless.  Education in the United States at least is broken, beyond repair for the most part.  Most universities are places where academic freedom and free speech are suppressed.  Most are academies of indoctrination.  Peter Boghossian resigned as assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University and warned, “Universities are turning into ideology mills.”

Pano Kanelos are among those that have seen enough and are starting the University of Austin.  He notes the following:

Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology….

In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented students from saying things they believe.

Wokeness, of course, is a major factor in the transformation of education into indoctrination, but the problem is deeper.  Back when I was at Duke too long ago, precursors of Critical Theory abounded, but the most insane aspects of that were mainly to be found in Women’s Studies and other nutty extremist studies departments. 

But even then there was not enough sane centrist and conservative academics and administrators with enough power and backbone to keep that stuff from expanding and eventually taking over the academy. Faculties were very slanted ideologically back then already and on the way to getting as bad as today. So if Critical Theory had not taken over the academy some other totalitarian Leftist ideology would. 

That’s my theory at least.  In any case, I see the bulk of American high education as now hostile to genuine academic freedom.  I hope I am overly gloomy and mistaken, but I would be very hesitant to recommend even my own alma mater today.

Yes, there are still a few outstanding institutions and departments.  But the current state of higher education is so far gone, more is needful.

I therefore intend to explore the possibilities of reinventing education.  One necessity is new universities.  Yes, a tall order, but more doable today when buildings and endowments are not as necessary as in the past.  The University of Austin is one such new project.  May it and more abound.