Many opponents of the “progressive” domination of our educational institutions say that we need to work to bring about “viewpoint neutral” teaching. Will that suffice to stop our slide into a nation of leftist zealots?
No, argues Professor Scott Yenor in today’s Martin Center article.
He writes:
John Stuart Mill has never and can never run the show in political communities, nor even in academia. The Left openly embraces enculturation, and enculturation is bad only when it elevates a false, corrupting culture, as it does today. Opponents of the educational Left must respond not with apolitical pap but with a defense of the questions and answers that are central to our civilization. Civic education and classical education, along with workforce preparation and research for public purposes, must guide the public university systems, which are aimed at perpetuating our civilization and its standards. The Left is infused with moral purpose because it is promoting a new, unworkable civilization. Its opponents must have a similar moral purpose in promoting a workable, standards-based defense of our Western Civilization.
A defense of Western Civilization — that is almost completely missing in our whole educational system. Students (starting very early) hear about the Left’s complaints all the time, but almost never about the vast benefits that have come from liberalism in its true meaning. Nor do they learn about the economic and moral failings of socialism.
Yenor continues:
Sincere and “principled” opponents of leftist campus hegemony should not settle for lame, self-defeating, unenforceable calls for “viewpoint-neutral” teaching. Nor should they, captured by their own bromides, be leery of mandating “intellectual diversity” in hiring. If others insist on “viewpoint-neutral” teaching, it is because they know that they cannot achieve intellectual diversity in their corners of higher education. Many academic disciplines, after all, are so ideologically hegemonic that they cannot produce intellectual diversity.
Yes, and those “disciplines” ought to be done away with. Viewpoint neutrality sounds nice, but it won’t save our civilization.
Read the whole thing.