Education! Education! Education! Part 2

2,337 words

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

“Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities – in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church!” — Nancy Pearcey

Nancy Pearcey, the author of Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (2005), based at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, is an important figure in the intelligent design movement. She is not alone in her belief that Christianity is the central tenet of Western Civilization. She shares this sentiment with the historian and documentary filmmaker Tom Holland, who wrote in his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (2019) that Christianity is “the greatest revolutionary movement.” He claimed that the faith is the ancient world’s most enduring and influential legacy, and that its emergence was the single most transformative development in Western history.

Thus, the arch-conservative Pearcey and the more liberal Holland agree regarding the significance of the Judeo-Christian ethos that permeates our European culture. Pearcey is a columnist for the magazine Human Events, and is a contributor to the pro-intelligent design school textbook Of Pandas and People (1989). He also took the stand in the controversial Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial of 2005. Holland, conversely, insists that Christianity is far from being conservative and static, insisting that it is based upon two highly subversive ideas: all people are equal, and the weak are heroic. These are notions which caused the ancient pagan elite to despise the new religion for being a creed “for the ignorant, the stupid, and unschooled,” and the later philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to describe it as a “slave morality.”

Holland’s book, which was recently reviewed by Christopher Hart in the Sunday Times, suggested that in St. Paul’s teachings, “there is really neither male nor female, Jew nor gentile, slave nor freeman, but all are one in Christ,” and that it is “the most radical, gender neutral, open-borders idea in history.” Hart continued by quoting Holland’s text to the effect that “God was closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich.”

These are fallacies that are perpetuated not only within the established church but also now in institutions of higher learning around the globe. The Jeffersonian maxim that man should not be “afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it,” is being mouthed by presidents, principals, and vice chancellors sitting in their well-funded ivory towers, but they have absolutely no intention whatsoever of facilitating research or other scholarly activity that might transgress their organization’s politically correct statutes and ordinances. Essentially they are political appointees, often devoid of any serious personal and professional claims to academic excellence themselves who have clawed their way up the greasy pole by attending diligently to the mores of gender sensitivity, pandering to the gay lobby, and taking every possible opportunity to express their positive views on inclusivity.

And when anyone within academia fails to fulfill such a mandate, they are ostracized, punished, and expelled into the void. Examples of this include Lawrence Summers, the President of Harvard, who was constantly clashing with his African-American staff, Left-wing colleagues, and human resources personnel over a drop in the number of women being hired, as well as his controversial remarks about the reasons for the lack of women in senior science and engineering roles. There is also University College of London’s Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt, who was purged from the European Research Council and his role at the University over some jocular sexist remarks; John Finnis, a Catholic law professor at Oxford who was sacked for allegedly having “a long record of extremely discriminatory views against many groups of disadvantaged people”; and Dr. Noah Carl of St. Edmund’s at Cambridge, who was stripped of his fellowship for having spoken at a eugenics conference and saying that hostility to migrant groups drew on “rational beliefs” about stereotypes that often prove “quite accurate.”

So where does that leave the question of academic freedom, and more importantly the integrity of those who are supposed to uphold the intellectual rigor of the Western canon? What does it mean when a heretic like Kevin MacDonald, former Professor of Psychology at California State University, is blackballed for his research on Jewish group behavior? Or when Ricardo Duchesne, the Canadian sociologist and author of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (2011) and Canada In Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians (2017), is subjected to complaints from over one hundred former colleagues at the University of New Brunswick, who consider his views “racist and without academic merit” while he is also being denounced by the Canadian Historical Association?

This at a time when the antifa mobsters feel entitled to adjudicate what is truthspeak and what is wrongspeak on campuses, and Left-wing faculty turn up to Berkeley demonstrations with bike locks to use as weapons. Then there are the politically preprogrammed two-thirds of the students at Georgetown University, who voted in favor of paying reparations to the descendants of some 272 slaves that the Jesuit founders of the university sold in 1838 to pay off college debts. The university’s President issued a public apology which was described by Richard Cellini, founder of the Georgetown Memory Project (which has spent years identifying and contacting the descendants of the Georgetown slaves), as “filled with jargon,” adding:

We believe Georgetown University and the Maryland Jesuits owe reparations and restitution to the descendants of their former slaves . . . that one of the school’s dormitories generates more than $1m in revenue every year and was built and paid for with the proceeds of the 1838 sales of enslaved people . . . This isn’t about something that happened a long time ago . . . It’s not a question about whether the past is the past. At Georgetown, the connection to slavery isn’t a legacy. It’s a modern-day income stream.

Such trite sermonizing is part of a larger and far more egregious picture. A snapshot of this is the almost endless virtue-signaling coming out of the public relations department of the University of Kent in the UK, an institution that now seems obsessed with appointing female vice chancellors and is openly hostile to the Brexit result. Describing itself as the UK’s “European university,” and with staff such as Marian Fitzgerald, Visiting Professor of Criminology, who willfully misleads the public with biased takes on current issues such as “Stop and Search.” Fitzgerald once said that “the Home Secretary [herself a woman of Gujarati heritage] is knowingly misusing the figures for arrests for offensive weapons in order to justify making it easier for the police to use an emergency power to search the public at random in certain areas,” when anyone walking the streets of London or any provincial city in Britain can predict with almost 100% certainty the age, color, and musical tastes of their potential assailants.

The same university has spent hundreds of staff hours and vast portions of its marketing budget on promoting characters such as author Hayley Mulenda, a student in the department of Social Policy, Sociology, and Social Research, who wrote The ABCs To Student Success, as one of the UK’s top ten black rising stars. This was the outcome of a competition judged by Kem Ihenacho, Sophie Chandauka, Tia Counts, Tom Chigbo, and the former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, that evaluates contenders in terms of criteria such as determination, depth of achievement, breadth of talent, initiative, and leadership.

And then there is a Jewish Professor at the Yale Law School, Daniel Markovits, author of The Meritocracy Trap (2019), in which he claims that a majority of Ivy League students are drawn from the narrow ranks of the very wealthy, implying that this is because such institutions perpetuate white privilege. He thus demands that colleges should be forced to draw half of their students from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution – by which he really means more blacks as opposed to more meritocracy, as the title of the book suggests. But what Markovits rather conveniently overlooks is the fact that a disproportionate number of Jews – falsely classified as whites – attend America’s top colleges. A 1998 op-ed by Ron Unz entitled “Some minorities are more minor than others” informed us that between a quarter and a third of Harvard students identify themselves as Jewish, while Jews comprise only two to three percent of the overall population. And a 2009 article in the Daily Princetonian, “Choosing the Chosen People,” cited data that indicated that besides Princeton and Dartmouth, Jews on average made up 24% of the undergraduate population on Ivy League campuses. Nevertheless, a rabbi led a campaign to ensure that Princeton raises it proportion of his fellow worshippers from thirteen to at least twenty percent.

This hidden bias is further confirmed in a study by Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walford Radford, the authors of No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life (2009), stated that there is “a general disregard for improving the admission chances of poor and otherwise disadvantaged whites.” Their data also “strongly suggest[s] that Jewish overrepresentation at elite universities has nothing to do with issues like IQ, but with discrimination against non-Jewish white Americans, especially those from the working class or with rural origins.” These findings should raise extreme concern about “reverse discrimination.” This is especially true when even the US Department of Justice’s civil rights division is discussing investigating universities that may have used affirmative action policies to discriminate against white students. This is further confirmed by a lawsuit being brought against Harvard University by Students for Fair Admissions on behalf of Asian-American students which alleges that Harvard engages in “intentional discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity”; and the notorious Fisher v. University of Texas case, where two young white women, Abigail Noel Fisher and Rachel Multer Michalewicz, felt compelled to bring the University of Texas to court in 2008 because they believed that the University’s admission system had discriminated against them on the basis of their race, in clear violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

So much, then, for John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University (1854), which Gordon Graham, in his book Universities: The Recovery of an Idea (2002), boils down to the precept of “the spirit of inquiring clearly and critically into the very idea of a university and its value.” These are principles that were first set down by Classical Greek thinkers like Aristotle; Thales, who founded the Milesian School; Heraclitus of Ephesus; Pythagoras of Samos; and Protagoras of Abdera, who famously said that “man is the measure of all things.” There were also Romans such as Cicero, in his De Oratore, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus’ The Institutes of the Orator, and Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Further contributions towards the university’s development were made by the cathedral and monastic schools of medieval Europe, like those of Clonmacnoise in Ireland and Aachen in Germany, which championed St. Augustine of Hippo and his De Magistro, and St. Thomas Aquinas with his Summa Theologica.

These principles led to the rise of sanctuaries of scholarship, then known as studium generale, such as the one in Salerno in the ninth century, Bologna in the twelfth century, and then, in quick succession, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge. These are thus ancient institutions that brought forth the great flowering of thought during the Renaissance and the rise of humanist thinking in the shape of Petrarch; Vittorino da Feltre and his boarding schools in Mantua, Padua, and Venice; Castiglione, who wrote Il Cortegiano, about the requirements to educate young nobleman in Italy; John Wycliffe; John Colet, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral; Francis Bacon; John Milton, who wrote On Education in 1644; Erasmus, the Dutch philosopher who was a leading figure in the Northern Renaissance; the Jesuit Ignatius Loyola, who inspired the Ratio Studiorum in 1599 to guide the curricula in over seven hundred colleges; Martin Luther; Philip Melanchthon, who worked to increase literacy in Germany; the Idealists, like Immanuel Kant, who set out his vision for education in his Padagogik of 1803; the Czech educationist John Amos Comenius, who wrote Pansophiae, who wrote that “education is a means to understand nature in all its forms”; and, of course, the stars of the French Enlightenment such as Diderot, d’Alembert, and Rousseau.

Very little of this spirit finds expression in the indoctrination factories of today that universities have now become. These vast generators of socially-engineered undergraduates, post-graduates, and research students spoonfeed their students a constant diet of politically-correct pap by the likes of half-wit televisual academics, who produce works like Susan Kuklin’s pedophilic Beyond Magenta (2014) and We Are Here to Stay: The Voices of Undocumented Young Adults (2019); Prashant Kidambi’s Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire (2019), a book that explodes the myth of racial superiority on which British Imperialism was based; Martha C. Nussbaum’s The Cosmopolitan Tradition (2019); Jeffrey Boakye’s Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explored (2019); Tony Milne’s The Myth of England: Debunking the Brexit Bible (2016); and Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and Memory of Evil (2019), a text that compares the rise of Trump to 1930s Germany.

These are nothing more than synthetic scholars who are applauded for their “groundbreaking” works while the great minds of yesteryear are derided on a daily basis for being too pale, too male, and too stale. More often than not, these insults are hurled by Marxist, feminist, trans, and environmentalist lecturers who are propagating their own interdisciplinary agendas to the sheep-like students who wander aimlessly around the great halls, quadrangles, and libraries, going through the empty rituals of town and gown rivalry. They endlessly repeat the platitudes pushed upon them by these tenured agent provocateurs who are determined to undermine every aspect of European identity while celebrating literally everything that is the antithesis of whiteness in its essence and substance. This is producing a generation of zombies who are threatening to usher in a new dark age of voodoo science, ignorance, and apocalyptic black magic.