Academia, as it is currently constituted, is incompatible with the societal need for civics and humanities “education.”
The public exposure, resignation, and subsequent death of the British fabulist Jason Arday have reignited the longstanding (if not eternal) debate about the purpose of higher education in our society and whether it is fulfilling that purpose. On the one side, conservatives are frustrated because, to them, the Arday case is emblematic: universities today are overwhelmingly leftist; leftists dominate the humanities and liberal arts faculties, and leftists are rewarded for poor or even fraudulent scholarship simply because it reinforces the preexisting beliefs of their contemporaries and superiors. On the other side, progressives and other leftists insist that the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment is definitionally a left-leaning enterprise, at least in contemporary society. Of course, leftists are overrepresented in academia; leftists seek awareness and understanding, while conservatives are simply less inquisitive and less interested in attaining knowledge, both temperamentally and practically, the latter for fear of learning that what they perceive as fairness and equality is, in reality, prejudice and discrimination.
Ironically, the progressives’ explanation is itself bigoted, in addition to being trite and largely self-serving. At the same time, however, the conservative account is inadequate. It describes the problem within academia today reasonably well but fails to explain why that problem exists. Indeed, it fails even to acknowledge that the problem has an underlying cause and isn’t merely the result of choice or happenstance.
As I have argued previously in these pages, as well as in my book, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, higher education today, especially in the humanities and liberal arts, really is a project that appeals to men and women of the left far more than their right-leaning contemporaries. This isn’t because progressives are more inquisitive and temperamentally thirsty for knowledge, however. It’s because the higher education system, as we have built it, is less about the acquisition and transmission of knowledge and more about the “discovery” of “new” things. That credo works well in the hard sciences and mathematics, where true discovery is not merely possible but indispensable, but in the humanities and social sciences, it’s worse than useless. It encourages both frivolous and fraudulent “research,” which neither produces substantive gains in understanding nor transmits knowledge to students. This isn’t universally the case, of course, but it is frequently so, as the enduring debates over the Jason Ardays of the world demonstrate.
The case of Syracuse University is, I think, instructive here, offering both an explanation of how the preoccupation with knowledge “discovery” is ultimately destructive and a warning to American academia about the price it will likely pay for its frivolity and fraudulence.
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