How Liberal Education Became Illiberal
7th December 2015
As Ross Douthat observes, these fits of radicalism, beginning in the 1960s and continuing apace to the present dramas, are in fact attempts to erect a new moral scaffolding, to restore the higher purpose higher education has lost in recent decades. The drama of the moment may reflect an unyielding reverence for identity thought (and not a little egoism), but it is primarily the effect of the decline of the liberal arts.
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The contemporary character of the university has been molded by strange bedfellows that include gargantuan administrative apparatuses, ideologically homogenous faculties, and the commodifying forces of capitalism. Two features particularly seem responsible for the deterioration of the liberal arts: the displacement of ethical and aesthetic thought by theory (or, put more capably by a dear friend, the “1970s poststructuralist gnashing of teeth”) which hurled the university gates open to all manner of passing fads, and a democratizing effect that forged the campus in the crucible of egalitarianism and made the application of reason virtually impossible.