How Higher Ed Has Poisoned the American Mind |
In a recent book, three professors argue that the American mind has been poisoned; that is to say, millions of people have been conditioned to believe certain ideas, automatically reject others, and can no longer discern truth from falsehood. In today’s Martin Center article, I review it.
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One of the author/editors is sociologist Lawrence Eppard. In his opening essay, “The Golden Age of Information,” he makes the point that, although people have access to more information than ever before, much of it is unreliable and even dishonest. He laments that the “guardrails” that used to restrain the publication of misleading or even blatantly false information have been largely demolished, such that it is now common for Americans to live in ideological “silos” where they receive only stories that have been curated to support a particular point of view. Worse yet, we have been led to believe that any dissent is not merely mistaken but immoral. Therefore, argumentation is pointless, and political victory by any means necessary over the forces of evil is essential.
This is exacerbated by the outpouring of academic research that is not intended to find truth but rather to inflame minds.
The contagion has spread into the sciences where merit is now taking a back seat to ideological concerns. Professor Dorian Abbot contributes a powerful essay on this, writing:
Liberal epistemology prizes free and open inquiry, values vigorous discourse and debate, and determines the best scientific ideas by separating those that are true from those that are likely not. [. . .] In contrast, identity-based ideologies seek to replace these core liberal principles, essential for scientific and technological advances, with principles derived from postmodernism and Critical Social Justice, which assert that modern science is “racist,” “patriarchal,” and “colonial,” and a tool of oppression rather than a tool to promote human flourishing and global common good.
Liberal epistemology prizes free and open inquiry, values vigorous discourse and debate, and determines the best scientific ideas by separating those that are true from those that are likely not. [. . .] In contrast, identity-based ideologies seek to replace these core liberal principles, essential for scientific and technological advances, with principles derived from postmodernism and Critical Social Justice, which assert that modern science is “racist,” “patriarchal,” and “colonial,” and a tool of oppression rather than a tool to promote human flourishing and global common good.
Higher education has become infected with the idea that it’s proper to silence those who disagree with you. As another of the author/editors, Professor Lee Jussim observes, to question the concept of “microaggressions” will lead to your denunciation for, of course, committing a microaggression against those who claim that this is a serious problem.
And in a strange way, the book itself is evidence for the problems presented. When the authors submitted the manuscript to the publisher, George Mason University Press, they ran into a brick wall with an essay examining the intolerance that now surrounds the concept of gender. They were told that they would have to eliminate that essay or take the manuscript elsewhere.
If there are any higher education leaders who still care about the academic enterprise, they will find this book very disturbing.