Summa Cum Loudly
How universities are ruining our country
It isn’t hard to recognize that there are incredible ways to learn nowadays without following the traditional routes in higher education.
The most recent—and recurring—revelation is that it is increasingly dangerous for one to go to university with any intent to actually learn something.
Sure, you’ll pick up some new info in your anthropology class (What do you mean we evolved from monkeys??!) or while in Econ 101 (So…you’re telling me money is all imaginary and made up?), but are you actually learning as opposed to memorizing concepts, facts, or models?
As in, are you learning how to learn, how to think, and how to critically assess problems that present themselves over and above storing an answer in your memory bank for later recall?
More often the answer is becoming “no.”
I recently wrote about the battle of ideas needing to be a renewed priority in our culture. The University of Virginia has added their own story to the dog pile of examples and will serve us well to look at before proceeding to tear it to shreds.
Adult Supervision
Last year we had the Halloween hocus-pocus go down at Yale. A beacon of truth and education was suddenly thrust into the spotlight to be seen as the ghost of Reason past. And the prophetic terror of Stupidity future.
Today we have UVa showing their backside in ways that we’ll soon explore. As they say, kids will be kids, right?
We unfortunately cannot blame the stupidity flowing out of our college campuses on the freshman class alone. Far from it, actually.
Professors—learned men and women with much schooling and at least a few more years of life on them than the typical student—get in on the action just as much as the 18 year old who was recently exposed to social justice and Twitter during a hazing event for the Society of Special Snowflakes.
This particular go around in the cul-de-sac of intolerant tolerance—or perhaps we can coin totolerantarianism?—is happening at the University of Virginia over a Jefferson quote.
The spark that lit the fire was the university’s president writing to students with a quote from Thomas Jefferson, a founder not only of our very nation but also of the university in view.
Given the context (his university) and the timing (post-election, precisely the time when Jefferson made this quote while speaking to UVa’s inaugural class) you wouldn’t expect much fuss. After all, we live in Jefferson’s America, these students are in fact attending his university, and the rustled faculty members are being paid by the university.
The latter two are certainly by choice, we should note. Or, as Jefferson once said:
Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.
To be fair, he hadn’t met our litter of modern day liberal pissbabies.
Instead of taking things in stride, four hundred and sixty-nine adults, composed of both students and faculty, signed an open letter written by Assistant Professor of Psychology Noelle Hurd.
A portion of the letter reads:
We are incredibly disappointed in the use of Thomas Jefferson as a moral compass. Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves. Other memorable Jefferson quotes include that Blacks are “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind,” and “as incapable as children of taking care of themselves.” Though we realize that some members of our university community may be inspired by quotes from Jefferson, we also realize that many of us are deeply offended by attempts on behalf of our administration to guide our moral behavior through their use. (emphasis mine)
Uh-oh. Someone remembered Jefferson was a bit of an a-hole when it came to slavery.
But here’s my problem. This entirely misses the fact that while people can and should be judged by the composite of their ideas, particular ideas do in fact get to rest on their own merit.
If you can believe it, ideas actually transcend the person espousing them. This transcendent value is precisely one of the key beauties and strengths of ideas.
And why we must begin interacting at that level once more instead of having our stand-offs.
Where we’re at
We are all products of our context and times. There is thus an epistemological arrogance inherent in this sort of retrospective, armchair quarterbacking of morality.
That’s not to say we give people a free pass simply because they’re dead. But neither should we get so presently bent. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t let those who do get ahold of a time machine.
We are increasingly aware, though still not fully, of LGBQT persons being just that—actual persons—but don’t get to go slap our grandmothers for not having the same insight that we’ve developed the last few decades. This is how society’s evolve.
It’s not pretty, but it is effective. Eventually.
If we are to completely disregard the past then we will be forced to learn the things that they actually knew and knew aright. In the case of Jefferson, must we learn what tyranny is before we arrive back at the conclusions that fueled him and the other Founders to create the republic we now live in?
Dismantling his wisdom because we see his foolishness only reveals our own foolish state of mind. The wise know that to avoid choking you need only to spit out bones rather than foregoing the available meat entirely.
Needed perspective
What should our great grandchildren do when they look back on the way we hoarded our capital while today nearly a billion people barely survive on less than $2 a day?
Should our modern views of compassion and tolerance be completely chucked aside due to our failure to see, or at least to truly feel, how immoral our industrialization of food is due to the misery it visits upon tens of billions of non-human animals every year?
How obvious will it be to future generations that we were morally adrift? That we were completely blind to our own ethical shortcomings?
Will they see it as chosen and willful neglect? Will they write open letters about us? When our missteps are painfully clear to them there is a good likelihood their views of us could be equally unforgiving and dismissive, though we can hope they will have grown beyond our temper tantrum driven culture.
Yet here we are thinking we’re taking a moral high ground by pissing on the wisdom of those who came before us, not merely their folly.
Let’s dispose of the science of Newton since he believed in alchemy; the wisdom of Jesus who didn’t blink at the prospect of paying taxes to a monster like Tiberius; all math that has been developed by way of Arabic-numerals since the Muslim men who brought it to Europe were intolerant misogynists of the highest medieval order; the beauties of philosophy, democracy, and geometry because the Greeks owned slaves.
In other words, since everyone besides us happens to be so unlike us by dint of their birth, then to hell with their advances, wisdom, and contributions to humanity’s progress we so readily enjoy.
Portions of their thought life, actions, or culture are “deeply offensive” since we’re too underdeveloped in our regressive version of tolerance to deal with it like rational adults, and thus should promptly be set aside entirely. Right?
Compasses
The big question looming above is:
Where do we draw the line for choosing when to disregard someone due to a moral failure?
Furthermore, how far do we draw out our protest when we have in fact drawn a moral line in the sand?
If we cannot even abide a quotation of Jefferson then why should we live under his principles found in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution?
Is it not a moral issue of complicity for someone who is deeply offended by his words to not at all be offended by his country’s charter that they now live by? Or to not protest in ways that require actual skin in the game rather than merely a signature?
Our eagerness to be on the alleged right side of history sometimes gets us driving on the wrong side of the road so far as intellectual honesty is concerned.
This sort of moral and intellectual confusion is in large part why we have found ourselves in our present political and cultural mess. When you cry wolf at every puppy you see it begins to become clear that your own ability to distinguish otherwise clear issues is leaving much to be desired.
It’d be appropriate to end with more from Jefferson. Here’s another quote that should upset our four-hundred plus emotionally wounded warriors:
When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.
At present, I have little doubt Jefferson would mind revising it to be pointed at stupidity rather than anger.
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About the author
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