Campus Censorship

The purpose of higher education and why and how it is censored

Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.

Professor John Alexander Smith spoke those words to the class of students entering Oxford University in 1914. At the time, and for centuries before and decades after, that was the overriding goal of higher education: to be able to recognize when someone was talking rot.

To teach this skill, professors exposed students to master works of literature, art, and philosophy. If the students could understand great ideas and events of history, then poor ideas, repetitions, rehashes, and disguises would be easy to spot.

No matter one’s profession, the skill is invaluable. It can help us choose everything from the jobs we take to the people we marry the to politicians we elect. Which one is the likely liar? Which idea is just a restatement of…