20 Oct What’s Wrong with American Universities?
The other day, my daughter – last seen in these pages earning her third-degree blackbelt in taekwondo – asked me a question. “Why,” she wanted to know, “does one of my Classics professors say that St. Patrick was absolutely integral in Christianizing Ireland, while another one insists that he had absolutely nothing to do with it at all?”
I thought for a moment and then said: “Part of it is just a difference of opinion, I suppose. Part of it is that different people interpret historical events and records differently. Part of it is that history sometimes offers only vague and incomplete answers that open the door to varying analyses.” And then, I cut to the point: “The biggest part of it, though, is what my publisher, Roger Kimball, calls ‘the hermeneutics of contempt.’”
By then, with her brothers and the dogs all demanding her attention, she had mostly moved on from the conversation. But since you are undoubtedly free of such distractions, I’ll continue:
Kimball’s term was a play on the description given to the strain of late 19th-century Western epistemology that sought to challenge (and undermine) the very foundations of reality by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who called it “hermeneutics of suspicion.” This hermeneutics (whichever modifier you choose to apply to it) was probably best described by the American literary theorist Rita Felski, who explained it as a “common spirit that pervades the writings of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche.” Despite their obvious differences, Felski argued, these thinkers jointly constitute a “school of suspicion.” That is to say, they share a commitment to unmasking “the lies and illusions of consciousness; they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths.”
This hermeneutics was also, more or less, the animating spirit of John Dewey’s philosophical pragmatism. Dewey was, for decades, considered the most important of all American philosophers, and as such, he was also the leading theorist of American education. And like the “suspicion-ists,” he believed that knowledge was valid only when it was “discovered” on its own, not when it was taught or inherited.
Together, Deweyian pragmatism and the hermeneutics of suspicion/contempt formed that which Kimball noted “is not criticism but what one wit called ‘criticismism’: the ‘ism’ or ideology of being critical.” And as I noted in The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, they also formed the guiding principle of American pedagogy:
For nearly an entire century now, American students have been encouraged to see themselves as the linchpin in the accumulation of knowledge. They have been taught to treat everything they absorb with disdain and to believe that their own “truth,” their own solutions, are superior to anything that anyone else may tell them. They have been encouraged to favor antagonism and deconstruction over constructive engagement, to view everything they see, read, and come into contact with critically. American students are taught—specifically and intentionally—to look for flaws and inconsistencies and to tear down rather than build up.
Over the past couple of weeks, we have seen many essays, articles, and columns describing the rot at the core of American higher education. Between the massive on-campus protests supporting Hamas, the letters signed by various student groups and faculty condemning Israel and demanding revenge on behalf of the Palestinians, the professors describing the slaughter of innocent Jews as “exhilarating,” and the professors calling for the murder of American Jewish students and their parents in their homes (see below), it is clear that American college campuses collectively are imbued both with anti-Semitism and a rhetorical fondness for violence and genocide. Sadly, this is inarguable. The only questions that remain are “why is this case?” and “what can we do about it?”
The hermeneutics of suspicion/contempt described above is a big part of the answer to the first question. American education purposefully and unapologetically practices a pedagogy of oppositionalism, a rejection of norms, traditions, and standards in pursuit of antagonism for antagonism’s sake.
The bigger – albeit related problem – is that this pedagogy fits perfectly with and enhances the very purpose of the American higher education system. American universities are, for the most part, dedicated NOT to teaching and preserving knowledge but to creating it. Again, this is an issue I discussed in the book:
Whereas Harvard was founded to train Unitarian and Congregational clergy, Yale was founded to teach theology and religious languages, Dartmouth was founded to teach Christianity to Native Americans, Princeton was founded to serve as a seminary for Presbyterian ministers, and so on, Johns Hopkins was founded not just to teach but to “discover” as well. Johns Hopkins was founded specifically and purposely to create or uncover new knowledge. In his inaugural address, Daniel Colt Gilman, the University’s first president, declared that its mission would be “To educate its students and cultivate their capacity for lifelong learning, to foster independent and original research, and to bring the benefits of discovery to the world.” Or, as Johns Hopkins University puts it today, its job is not to teach its students the knowledge of the world, but to uncover “knowledge for the world.”
Modeled after Germany’s famed Heidelberg University, Johns Hopkins, in turn, became the model for the American research university more generally, an institution designed to produce new knowledge and to embrace “progress” as a defining value.
This defining value is perfectly reasonable and even admirable in the physical sciences. In the humanities and social sciences, however, it has been an unmitigated disaster.
The value of “progress” that underlies the American higher education system and the hermeneutics of contempt that animates that system have combined to create an ethos of denigration and blame on American college campuses that is aggressively and irreparably nihilistic. Nothing matters except power and the will to it. All that came before, all that exists, all that is, was, or ever will be respected and admired must be destroyed and its power usurped. And this can and should be accomplished by any means necessary.
Ironically, the Ivy League schools – which were famously founded before the progressive spirit of higher education and for purposes of actual edification – have become hotbeds for this nihilism. That does not, however, mean that they are alone in embracing it, teaching it, and advocating for it. With a few notable exceptions, the entirety of American higher education is fundamentally corrupted by this same ethos.
As to the question of what can be done to remedy this situation, we are not especially optimistic. As we say, the ethos of nihilism is derived directly from the mandate given to nearly all colleges and universities throughout the country. Changing that ethos will require reassessing that mandate, revoking it when appropriate, and rebuilding an entirely new system. This is something that can be done, theoretically, but that is extremely unlikely on anything but an institution-by-institution basis. We don’t mean to sound nihilistic ourselves and to give up hope that this damage can be undone, but we know well that it will require concerted and extended effort on the part of countless numbers of people.
In the wake of the Hamas attacks on Israel, the rot at the core of American higher education has been indelibly exposed. Now it’s up to us to address it and fix it.
