The Predicament of Contemporary Academia

“As a result, liberal arts education has been dragged down into the world that it previously resisted, subjugating honest intellectual inquiry to cheap ideological attachments and the profanities of political activity.”

Introduction

In 1987, when the Reverend Jesse Jackson led hundreds of student protestors at Stanford University, chanting “Western civilization has got to go,” it was a perplexing spectacle for many outside observers. Why would students at Stanford—presumably an exemplary testament to the moral, philosophical and cultural accomplishments of the West—be so ardently opposed to our civilization’s very existence? In the context of the 1987 protests, Stanford’s requirement that all its students take certain classes in the study of the Western tradition (a common, eminently reasonable expectation at liberal arts universities throughout the West) was the source of student outrage. However, the larger antipathy towards the idea of Western civilization itself, which animated the Stanford protests, is a sentiment that now pervades contemporary academia, extending even to include reports last week of Yale discontinuing an introductory art history class over concerns about artists taught being, “overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male.”

In the modern liberal arts, the Western tradition is increasingly regarded as a symbol of oppression and suffering, and its major achievements are all thought to be emblematic of this inherently oppressive character. When the Stanford protestors petitioned their university to abolish any mandated engagement with the intellectual inheritance of the West, this was the underlying objection: the conviction that Western civilization, particularly for historically marginalized groups, is irredeemably marred by a history of racism, sexism, and any number of other mortal sins. In the context of the modern liberal arts, the consequences of this tectonic shift are difficult to overstate.

The Rise of Critical Theory

The West is experiencing a crisis of confidence; this is more apparent in our current moment than it was in 1987, though events like the Stanford protests were a foreboding warning to anyone who was paying close attention. One of the most significant causes of this pervasive cynicism is the transformation of the modern university, pursuant to a radical shift in the dominant conception of the purpose of a liberal arts education. In contrast to the classical understanding of a university education as an initiation into the intellectual inheritance of Western civilization, a new conception of the liberal arts began to emerge in tandem with the popularization of the “oppressive” understanding of the West; the liberal arts, argued the proponents of this new understanding, must be transformed into a tool for liberation from the Western inheritance. The result was various iterations of “critical theory,” from the neo-Marxism of Antonio Gramsci to the postmodernism of Michel Foucault, and it sought to replace the ancient Platonic formulation of education as a search for the good, the true, and the beautiful.