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Higher Education and the Crisis of Democracy
What started as abstruse arguments in the ivory tower have now fully consumed American politics, and not for the better. Without a return to basic principles and traditional liberal curricula in higher education, America's days as an open, tolerant, well-functioning democracy could be numbered.
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Roosevelt Montás, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, Princeton University Press, 2021.
Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us, Princeton University Press, 2021.
SEATTLE – “Higher education is broken,” wrote historian Niall Ferguson in a November 8, 2021, Bloomberg commentary. To help fix it, he has helped to create the University of Austin, a new institution that is supposed to be free of the growing leftist intolerance found at too many universities nowadays. According to Ferguson, that intolerance is evident not only among faculties, but, more ominously, among administrators at elite universities such as MIT and Harvard. As politically centrist faculty members at any major public university can attest, the situation appears no better there, either.