The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Students leave university without aspiring at all to freedom; they leave feeling at home in slavery, even seeming delighted with it.
"For years, whenever Europeans wanted to impress guests, they would say, “I studied at Harvard.” These days, however, to impress guests and gain their respect, it is better to say, “And I didn’t study at Harvard!” The “2024 College Free Speech Rankings” by College Pulse and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) offers results that should shock us — because there seems to exist almost nothing left of the spirit in which universities were once founded by European Christian monks back in the Middle Ages, and which constituted a restricted community between students and professors to train and to teach how to think, research, and debate, activities that could never be achieved outside of an environment of freedom. It is shocking to read the report and discover that advocating that abortion is not a right or that climate change is not man made, or suggesting that the best treatment for gender transitions is a psychiatric one, is subject to immediate cancellation by both authorities and students. There is no longer any freedom in the institution that one day was born precisely to endow us with it.
"It should surprise no one that the Catholic Church was the main promoter of those primitive universities (not so different from those of today in their organization and purpose), as historian Lowrie Daly points out when he affirms that it was “the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge.” Today, evil historians have rewritten history to denigrate Christians who sowed that cultural germ in Europe, and, although the myth that the Middle Ages were the Dark Ages has triumphed, the truth is that never did so much light shine on the Old Continent. Without those universities, we would never have had a Western civilization to be proud of.
"Today, on the contrary, an alarming number of universities are competing to renounce the great purpose of the medieval university: to teach how to think, to debate freely, to achieve excellence. Today many of the most important universities in the world teach only to repeat like parrots a few stupid slogans from the Woke Catechism, the basic textbook of any faculty. Biology, philosophy, history, or art — everything is subdued and perverted under the yoke of contemporary extreme-left single thought. " . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment