{"id":78847,"date":"2025-01-08T06:00:17","date_gmt":"2025-01-08T11:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=78847"},"modified":"2025-01-08T08:46:13","modified_gmt":"2025-01-08T13:46:13","slug":"reforming-higher-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2025\/01\/reforming-higher-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Reforming Higher Education"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Woke ideology does not emanate from the Democratic party, as such, but from America\u2019s universities, which turn out the political activists, corporate executives, and culture makers that have spread that virus far and near.<\/p>\n

Today, though, the academic establishment is in a bad way.\u00a0 Enrollments are plummeting, costs are soaring, and student learning is embarrassing.\u00a0 Universities send out graduates who know little, can do little, and can\u2019t get jobs, even as their enormous student loans come due.<\/p>\n

The good news is that universities are starting to recognize that there is a problem.\u00a0 They can sense that the culture is turning against them.\u00a0 That voters have re-elected Donald Trump, who is threatening to tax university endowments, largely out of a reaction against leftwing identity politics, is part of the awakening (as opposed to the awokening).\u00a0 The intersectional left is coming apart over its internal contradictions, as it descends into anti-semitism and finds itself championing anti-woman, anti-gay Muslim terrorists.\u00a0 In this climate, the more traditional scholars, who have seen what the reigning ideology has done to their fields but have been keeping their heads down, are starting to assert themselves.<\/p>\n

\n

The flagship trade publication of higher education, the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em>, has published Michael W. Clune\u2019s\u00a0 We Asked for It<\/a>, with the summary deck, \u201c<\/span>The politicization of research, hiring, and teaching made professors sitting ducks.\u201d\u00a0 This is a rather contrite confession.\u00a0 He writes, \u201cProfessors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields \u2014 such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument \u2014 as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.\u201d\u00a0 This is happening not just in the humanities and social sciences, but also in the hard sciences<\/a>, even in medical schools<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Having spent decades as an English professor, I have seen this firsthand, though I found a haven in Christian colleges.\u00a0 Graduate students like me used to go into the field of literary studies because they enjoy reading.\u00a0 They might, for example, be great fans of Shakespeare, whom they have found moving and instructive and whom they want to understand more deeply.\u00a0 More recently, though, in English Departments committed to \u201ccritical theory,\u201d the scholar submits the author to \u201cinterrogation\u201d\u2013their word, and the police state metaphor is intentional\u2013in which authors and literary works are tortured until they confess to political crimes (sexism, colonialism, homophobia, etc.).\u00a0 Grad students who liked Shakespeare won\u2019t like him any more once his oppression is revealed, or if they do, they had better keep quiet about it.<\/p>\n

Today, though, an alternative approach to literature is emerging, the \u201cpost-critique\u201d movement.\u00a0 Sparked by\u00a0Ruth Felski,\u00a0 whose book The Limits of Critique<\/a> argues that \u201cRather than looking behind the text\u2014for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives\u2014we might place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible.\u201d\u00a0 She says that we should ask what the text is telling us, why it moves us, and how it is working.\u00a0 She advocates a return to aesthetics and meaning.\u00a0 (See this explanation<\/a> of this \u201cpost-critical\u201d scholarship.\u00a0\u00a0See also Walker Larson\u2019s discussion<\/a> of these and other heralds of change in academia.)<\/p>\n

Many universities are are now refraining from issuing political statements and are dismantling their DEI programs, some of which force faculty members to formally articulate a woke confession of faith as a condition of employment.<\/p>\n

So perhaps higher education can reform itself.\u00a0 And yet, there may be limits as to how much reform is possible.\u00a0 A whole generation of professors and administrators has been schooled in critical theory and interrogating their subjects may be all they know how to do.\u00a0 But intellectual fashions change, and we can expect higher education to do so as well, eventually.<\/p>\n

And yet, changing institutions, with their entrenched personnel and long-established habits of mind,\u00a0 is very difficult and can take a long time.<\/p>\n

In some ways, it is easier and quicker to start new and better institutions\u00a0 than to reform the old ones.\u00a0 This is happening as well, as we\u2019ll post about tomorrow.<\/p>\n

Illustration:\u00a0 William Shakespeare Interrogated by KGB Agents.\u00a0 Generated by the Cranach blog via Deep AI.<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Woke ideology emanates from America’s universities, which turn out the political activists, corporate executives, and culture makers that have spread that virus far and near. Today, though, the academic establishment is in a bad way.\u00a0 The good news is that universities are starting to recognize that there is a problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":79625,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,28,34,35],"tags":[4037,15710,15716,15713,10607],"class_list":["post-78847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-literature","category-personal","category-philosophy-2","tag-critical-theory","tag-higher-education-reform","tag-literary-studies","tag-post-critique","tag-woke-ideology"],"yoast_head":"\nReforming Higher Education<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Woke ideology emanates from America's universities, which turn out the political activists, corporate executives, and culture makers that have spread that virus far and near. 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