Higher Education Leaders Finally Start To Realize Their Entire Industry Is Worthless
By: Walker Larson
December 31, 2024
An article in higher education’s flagship magazine is more evidence that academia is starting to recognize it needs to change.
Academia is finally asking honest questions about what it has become and why. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a brutally honest op-ed about what went wrong in academia, entitled simply “We Asked for It.”
When Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016, dozens of university officials put out statements on the issue, but this time around, only a few have. Public opinion of the American higher education system has reached new lows, and the Trump administration has said it will take a scalpel to higher education.
In the article in the flagship magazine of American higher education, English professor Michael W. Clune recognizes that many academic disciplines have forgotten their original purpose in favor of political activism. Clune writes, “Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.”
As Clune notes, nearly every professor, administrator, academic journal, and institution now tries to justify their work on political grounds. Valid, rigorous, and worthwhile intellectual work is that which relates in some way to identifying injustice and enacting political change — invariably of a left-wing, often neo-Marxist character.
https://thefederalist.com/2024/12/31/higher-education-leaders-finally-start-to-realize-their-entire-industry-is-worthless/
