An excellent post on higher education from Stephen H. Webb:
The central dogma of higher education goes by many names, but its basic thrust is as easy to grasp as it is hard to miss. Whether it is called multiculturalism, social constructionism, or left-leaning liberalism, the bottom line is that higher education in America these days promotes cultural relativism. Colleges do not advertise this fact for obvious reasons, but look closely at what they say in their promotional literature. Colleges talk about broadening your perspective, expanding your horizons, and offering you new experiences, but they do not talk about teaching you how to make moral judgments, how to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly, and how to seek the truth. That is because secular liberal-arts colleges and public universities do not believe you should make moral judgments, contemplate the beautiful, or acknowledge universal truths. And they don’t believe these things because they do not believe there is something called human nature.The college you have chosen to attend is no worse, and probably a little bit better, than most colleges when it comes to multiculturalism, but it is always wise to be prepared when you go to school. What you most need to know is that the “higher” in higher education no longer refers to the high culture of the greatest works of Western civilization. In fact, higher education has been trying to dismantle this culture for decades. Higher education today is all about lowering the great books and great ideas of the past to the same basic level. Rather than ask you to climb the great heights of the classics, professors these days will ask you to tear them down. Rather than ask you to test your intellectual strength by pitting yourself against the greatest thinkers of the past, professors will teach you the intellectual equivalent of etiquette and manners. You will learn how to talk without embarrassing yourself in polite, educated company. You will learn what to say, not how to think.
I have been peering into Aquinas's Summa Theologica lately because of a paper I am writing. One thing that strikes me about it is that Aquinas is a) consummately fair to his opponents, and b) assumes a level of philosophical skill and knowledge in his readers that is considerable. In other words, Aquinas makes two assumptions that virtually no college professor does today: first, that his opponents are reasonable, even when they are wrong; and second, that his opponents and students are knowledgeable. Today, the modern university assumes the opposite of both propositions: it assumes its adversaries are criminals, and it assumes no degree of literacy in its students. Why study Aristotle (a dead white male)? In the medieval university, knowledge of Plato and Aristotle was an assumption; one can hardly follow Aquinas's arguments without a good knowledge of the works of his philosophical predecessors. Aquinas took Plato and Aristotle very seriously. He took the writings of St. Augustine and the church fathers very seriously. Why? Because he troubled himself to become educated before he wrote. He assumed that some of the past was valuable.
It has been apparent to me for some time that we live in a barbarous age. The universities are partly to blame for this, because they start with no core philosophical beliefs or assumptions. If it is, intellectually, equally valid to read in a library or to burn the library down, is it any wonder that the libraries are, in a sense, being burned down? Everyone likes a bonfire.
Actually, though, the universities are more subtle than that. They are carefully burying the intellectual heritage of the past under mounds of debris and silt, the writings of lesser men and women obscuring the writings of the great.