Not Very Civic Education
- PDF / 143,879 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 47 Downloads / 228 Views
Not Very Civic Education The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done, John M. Ellis, Encounter, 2020, pp. 210, $21.72 hardcover. Stephen Baskerville # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Readers of this journal will not need to be told about the politicization of American colleges and universities by radical ideology. But John Ellis has written an unusually clear and eloquent overview that assembles the atrocities in one place, with explanations of the origins and recommended solutions. Written by an academic with over a half century experience, and following his own strictures by citing solid evidence, the case he presents cannot be denied or ignored.
Stephen Baskerville Ph.D., has taught in higher education for over thirty years and is the author of The New Politics of Sex (Angelico Press, 2017) and other books. He has held regular appointments at Howard University and Palacky University in the Czech Republic, plus Fulbright Scholarships in Russia and Poland.
The first striking feature of this book is simply that its existence confirms its own argument, since such criticism cannot be expressed from within the universities themselves. All come from outside, sometimes by professors who have retired (like Ellis) or been rejected or ejected, because “career termination [awaits] those who challenge campus orthodoxy.” Ellis’s case is illustrated by the glaring incapacity of this institutional concentration of savants to critically evaluate, of all topics, itself. After all, this subject might have been appropriate for a scholar of politics or education (perhaps otherwise buried in pointless esoterica and the “impenetrable jargon” Ellis ridicules). Instead it is left to an emeritus professor of German literature, one relatively immune from punishment. As he writes: “Academic analysis is now not to be permitted in [and certainly not about] academia itself!” His account of where this came from is especially helpful: essentially the combination of exploding enrollments, which lowered standards, and 1960s radicalization, which brought ideology. Ellis does not weigh the different strands of leftist ideology, but in my view the
Reviews
threat from racial nationalists is now much less serious than today’s cutting-edge trend of sexual radicalism—including patently fabricated quasi-criminal accusations against innocent people (documented by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, among others). Ellis blames, foremost, ideologues among the professoriate, saying that “students were following, not leading,” though he concedes that current professors are 1960s-70s-era students. The result is universities populated by “people who don’t really belong in academia but are now numerous enough there to control it.” But the story he tells is one of cowardice as much as zeal, including “cowardly administrators” (especially presidents) and “completely useless” oversight bodies like faculty senates, boards of trustees, and accreditors. As Ellis recounts one horror sto
Data Loading...
