The Corruption of Western Universities as a Contributing Factor in Cultural Decline

Ed West, in his Daily Telegraph blog, makes the case that British universities are a threat to world peace:

Perhaps the least surprising thing about the Stockholm suicide bomber Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly is that he went to a British university. . . .

As anyone watching the disgraceful riots last week will have picked up on, violence is not the preserve of the uneducated or poor. Indeed, throughout modern history, Left-wing student movements have shown both a willingness to commit violence to get their way and to condone violent acts by others.

Rather than terrorism being a product of poverty and despair, as we’ve always been told, statistical studies of Islamic terrorists show they are no poorer than the population at large. Islamism has very little to do with “injustice” and everything to do with alienation and isolation (80 per cent of jihadis are immigrants or the children of immigrants), a thwarted sense of entitlement, idleness, and radical anti-Western politics.

Which is why British universities are, of course, the perfect breeding ground for Islamism, combining all of those things.

Read it all here.

Today's universities, generally speaking, (with honorable exceptions here and there) are mostly bastions of entitlement, laziness, drunkenness, sexual debauchery, violence and political correctness. Much of the self-loathing of people who have no moral center or purpose in life is turned into rage against "society" and its "patriarchy," "racism" and "capitalism." To think that this is not a breeding ground for hate and violence is to delude only oneself.

Jonathan Kay, in the National Post, describes a piece of anti-Semitic propaganda written by an anti-Zionist Jew named Jenny Peto at the University of Toronto's teacher's college, OISE. He writes:

By now, many people have heard of Jenny Peto — the 29-year-old anti-Israel fanatic who managed to get a Master’s Degree at OISE for a navel-gazing essay that claimed holocaust education was a tool of the Zionist war machine. Peto’s project was so offensive that she actually was rebuked in the Ontario legislature. Even ultra-politically correct diversity maven Karen Mock thinks that Peto is out to lunch. We also know that the Peto paper is littered with unsupported claims — thanks to this fine article by Robyn Urback.

But Peto is a small fish. The bigger problem here is OISE — the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, AKA UToronto’s teacher’s college — itself. For years, I’ve been hearing tales of political correctness gone amok at OISE, including radical anti-Israeli events. But it took the Peto case to really get me probing around to see what else is going on at OISE.

Someone else who’s been doing his homework is Werner Cohn, a former UBC sociology prof now living in New York. Below, reproduced with his permission, is his analysis of the 36 internet-available master’s theses that have been conducted under the auspices of OISE’s Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education department. They read like a satire of 1990s-era political correctness.

Surely, the higher-ups at UToronto know about this sort of thing. Will the Peto scandal give them the excuse they need to clean house?

Here is a brief description of one thesis cited by Cohn:

….In this thesis I will explore this ruling using a methodological approach that engages practices of: self-reflexivity; tracing historical and political genealogies; and case study analysis…. Through an engagement with transnational and black feminist theorizing, anticolonial studies, and disability studies, I will suggest that “medical inadmissibility” is one of many regulatory mechanisms that work to fashion the Canadian nation-state as white, healthy, fit, and productive.

Here is another:

This body of work endeavours to interrogate mainstream media and popular culture [mis]representations of racialized persons, in addition to the negative impact such imageries have on identity formation processes….The ultimate goal of this project is to propel racialized students to move away from the [mis]educative effects of the media, toward beginning to define themselves on their own terms.

This is left-wing politicized propaganda and it is done at a public university supported by our tax money. There is no political balance evident: no conservative faculty or research and there is not much of real relevance to actual educational theory or practice. There is just a lot of doctrinaire cultural Marxism dressed up in impenetrable jargon that defeat understanding by anyone except other cult members.

It is time to take the universities back from the left=wingers. The hard left has burrowed deep into the faculty, while their left- of-center enablers staff the upper administration. No one is brave enough to stand up to them and academic freedom is just a cloak for enforced ideological conformity. Entire departments and so-called "disciplines" should be axed and faculty hiring practices must be taken out of the hands of the faculty until the philosophical and religious views of the faculty as a whole reflects the spectrum of Canadian society as a whole. At the moment it is skewed radically and disastrously to the left and the imbalance is killing the university as a place of science, reason and wisdom.

This is the mission field Christians must enter and occupy or else watch as our culture crumbles.