Satan Gives Commencement Addrss at St. Sincerus

In the wake of Georgetown University's decision to invite Kathleen Sibellius (best known as the persecutor of Catholic and Evangelicals, as well as other faith communities,) to speak at its Commencement Ceremony recently, the Catholic Phoenix decided that mockery would be the most appropriate response. 

So it announced that St. Sincerus University, the 84th largest Catholic university in the US, has invited Satan to be its Commencement speaker.  (Today's liberal Catholic universities do not make satire easy.)

In a move already denounced by Catholic bishops & other leading religious conservatives, St. Sincerus University, the nation’s 84^th largest Catholic university, has invited Satan to deliver its commencement speech later this month. Also known as the Prince of Darkness, Lucifer, &, more popularly, the Devil, Satan is a divisive figure among Catholics & other Christians. Several Catholic universities have upset religious conservatives in recent years by inviting controversial figures to deliver commencement speeches, as when the University of Notre Dame, the nation’s largest Catholic University, invited President Barack Obama, who supports a woman’s right to abortion, in 2009. The invitation to Satan by SSU president Fr. Thad Despereaux comes at a time when many Catholics are highly critical of the Obama administration’s attempts to reform health care, which some claim would force Catholic institutions to violate their Church’s teachings by providing contraceptives as part of their health insurance plans. Fr. Despereaux, in comments made to the Daily Sham, SSU’s student newspaper, said that having Satan on campus gives bold witness to a central Catholic principle that God can be found in all things. “The continuing politicization of the faith indicates just how important it is for us to build bridges,” Fr. Despereaux said. “Our whole mission as a university is to bring people together. Satan is badly misunderstood by many people, & we hope to show our graduates that stereotypes, & the hatred they engender, have no place on a Catholic campus. As Catholics we are to hate hate.”

On-campus reactions at SSU have been favorable, as faculty & students alike have applauded the university’s open-mindedness in issuing the invitation. Dr. Sophia Greengrass, Director of the university’s Wiccan Institute, called the invitation a brave attempt to promote the university’s academic integrity in the face of “fascist attempts by the male hierarchy to impose its limited & limiting dogmas,” . . .

 Read the rest here.

Now, Dr. Satan's speech is up.  Here is the beginning. 

Thank you. (loud applause) Thank you all very much. Thank you, Fr. Despereaux. Please, folks (continued applause), please be seated. A little restraint every now & then. . . (laughter).
Seriously, this is quite an honor for me. I can’t say an unexpected honor, as this invitation was in the cards for some time now. And this despite all the non-attention I’ve received from many of your Catholic intellectuals; wasn’t it your own Fr. Cheever in Ancient Near Eastern Studies who said in your student paper that I don’t exist? (laughter). He’s not alone in thinking that, though I take it that after we got to know each other a bit better last night he has a different take on things. Talk about an ashen countenance when I discussed my background! Suffice it to say that he knows a bit more about ancient mythology & sacrifice than he did before we spoke. It really is too bad he can’t be here today, as he’s much in my thoughts, as are all the fine academics at this institution. Much of the work you do is directly responsible for my being here today, & I am much pleased by it.

To honor the graduates of St. Sincerus, I will focus my remarks on the creative gifts God has so richly blessed you all with, as well as on your sacred responsibility to nurture those gifts, despite the heavy costs. As you know, you live in a world in which the majority of people seek to restrain, to control, & even to deny the creativity of the few. Isn’t it a sad irony that such a gift, which can help you to make & remake your world, & which is an expression of God’s image within you, so badly frightens the unimaginative? 

Read the rest here. 

On Teaching Students to "Think For Themselves"

Here are three questions every university professor must answer:

1. Should university education be "unbiased"?
2. Should professors teach students "what to think" or should they teach them "how to think"?
3. Should a student expect a professor to come to class, lay out a range of conflicting views on a certain topic (eg. economic theories about creating jobs in a recession, whether Aristotle is misogynist, whether the British Empire was a force for good or evil in the world, various views on abortion or euthanasia or war, Milton's view of free speech, or Mill's no harm principle) and then invite the students to choose which one to accept?
   

I think each of these questions is more difficult to answer than one one might think at first glance.

First, let's take the third question, which asks about what I call the "cafeteria approach to forming one's opinions." Now, I understand that many of my students come to my classes expecting professors to function like the operators of the campus cafeteria. Here are four (or three or five) views on this subject: pick the one you like best.

They think this way for several reasons. For one thing, they have never experienced any form of education that did not avow this as the goal except for the hard sciences, which most of them have not studied at a rigorous level. Even those who understand that the hard sciences do not traffic in personal opinions seem to think that the humanities and social sciences are completely different on this point. So even if they are not relativists about the hard sciences, they usually are about ethics, literature and politics. (This often applies even to students who are committed Christians!)

If there is one lesson most students learn from twelve years of public school it is that they have the personal right to choose - except when they don't. The point is that in matters concerning their own bodies they have the right to be total, postmodern relativists and make up their own morality, but in matters of government, taxes, money, language and politics they must conform to group think. This is what contemporary educational theory is designed to teach and does teach very effectively.

All reality is divided into the realms of the "private" and the "public." They are convinced that it is perfectly fine to hold any view you choose on "private" issues and utterly heinous to depart from group think on "public" issues. On private issues you can have any opinion you like; on public issues you must think like the herd. However, they never get around to thinking about why various issues get assigned to each category. It never seems to intrigue them that sexual behavior used to be private and sexual morality public and now it has been reversed so that sexual behavior is public and sexual morality is private. Why is that? "Dunno, just is" many would say.

Thus, they are essentially confused about the foundations of truth, goodness and beauty. But they think their mixed-up views are sane and logical simply because they derive their opinions from the majority of authority figures in the culture.

When they encounter me, however, they are often quite shocked to realize that I do not think they have the right to choose their own truth in private matters and I actually encourage rebellion against the group think known as "political correctness" on public matters. I'm authoritarian where they have been taught to glorify the romantic rebel against authority and rebellious where they have been taught to be meekly submissive!

Unlike secular, public educational theory, I believe that there is a vast difference between the right to choose for yourself and the right to think for yourself. I believe that everyone has the right to think for himself, but also that, having thought carefully about an issue, one must bow to the objective truth on that issue instead of choosing the view that is most congenial or comfortable to oneself.

It is "pedagogical prostitution" simply to teach what the "customer" wants to hear and it is irresponsible in the extreme to present a range of true, partly true, partly false and false opinions as if they were equal in status. In fact, to teach this way is to teach epistemological relativism in practice no matter what one says in theory.

Does this mean one only teaches the "one, true view" of every issue? No, of course not. It simply means that, even when presenting views one does not hold, one recognizes and admits openly that one is coming from a particular perspective. I notice that this makes some students uncomfortable and, when that happens, the most common response is to accuse me of "bias" as if I wasn't supposed to have any - or more realistically - was not supposed to admit openly that I have any. It is as if the mere assertion that one is unbiased does the trick. But of course it doesn't in actual practice. To avoid accusations of bias, it has to be followed up by a relativistic listing of options and an invitation to the student to choose according to his own, personal, irrational preferences. As soon as it becomes clear you won't do that, the accusation of bias comes back like a shot.

As for the second question, it should be clear by now that it presents a false dilemma because the only way to teach students how to think is to challenge the late modern and false idea that discovering truth is an act of the will - a choice - and advocating the traditional and true idea that discovering truth is an act of submission of the will to reality itself. It is not submission of the will to the professor any more than it is a submission of the will to "political correctness," "leftist media elites" or "the authority figures of pop culture." We teach students to think by getting them to think instead of lazily just choosing. Our goal is to teach them to think, not to merely to let the exercise of the will lazily substitute for rational deliberation. The more they actually think the more they will come to see the poverty and nihilism of just choosing.

As for the first question, it would seem that we have a paradox: the university can only be truly unbiased by being biased. How so? A professor must be biased toward the truth as he honestly and sincerely sees it, but he he must make it clear that his opinion is not the standard of truth in itself. How can this be done?

Most importantly, a professor must, (like the preacher), point away from himself to something that stands higher than any individual opinion and try to get the student to see it for himself. Now, the fact that the student does not, at any given moment, see the truth in the same way is not as important as that the student understands that the truth itself is different from both the professor's opinion and the student's preference. The student must learn that this is so even when the professor's opinion happens to be true, just as much as it is when the professor's opinion happens to be false. Helping students develop a reverence for, and submissive spirit before, the truth is the greatest challenge of pedagogy. It is a delicate high wire act and extremely easy to mess up. For this reason, many professors lack the courage to teach well.

But if the professor seeks to exhibit no bias whatsoever, he must therefore treat truth and falsehood equally and to do this is to be a practicing relativist. And that is an ignoble betrayal of the teaching profession, for which love of wisdom and truth is the highest value.

So there must be academic freedom for both professor and student. Academic freedom for the professor will allow him to dissent from political correctness, majority opinion and cultural values that are false and in conflict with Christian truth. It thus frees the professor to stand for the truth as he sees it. Academic freedom for the student allows him to dissent from the professor's view without losing marks as long as the student has reasonable and fact-based arguments for doing so.

The grey area in adjudicating this delicate balance will arise from a clash of worldviews: the commitment to absolute truth that one hopes the Christian professor professes and the commitment to personal choice as higher than truth on private matters and the necessity of conforming to political correctness on public matters that the student has imbibed from secular education and the contemporary culture at large.

The result is a paradoxical situation: teaching students to think for themselves will necessitate a vigorous defense of truth and a refusal to allow students to say that it doesn't matter what a person chooses to believe because it is a personal choice. Some students will have to be drug through this door kicking and screaming and it won't feel to them like being made more broad-minded. It will feel like being indoctrinated - a curious paradox! But until they realize that the truth is not personal opinion - either their own or their professor's - they have not even learned that they need to think for themselves, let alone how to do so with excellence.

I tell my students that a real university education involves learning to detect, and allow for, biases because biases are everywhere - in the textbooks they read, in blog posts, in their professors, in their peers, in pop culture, in contemporary, public education etc. To expect a professor to be a safe island of objectivity in a seas of bias is unrealistic. I also tell them that open, professed, argued-for, biased beliefs are much less dangerous to them than unacknowledged, denied, presumed, biased beliefs. It is the latter for which they should especially be on the lookout.

When someone tells you that he is just "trying to help you learn to think for yourself," rather than "telling you what to think" your BS antennae should go up and a little red light should start flashing in your mind. For what comes next is likely to be either (1) a bid to get you to accept the idea that truth is a function of your personal choosing (inculcation in moral relativism) or (2) an attempt to persuade you that you have to accept the dicta of the politically correct police because that is what all right-thinking people do (inculcation in secularism).

Life is full of paradoxes.

Free Speech in Decline in the West

It is back to school week and so it is an appropriate time to reflect with a certain degree of nostalgia on the good old days half a century ago or so when Western society, and universities in particular enjoyed the right of free speech.

How long will it be before this blog is shut down? I don't know; that is why I keep writing. I expect a long vacation at some point in the future and I can rest then.

Mark Steyn has a great piece out on the decline of free speech rights in the West in the decade since 9/11. The terrorists terrorized us and free speech died. Actually, one should not use the passive voice; it was murdered by politically correct, cultural Marxists out to undermine the foundations of our culture so we are softened up for the Revolution. Anyway, Mark reflects on how the jihad against Christianity and the political liberalism that came out of it is going these days:

Had John O’Sullivan and Kathryn Lopez chanced to be strolling by the Driftwood Beach Bar on the Isle of Wight when, in the course of oldies night, Simon Ledger performed “Kung Fu Fighting,” they would have had no grounds for complaint, even if he’d done the extended dance remix. However, the passersby in question were Chinese, and so Mr. Ledger was arrested for racism.

In such a world, words have no agreed meaning. “There were funky Chinamen from funky Chinatown” is legal or illegal according to whosoever happens to hear it. Indeed, in my very favorite example of this kind of thinking, the very same words can be proof of two entirely different hate crimes. Iqbal Sacranie is a Muslim of such exemplary “moderation” he’s been knighted by the Queen. The head of the Muslim Council of Britain, Sir Iqbal was interviewed on the BBC and expressed the view that homosexuality was “immoral,” was “not acceptable,” “spreads disease,” and “damaged the very foundations of society.” A gay group complained and Sir Iqbal was investigated by Scotland Yard’s “community safety unit” for “hate crimes” and “homophobia.”

Independently but simultaneously, the magazine of GALHA (the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association) called Islam a “barmy doctrine” growing “like a canker” and deeply “homophobic.” In return, the London Race Hate Crime Forum asked Scotland Yard to investigate GALHA for “Islamophobia.”

Got that? If a Muslim says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, Scotland Yard will investigate him for homophobia; but if a gay says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, Scotland Yard will investigate him for Islamophobia.

Two men say exactly the same thing and they’re investigated for different hate crimes. On the other hand, they could have sung “Kung Fu Fighting” back and forth to each other all day long and it wouldn’t have been a crime unless a couple of Chinese passersby walked in the room.

If you don't think this is crazy, you must be missing something. The most important sentence philosophically in that quotation is the one I bolded: "In such a world words have no agreed meaning." Steyn's humorous stories have a philosophically serious point: in the absence of metaphysical realism, the nominalism of late modernity disconnects words from their referents and makes them susceptible to manipulation by the powers-that-be so that anything you say can be twisted into meaning whatever they want it to mean. Not only is truth no defense; neither is the actual meaning of words. You literally cannot know if you said something illegal until Big Brother informs you after the fact.

I started with a reference to universities. Here is an interview by Ezra Levant with the lawyer for the University of Calgary students who have been expelled for expressing their constitutional right to free speech because the bullies in the administration dislike the content of their ideas.

It is amusing that Canadian Association of University Teachers, the leftie union, thinks that Christian universities do not have academic freedom because you have to sign a doctrinal statement in order to be hired. They are fine with Canadian universities deciding after the fact whether what you said is illegal or not according to the latest version of group-think among left-wing faculty and administration members. That isn't incompatible with academic freedom at all.

If the CAUT really believed in academic freedom or free speech in general, they would be fighting the University of Calgary tooth and nail. And they would be up in arms about the angry Left physically preventing Ann Coulter from speaking last year at the University of Ottawa. But no - those atrocities are just fine. What we really need to be worried about is a few small universities where they still believe in God.

Students Prefer Old-Fashioned Lectures to Cutting-Edge Techno Wizzardry

The National Post has a report on a new study that shows that Canadian university students say that they learn more in traditional lecture courses than they do in courses with on-line components. (Thanks to Scott Masson for pointing out this article.)

They’re addicted to Facebook and slaves to their smartphones — “digital natives” trying to navigate the post-secondary world. But as universities spend millions on e-learning tools to help cater to this tech-savvy generation, current students say they’re learning more in classes that don’t have all the technological bells and whistles.

In fact, the first Canadian study of its kind has discovered that students prefer — and learn more — when a live lecturer stands at an unadorned podium. The finding surprised even the study’s authors.

“We were expecting to see evidence of what’s known as the ‘digital native’ era and we just didn’t see that,” said Joseph Berger, director of business development and communications at Higher Education Strategy Associates, the Canadian education consultancy that published the study Thursday.

“It’s not the portrait we expected whereby students would embrace anything that happens on a more highly technological level. It’s to the contrary — they really seem to like access to human interaction, a smart person at the front of the classroom.”

Well, of course. We professors already knew that and didn't need a "study" to tell us. But maybe the "study" will impress the administrators. Those of us who teach, especially in the humanities, know that reading, listening to lectures and face to face questions and answers are the essence of a liberal arts education. Students benefit from having a real, live professor who has studies the subject all his or her life right there in front of them so that actual, face-t0-face communication is possible.

This does not mean that there is no place for electronic learning resources any more than it means that if you have lectures you don't need books and libraries. Any student theoretically can get an education just by going to the library and reading long enough and diligently enough. But few will do so and it is an inefficient method even for those who do have the self-motivation to pursue it.

The essence of a university course is having a teacher who knows you, your background and who is going to respond to your questions and help you learn. Lectures, tutorials, seminars, question and answer sessions, review sessions, outlines, assigned readings and Socratic questioning are all part of a good university course. Learning is the point; conveying information (which is what the internet is good for) is just part of the process.

As universities become larger and classes become larger the illusion that technology can make up for a lack of a good student-professor ratio is a bureaucrat's dream and a student's nightmare.

Heh, heh, ho, ho: Western Civ Has Got to Go!

Mona Charon at The National Review is happy that her son, who goes off to college this Fall, is going to study Music. Why? Because it is one of the disciplines least affected by grade inflation, political correctness and the obsession with sex that characterizes most of Western higher education today.

A recent report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education counts David’s college as among the seven best for free speech in the nation. That such a list is required speaks volumes. The seven are Arizona State, Dartmouth, William and Mary, the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and the University of Virginia. Not that these seven are moderate in their political or social views. Don’t make me laugh. Not that they have more than one or two Republicans on the whole humanities faculty. Ha! No, these schools excel simply because they don’t exert the kind of totalitarian thought and speech control so commonplace on American campuses.

Colleges are actually ranked on being "best for free speech"? In America? Who knew? Higher education is sinking lower and lower.

We scrape together our hard-earned income (lots of it) to deposit our cherished offspring at schools that are determined to teach them to despise everything we revere — even learning.

Three decades ago, at Stanford University, Jesse Jackson led chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” If you were in any doubt, the National Association of Scholars reports that the mob was wildly successful. The institutions that are (or were) one of the glories of Western civilization — universities — now no longer see the worth of teaching the history of the West. In The Vanishing West, the NAS examined the curricula at 50 leading colleges over time. In 1964, all of them required some sort of Western civilization survey course or interdisciplinary course treating the same themes. They began with Greek civilization and encompassed Rome, the rise of Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, literature, art, music, the history of science, political philosophy, the modern era, and so forth. By 2010, none of the 50 colleges required any course in Western Civ. Even for history majors, survey courses on Western civilization are rarely required. The same is true for American history.

Students can still find courses on these subjects, but only as choices in a vast cafeteria of offerings that also includes courses like “Lesbian Queer Media Cultures” (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), “The Living and the Undead: An Inquiry Into Zombies in Cinema and Literature” (University of Mississippi), “The Militarization of American Daily Life” (Oberlin), and “The American Sexual Past” (Temple University). The term “higher education” is fast becoming a misnomer. American students are graduating with scads of courses on zombies and queer theory — which is why we’re importing an ever-larger number of our Ph.D.s.

What is wrong with colleges and universities today? They are occupied territory, having been conquered and occupied by the Generation of 68 with its anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-intellectual left-wing superstitions.

A liberal parent may glow with excitement and pride at the prospect of his child attending college. Isn’t that why she got straight A’s, crammed for the SATs, played travel soccer, and dug wells in Guatemala during summer breaks? But no conservative can be entirely cheerful at the prospect of an impressionable youth being bundled off to a university in the United States. Academia is a conquered land — the playground of the ultra left.

The fusion of Greek philosophy and science with Biblical revelation sparked the creation of the greatest civilization in the history of the world. Political liberalism, democracy, the separation of church and state, individual liberty, capitalism, science, Gothic cathedrals and classical music are just some of its accomplishments.

To think all this is evil, depraved and unworthy of study is to reject one's own tradition and one's own identity in favor of a revolutionary, Utopian, Gnostic dream of human perfectibility and economic equality.

Jesse Jackson can rest easy: Western civilization is sinking beneath the waves. I hope he is proud that the only civilization in the history of the world to abolish slavery so far is going down. I hope he is glad that universities are the least free, the most mediocre and the lowest quality they have ever been. After all, that is what passes for progress for Progressives.

University Education Under Fascism

In the Corporatist State of Sinclair Lewis's depiction of fascist America in It Can't Happen Here, it is interesting to see his take on what university education would look like under Fascism. All American universities are closed and entirely new Corporatist ones are created:

"Dr. Macgoblin pointed out that this founding of entirely new universities showed the enormous cultural superiority of the new Corpo state to the Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Fascists. Where these amateurs in recivilization had merely kicked out all treacherous so-called 'intellectual' teachers who mulishly declined to teach physics, cookery, and geography according to the principles and facts laid down by the political bureaus, and the Nazis had merely added the sound measure of discharging Jews who dared attempt to teach medicine, the Americans were the first to start new and completely orthodox institutions, free from the very first of any taint of 'intellectualism.'

All Corpo universities were to have the same curriculum, entirely practical and modern, free of all snobbish tradition.

Entirely omitted were Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Biblical study, archeology, philolophy; all history before 1500 - except for one course which showed that, through the centuries, the key to civilization had been the defense of Anglo-Saxon purity against barbarianians. Philosophy and its history, psychology, economics, anthropology were retained,but, to avoid the superstitious errors inordinary textbooks, they were to be conned only in new books prepared by able young scholars under the direction of Dr. Macgoblin.

Students were encouraged to read, speak, and try to write modern languages, but they were not to wast time on the so-called 'literature'; reprints from recent newspapers were used instead of antiquated fiction and sentimental poetry. As regards English, some study of literature was permitted, to supply quotations for political speeches, but the chief choruses were in advertising, party journalism, and business correspondence, and no authors before 1800 might be mentioned except Shakespeare and Milton.

In the realm of so-called 'pure science,' it was realized that only too much and too confusing research had already been done, but no pre-Corpo university had ever shown such a wealth of courses in mining engineering, lakeshore-cottage architecture, modern foremanship and production methods, exhibition gymnastics, the higher accountancy, therapeutics of athlete's foot, canning and fruit dehydration, kindergarten training, organization of chess, checkers, and bridge tournaments, cultivation of will power, band music for mass meetings, schnauzer-breeding, stainless-steel formulae, cement-road construction, and all other useful subjects for the formation of he new-world mind and character. And no scholastic institution, even West Point, had ever so richly recognized sport as not a subsidiary but a primary department of scholarship. All the more familiar games were earnestly taught, and to them were added the most absorbing speed contests in infantry drill, aviation, bombing, and operations of tanks, armored cars, and machine guns. All of these carried academic credits, thought students were urged not to elect sports for more than one third of their credits.

What really showed the difference from old-foggy inefficiency was that with the educational speed-up of the Corpo universities, any bright lad could graduate in two years." (pp. 207-8)

I'm afraid to comment on this vision very extensively; suffice it to say that I fight a mild, incremental and respectable version of it every day.

Benedict XVI , the Pathologies of Faith and Reason and Christian Liberal Arts Education

Samuel Gregg is an intelligent and articulate interpreter of Catholic theology, especially moral theology and economics. He has a very good article entitled "Benedict XVI: In No One's Shadow" in the American Spectator.

He discusses Benedict's reform of the banalities of the post-Vatican II liturgy and the fast-improving relations with the Eastern Orthodox Churches before turning to Benedict's analysis of what is wrong with the Western world. He articulates concisely and precisely some ideas I have clumsily tried to express about Benedict's importance as a prophet to late modernity. He writes:

"But above all, Benedict has -- from his pontificate's very beginning -- gone to the heart of the rot within the West, a disease which may be described as pathologies of faith and reason.

In this regard, Benedict's famous 2006 Regensburg address may go down as one of the 21st century's most important speeches, comparable to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard Address in terms of its accuracy in identifying some of the West's inner demons.

Most people think about the Regensburg lecture in terms of some Muslims' reaction to Benedict's citation of a 14th century Byzantine emperor. That, however, is to miss Regensburg's essence. It was really about the West.

Christianity, Benedict argued at Regensburg, integrated Biblical faith, Greek philosophy, and Roman law, thereby creating the "foundation of what can rightly be called Europe." This suggests that any weakening of this integration of faith and reason would mean the West would start losing its distinctive identity. In short, a West without a Christianity that integrates faith and reason is no longer the West.

Today, Benedict added, we see what happens when faith and reason are torn asunder. Reason is reduced to scientism and ideologies of progress, thereby rending reasoned discussion of anything beyond the empirical impossible. Faith dissolves into sentimental humanitarianism, an equally inadequate basis for rational reflection. Neither of these emaciated facsimiles of their originals can provide any coherent response to the great questions pondered by every human being: "Who am I?" "Where did I come from?" "Where am I going?"

So what's the way back? To Benedict's mind, it involves affirming that what he recently called creative reason lies at the origin of everything.

As Benedict explained one week before he beatified his predecessor: "We are faced with the ultimate alternative that is at stake in the dispute between faith and unbelief: are irrationality, lack of freedom and pure chance the origin of everything, or are reason, freedom and love at the origin of being? Does the primacy belong to unreason or to reason? This is what everything hinges upon in the final analysis."

Read it all here. I totally agree with Gregg's analysis of the Regensburg Address and I have made the exact same argument about it in a recently published chapter in a book.

I especially like his use of the phrase "integration of faith and reason" to describe the cultural origins of Europe in Greek philosophy, Biblical faith and Roman law. This phrase "the integration of faith and reason" is often used in a banal and empty manner in Christian liberal arts colleges. One can never be quite sure what is meant by it and it can easily degenerate into little more than a marketing slogan. But Benedict gives it some specific form and content.

What if this definition of integrating faith and reason were to be taken seriously in Christian liberal arts education? What if the liberal arts curriculum were to be organized around this motif as the center? What if the goal of a liberal arts curriculum were to become conversant with Greek philosophy, Biblical faith and Roman law and how they shaped Christendom and then how modernity has declined and both philosophy and law decayed because of modernity's rejection of the Biblical basis of the Christian West?

This would make Christian university education decisively different from the secular version on offer in the decadent, late modern universities. It would revolutionize the teaching of literature, the natural sciences, the social sciences and history, as well as philosophy and theology. It would produce citizens of a Christian culture who were equipped to see through the modern pathologies of faith and reason and ready to be real salt and light in a dying culture. Could Evangelicals liberal arts colleges, with an assist from this scholar-pope, dream of being that radical and that counter-cultural? Do we have the faith to follow Christ when all around us God is being dismissed as out-dated and unnecessary? Can we as faculty and our students make a reasoned and articulate case for creative reason (the Logos of John 1) as the origin and meaning of everything?

Well, why not?

University of California - Irvine Stands Up for Free Speech

The following video is long but you can get the main point by watching just the first few minutes. The Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, was invited to speak by the Political Science Department. This is one of over a thousand such academic events held every year in the university. But it was disrupted systematically by Muslim students shouting and trying to prevent the speech from going ahead.

This kind of hateful attack on free speech takes place routinely on American and Canadian university campuses. It is carried out by Muslim student organizations such as the Muslim Student Association and the tactics are those of the hard Left. These Muslims are aided and abetted by left-wing professors, students and administrators, who are not liberal and not committed to free speech or the concept of the university as a place for the civil exchange of ideas.

What this video shows, however, is the university exhibiting (for a change) a bit of spine and standing up to the barbarians. Watch for yourself and compare the civilized and principled deportment of the organizers, the representatives of the university and the ambassador to the wild, fanatical, irrational and hate-fueled strong-arm tactics of the protesters.



These young students were born in the United States. Their anti-Semitism and hard-left attacks on free speech come as much from the American Left as from their Muslim culture. Both the Leftist ideology and the Islamist ideology constitute a clear and present danger to freedom, democracy, the rule of law, the protection of minority rights and freedom of speech. We must stand against those who would undermine our political system and our culture of freedom. We must understand who they are and what they stand for and we must not allow them to portray themselves as liberal for they are illiberal and fascistic.

If fascism comes to the US, it will not come from the Tea Party or Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin, but from people like these doing things like this. Remember, universities are where we are supposed to debate opposing ideas. When this is no longer possible, then universities no longer exist and a significant bulwark against barbarism has fallen.

Catholics, Evangelicals and Philosophy

One of the most attractive things about the Roman Catholic Church is its openness to reason and its long-standing resistance to anti-intellectualism, obscurantism, relativism and shallow thinking. The Enlightenment movement tried to portray itself as the voice of reason over against the superstition and ignorance of Christianity, but the Church was battling sophists and irrational mystics long before anybody ever thought of the Enlightenment and now continues to champion reason as Enlightenment-inspired scientism spirals down into nihilistic solipsism.

Here is an encouraging little note from Rome about adjustments to the curriculum for priestly formation. Evangelical colleges, seminaries and universities should take note.

"With the human ability to think under fire from relativism, priests and theologians need to study more philosophy, the Vatican says.This was one of the main points of the "Decree on the Reform of Ecclesiastical Studies of Philosophy," which Benedict XVI approved Jan. 28 (the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas), and Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, presented Tuesday.

The cardinal explained that the Church is always adapting to respond to the needs of changing historical-cultural circumstances, and that many ecclesial institutions today are lacking in philosophical formation.

This absence is particularly noteworthy at a time "in which reason itself is menaced by utilitarianism, skepticism, relativism and distrust of reason's ability to know the truth regarding the fundamental problems of life," he reflected.

New guidelines are in accordance with Pope John Paul II's "Fides et Ratio," the cardinal added, which notes that "theology has always had and continues to have need of a philosophical contribution."

Cardinal Grocholewski said the Church intends to recover metaphysics, namely a philosophy that will again pose the most profound questions of the human being.

The Vatican official stressed that technology and science cannot "satiate man's thirst in regard to the ultimate questions: What does happiness consist of? Who am I? Is the world the fruit of chance? What is my destiny? etc. Today, more than ever, the sciences are in need of wisdom."

He said that the "original vocation" of philosophy needs to be recovered: "the search for truth and its sapiential and metaphysical dimension."

The cardinal also emphasized the importance of logic, calling it a discipline that structures reason and that has disappeared because of the present crisis of Christian culture.

The rector of the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum), Dominican Father Charles Morerod, added that there is no contradiction between philosophy and faith.

"Christianity presupposes a harmony between God and human reason," he said.

"The importance of philosophy is linked directly with the human desire to know the truth and to organize it," the rector explained. "Experience shows that knowledge of philosophy helps us to better organize, in cooperation with other disciplines, the study of any science."

"Metaphysics seeks to know the whole of reality -- culminating in knowledge of the First Cause of everything -- and to show the mutual relationship between the different fields of learning, avoiding any closing in on themselves of the individual sciences," he added.

Ecclesiastical philosophy degrees will thus increase to 180 credits, going from two-year programs to three-year. There will also be more stringent requirements for professors, with greater demands for doctors in philosophy, preferably with degrees earned from an ecclesiastical institution. Theology degree programs will not be longer, but will have more philosophy credits during the first years."

A couple of statements in particular stood out to me as important. First, "With the human ability to think under fire from relativism, priests and theologians need to study more philosophy." This statement, it seems to me, goes deep down toward the heart of our cultural crisis. The problems with relativism go far beyond ethics to matters of epistemology, logic and truth.

A second statement, from Cardinal Grocholewski, that stood out was: "the 'original vocation' of philosophy needs to be recovered: 'the search for truth and its sapiential and metaphysical dimension.'" Our culture is in dire need of philosophy, but most of the philosophy done in universities has made itself irrelevant and uninteresting because it has abandoned its "big picture" search for truth about reality and how the different aspects of will, passions, and intellect relate to each other. Theology could pursue this task but it is almost entirely marginalized. Philosophy is desperately needed, but is apparently not up to the task. This leads me to think that the most important philosophy in the decades ahead will be done outside the secularized universities of the West.

Evangelicals need to recover philosophy if they are to bear a witness to Christianity as a worldview with culture-renewing power and inspirational vision. The Roman Catholic Church is resisting the spirit of age. Why can't we?

Finally, Free Speech is Used to Condemn Anti-Semitism in Canada

Well, this is encouraging. Our political leaders are finally speaking out against the orgy of hate that takes place on Canadian university campuses every year under the banner of Israeli Apartheid Week. From the National Post:

There is a growing Canadian backlash against Israeli Apartheid Week, the on-campus campaign to delegitimize Israel.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney issued a strongly worded statement Friday, asking students to think twice before joining activities tied to the week, taking place across Canada and internationally this month.

The events, which seek to promote Palestinian human rights, are frequently “accompanied by anti-Semitic harassment, intimidation and bullying,” Mr. Kenney said, and are at times planned and promoted with disregard for the safety of Jewish students, professors and others on campus.

“These activities can cultivate an atmosphere exactly the opposite of one that is open to the free exchange of ideas and the development of the mind with the aid of facts and logic,” he said. Repeatedly singling out and condemning Israel year after year creates a “hateful environment” that “offends not only our sense of fairness, but also our core Canadian values of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.”

“Such scapegoating becomes yet another symptom of a worrying new acceptance of the vilification of Israel and of Jews around the world.”

At a Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Community fundraiser Thursday evening, Prime Minister Stephen Harper slammed anti-Semitism on Canadian campuses, saying the organized Israeli Apartheid Weeks had become increasingly sophisticated and “intellectually acceptable.”

“At one time, friends, we could’ve expected threatening behaviour toward Jewish students to be rejected in any form at institutions of higher learning,” he told a crowd gathered at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. “Unfortunately, it is now often the behaviour of the anti-Israeli mob that is allowed to prevail.”

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, who also spoke at the event, said it’s time activists stop comparing Israel to South Africa, where apartheid was in place for approximately 45 years and finally abolished in 1993. He, too, released an official statement Monday condemning the week as a “dangerous cocktail of ignorance and intolerance” that threatens “the mutual respect” of Canadian society.

Read the rest here.

Well said Prime Minister and kudos to Michael Ignatieff for standing up for the right and setting partisan politics aside for once.

Let them say what they want. And then shame them, refute them, disown them and make them responsible for their hateful, biased, prejudiced and ignorant talk. That is what free speech is for.

Destroying the University One Sex Demonstration at a Time

Mary Katherine Ham ask us to take this Rorshach test and links to two recent stories about two universities. Which one looks normal and which one looks totally weird to you?

As for me, I find Morman theology to be pretty far out there; but at least they have a civilized attitude toward sex, marriage and family. But at Northwestern University the asylum appears to be have been taken over by the inmates so long ago that nobody even thinks it is strange any more.

The National Post has this story entitled: "Live sex class troubles university president."

"The head of a U.S. university said Thursday he was launching an investigation into an on campus presentation of a live sex act performed for students at an after class event.

Morton Schapiro, president of Northwestern University, a private school in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, said he was "troubled and disappointed" after hearing about the use of a motorized sex toy on a naked woman by her fiancé in front of more than 100 students.

Jim Marcus and Faith Kroll were part of a group of four adults brought to speak about the world of kink and fetish in an optional seminar that followed psychology professor J. Michael Bailey's popular class on human sexuality, the Chicago SunTimes reported.

The live sex act featured a sex toy with a power-saw handle and an attachment representing erect male genitalia in place of the saw blade.

Ms. Kroll and Mr. Marcus said they engaged in the act to help students learn . . . "

OK, we halt this quotation right there. Whatever Ms. Kroll and Mr. Marcus intended the students to "learn" is irrelevant. This is an insult to the university mission of seeking truth. Watching pornographic acts is not learning. It is sinning. It is indulging. It is vicious. It is a lot of things - but it is not "learning."

To misuse language by implying that participating in sexual exhibitionism is a form of learning is irresponsible. What next? Field education in brothels? Science experiments on luscious blonds for all undergraduates? Penthouse as literature? Hooking up as psychology homework? (It takes more and more imagination to mock such people by exaggeration!)

Zoe Romanowsky makes a good point by asking why such a dumb course even exists in the first place:

Northwestern University is getting a lot of heat for the live sex-act segment of an after-class presentation (on campus) on sexual arousal recently.

What's lost in the maelstrom is the absolute farce this course is in the first place. Professor J. Michael Bailey's Human Sexuality class has nothing to do with psychosexual development, morality, biology -- nothing worthy of study; just an excuse for presenting risque and deviant sexual behaviors as normative.

The university initially came out in support of Bailey, but there's nothing like bad press and angry benefactors to get administrators to change their minds. Now officials say they're "investigating" and the president says the incident "represented extremely poor judgment on the part of our faculty member" and was not "appropriate, necessary, or in keeping with Northwestern University's academic mission."

Uh huh. And how about the course itself, Mr. President? You think it's worthy of your academic mission or your students' time and money? What exactly are they learning in a class like this?

I think she has answered her own question. This course has no legitimate purpose; it is "just an excuse for presenting risque and deviant sexual behaviors as normative." That is a purpose central to the cultural Marxist agenda of the 60s radicals who have seized control of many of our cultural institutions in order to destroy them. This is not education but the undermining of all the ideals of education. It is insidious, destructive and juvenile. It is just doing what barbarians do after they break in.

I note the fact that the president pronounces himself "troubled." A real president would be outraged and eager to take advantage of the publicity generated by this event to fire some professors, cancel courses like this and clean out the stables. And disinfect everything . . . with really strong disinfectant. A real president would be spoiling for a fight and ready to make work for some lawyers. A real president would not merely be "troubled." But only a real university deserves to have a real president and there is not much evidence to suggest that Northwestern is really that serious about being a real university.

Universities that reject natural law and basic morality don't work. They degenerate into parodies of real education. Having lost the self-discipline that is necessary to true science, they become self-indulgent, lazy and stupid. This is not a theory; it is a fact. Evidence? Exhibit A: Northwestern University c. 2011.

Modern Sex Week: What is That All About?

Megan Fox has the growing phenomenon called "Sex Week" on contemporary university campuses all figured out. She writes a post called "Capturing the Culture: How 'Modern Sex Week' Advances an Insidious Marxist Agenda:"

Do you send your children to college to enter into the sex trade?

If you’re the parent of an Oregon State University student, that question isn’t as far-fetched as you think. Last week OSU sponsored “Modern Sex Week,” a campus event devoted to pornography, X-rated toys, and sexual how-tos.

Am I the only one who thinks 19-year-olds don’t need more sex education? I think most of them could teach the rest of us a thing or two in the boudoir. And even if their sexual education was lacking, is their science education that far advanced that they’re truly in need of “Modern Sex Week” awareness? Does the world need more sex experts? I didn’t realize there was a shortage. And why are college students learning how to participate in the sex trade? I am pretty sure you don’t even need a high school degree for that type of work.

Instead of churning out Pulitzer Prize winners and Nobel nominees, universities are sending our kids home from their $100,000 educations stuffed full of communist propaganda and lots of tolerance for things that you find intolerable. And as you’ll see, these absurd uses of educational dollars are all part of the Marxist blueprint to “capture the culture,” starting with impressionable college students.

But first, what is “Modern Sex”? Let’s find out shall we?

“Modern Sex Week” started out with a bang with “Anger and Female Sexual Pleasure” hosted by Veronica Monet (whose site is so vile my computer wouldn’t let me go there because it is deemed “dangerous.”) Being the fearless type, I Googled her and tried finding a way in that didn’t upset my security settings. (Isn’t it funny you can also catch a digital virus from Internet promiscuity? I think I just came up with a million dollar marketing idea for Norton Antivirus.) Monet is a “sex worker” and advertises her services online.

Veronica Monet takes pride in offering compassion, guidance and nurturing in the tradition of the ancient sacred temple prostitutes. Ms. Monet offers the benefits of education and experience tempered with intuition.

Monet is a graduate of OSU, if that gives you any indication of the level of education they offer. After learning about women and sexual anger, attendees could wander down to the seminar on the founding of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgender) Center at OSU and all the “conflict” they’ve encountered. Nothing like tearing open old wounds to bring people together.

After the LGBT tour there was the keynote address that was supposed to feature Tristan Taormino, “feminist pornographer,” “sex educator,” and author of books such as The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex For Women. Taormino’s keynote speech was canceled, and the weird part is that it is assumed this had something to do with angry taxpayers objecting to a pornographer receiving $3,000 on their dime, but her replacement was another pornographer who sells sex toys for a living, Charlie Glickman.

I'll spare you rest of the gory details of this event, but if you want to read more go here to Fox's post. It is safe to say that the barbarians are not just outside the gates, they are running our universities. But what does it all mean? What agenda do these people have in organizing such events? Fox writes:

But perhaps the most important question is, why does the Left use sexual promiscuity to further their political cause? William Norman Grigg, Constitutionalist, has the answer.

Often, power cannot be seized through the sudden imposition of a total dictatorship; instead, it must be obtained through the process of patient gradualism — the persistent subversion of vital institutions and the incremental consolidation of power.

One only needs to look to the Marxist philosophers like Antonio Gramsci to find out how the Left has successfully used these tactics in the past and how they plan to use them in the future. “Modern Sex Week” on college campuses is part of the plan.

These efforts draw upon a blueprint composed by Italian Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, who understood that the creation of the total state requires the seizure of the “mediating institutions” that insulate the individual from the power of the government — the family, organized religion, and so forth — and a systematic redefinition of the culture in order to sustain the new political order. The battle cry of Gramsci’s disciples is: “Capture the culture!”

Uh oh. If it hasn’t been a total sack and plunder, they’re pretty close. When universities are charging $100,000 a year to educate your kids about hand jobs and dental dams and passing it off as legitimate “learning” it’s hard to say they haven’t won.

We need to get beyond the examination of conscious motives and ask the deeper question of why universities are going to such extreme lengths to destabilize traditional morality and corrupt young people into a lifestyle of debauchery and licentiousness. Is it just a lark? Is it just what humans do when moral restraints fade - sort of our "Lord of the Flies moment" as a culture?

The point is that whatever the individual and personal motives of the administrators and organizers of this kind of event may be, the effect is exactly what revolutionary Marxists want. So whether the organizers are committed Marxists, useful idiots or empty-headed, sexual nihilists is beside the point. The effect is the same.

In an age when socialism has failed as an economic system, the rage against capitalism continues and anarchists and Marxists still seek to destroy Western culture even though they have nothing to put in its place. This is nihilism rather than Communism; but it would be better to say that Communism has always had a deep strain of nihilism secreted within itself.
You can see it pretty clearly in "Modern Sex Week."

The Real Threat to Academic Freedom on Campus: It's Not What the CAUT Thinks It Is

If the CAUT was really interested in promoting academic freedom, (rather than doing the opposite by attempting to stamp out intellectual diversity by harassing small Christian universities), it might consider launching investigations into the shocking and Orwellian squashing of free speech at Canadian universities (that is, the publicly funded ones at which its members actually teach) through the use of unconstitutional speech codes.

Greg Halvorson at American Thinker blog explains how much of a threat speech codes are in his post: "Fighting campus speech codes with FIRE."

Speech-code. Sounds like something from George Orwell's pen or a Stephen King tale, but it's not. According to Adam Kissel, from the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education, two-thirds of college campuses enforce speech-codes, violating the First Amendment rights of their students. Thanks to FIRE, however, codes are being challenged, speech is alive, and awareness is being raised. While two-thirds isn't good, this is down from a shameful nine-tenths, and each day, with FIRE's help, administrators are relenting.

Kissel, at CPAC, explained how codes work. They're all about "diversity," demanding it at the expense of expression. If a student opposes Islam, say, or the homosexual lobby (prominent campus clubs), he can be hauled before a panel with expulsion authority. The affect is to chill speech, of course, but on a larger scale, to destroy education's true purpose.

If no one can be criticized because it may offend - if all it takes is "You annoy me!" to bring censure - this doesn't produce analytic thinkers but instead conformists desperate to "be liked." In place of a wholesome learning forum, colleges become homogenized vacuums in which censorship trumps debate.

But FIRE is fighting back. Here is how it states its mission on its website:

The mission of FIRE is to defend and sustain individual rights at America's colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience — the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity. FIRE's core mission is to protect the unprotected and to educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to these rights on our campuses and about the means to preserve them.

Here is an interview with Adam Kissel of FIRE in which he explains how conservatives are the most common victims on today's campuses when it comes to taking away rights to free speech.



The problem is that many people have confused left-wing, paternalistic, moralism and coercive political correctness for respect for individual human beings. Yes, academic freedom, freedom of thought and freedom of speech are under attack in today's universities. But it is not Christian statements of faith that constitute the threat: it is speech codes.

The hypocrisy of the CAUT is breathtaking. If they really care about open debate and freedom of investigation, then why not join with FIRE in the fight against unconstitutional, paternalistic, Orwellian speech codes?

I Have an Idea: Let's Investigate the CAUT

Redeemer University College has announced that it will not be cooperating with the CAUT's "investigation." Instead they want dialogue about the CAUT's premise that no Christian university ever could have academic freedom.

From The National Post:

A Christian university accused of stifling academic freedom said Wednesday it would no longer co-operate with the investigation by Canada’s largest teachers’ federation.

“The report’s findings are a foregone conclusion,” said Hubert Krygsman, president of Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ont.

The college issued a news release late Wednesday saying it would gladly discuss the issues with the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) but would not submit to an official process.

“Instead, Redeemer has invited the CAUT to an open and honest philosophical discussion about differing paradigms of academic freedom and the relation of faith to learning,” the release says.

CAUT was not available for comment on Wednesday.

I don't imagine the CAUT wants a philosophical debate on the issue. They depend on a sneaky tactic to influence public opinion against Christian universities because their argument have no substance.

Now for the back-peddling. From The National Post yesterday:

The country’s largest association of university teachers has vowed to change how it investigates Christian schools over allegations that faculty are required to sign statements of faith.

James Turk, head of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), said Tuesday that his group would no longer send a team of investigators to uncover what critics say was readily available by a phone call.

“In hindsight we started out using our elaborate investigative procedures because we wanted to be fair to the institutions,” said Mr. Turk. “We didn’t want to say the schools were doing something inappropriate without checking it out carefully.”

CAUT, which represents 65,000 faculty members, has issued lengthy reports on three schools since 2006 that took months to complete. They concluded that Trinity Western University in British Columbia, Crandall University in New Brunswick and Canadian Mennonite in Winnipeg made faculty sign a statement of Christian belief as a requirement of employment. A fourth school, Redeemer University College in Ontario, is now under investigation.

The targeted schools, none of whose faculty belong to CAUT, said the investigations were not necessary because the statement of faith requirements were readily available on their websites and in their academic catalogues.

But by taking months to investigate and then issuing a lengthy report on their findings, CAUT created an air of doubt about the schools that has resulted in some parents and donors wondering whether there was a problem, said Justin Cooper, president of Christian Higher Education Canada, the umbrella group of Canada’s 33 private Christian universities and colleges.

The issue here was never whether or not Christian schools have a faith statement that faculty signs. Everyone knows that; in fact, it is a selling point that these universities use to promote themselves to potential students, parents and donors. It is part of their whole reason for existence.

But some left-wing radicals at the CAUT don't like Christianity or Christian universities, so they invented a phony "investigation" and sent out Captain Obvious out to do an investigation that would breathlessly report back that indeed, what the PR literature and the Academic Calendar and the university website all state is, in fact, (gasp!) actually true!

As Cooper points out the purpose of this charade is merely to create an atmosphere of suspicion around Christian universities and thus harm them.

I think Canadian universities should get together and raise a sum of money to mount an advertising campaign around the theme: "Hated by the CAUT; you know you can trust us with your kids!" In other words, turn the tables and use some pointed humor to skewer the witch hunters. What they are doing depends on confusion, misinformation and half truths. The best way to fight back is to shine the search light on them.

I would even go further. I would announce the formation of an investigative committee to probe the ideological leanings of the CAUT. The purpose of this committee would be to bring to light the political positions taken by CAUT over the past couple of decades and the range of ideological positions taken by its staff. Questions to be answered would include:

1. Does the CAUT represent a wide range of political, religious, ethical and social views or does it represent only a narrow swath of such views as compared to the Canadian public?

2. Are any religious people working for CAUT and on its governing board? Are any of them Christian? Are any of them Evangelicals?

3. Does the CAUT approve of programs in Canadian universities that require professors to hold a certain ideology such as Gender Studies professorships?

4. Does the CAUT campaign for free speech on campus or does it seen rigid speech codes?

5. Has the CAUT targeted any non-Christians schools for investigation? Does it plan to do so?

6. Has the CAUT membership as a whole endorsed this witch hunt or was it dreamed up by a cadre of paid staff?

The point would be to show that the CAUT is being used by radicals using Alinsky-inspired tactics to undermine Christian institutions as part of a wider agenda of Cutural Marxism.

Academic Freedom: Where May It Be Found?

Ian Hunter has a terrific article, "Education thrives in a world without 'equity officers'" in The National Post today about the CAUT witch hunt against Christian universities in Canada

In a Feb. 11 letter to the National Post, responding to recent criticism of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, CAUT executive director James Turk defended his organization’s witch-hunt against faith-based universities. He argued that CAUT’s investigation of religious schools was necessary to ensure that parents know what kinds of institutions their sons and daughters are attending — and, as Mr. Turk puts it, “to ensure that neither universities nor outside groups impose ideological requirements on academic staff.” In other words, we are asked to believe that CAUT commissioned studies of Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C., Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ont., and others, in an effort to glean information readily available to anyone who took the time to glance at the universities’ respective calendars.

I found the CAUT report on Trinity Western University particularly risible: Two academics (Professors William Bruneau and Thomas Friedman) burrow away through 22 turgid pages — plus four Appendices and 24 footnotes — to discover what the university’s Mission Statement says on the first page of the calendar; namely, that TWU is a Christian institution intended “to develop godly Christian leaders, goal-oriented University graduates … who [will] serve God and people in various marketplaces of life.”
Likewise Redeemer, and the other institutions under scrutiny, do not exactly hide their light under a bushel.

And that is precisely the problem. These institutions, you see, are committed to something other than secular relativism; and that sticks in the craw of the CAUT and however many of its 65,000 members actually support these ludicrous investigations.

So far, Hunter is rehearsing the obvious: those who have been following the controversy know that the CAUT has been caught out perpetrating a witch hunt in the name of "academic freedom," a particularly Orwellian move even for left-wing academics.

But the next part is Hunter's personal testimony to the greater degree of actual academic freedom that exists on Christian university campuses as compared to the speech-code ridden, equality officer dominated, fearful, politically correct atmospheres of most contemporary, Canadian, secular campuses.

As it happens, I have lectured at both Trinity Western and at Redeemer College, as well as many secular Canadian Universities, and, for that matter, at Oxford and Cambridge in England. So I am in a position to offer a bit of direct evidence, evidence overlooked by the prolix twosome of Bruneau and Friedman: Yes, faith-based Universities are different. Allow me to explain.

At Redeemer and Trinity Western, the buildings are clean, the walls undefaced by graffiti. The knuckles of their students do not drag the ground. I noticed immediately that informal and animated discussions were going on everywhere on campus between students and faculty — and the faculty seemed to know each student’s name.

The Staley Lectures, which I was at Redeemer and Trinity Western to deliver, continued over several days: public addresses, seminars and discussions, an evening panel, etc. I experienced culture shock.

I discovered that these faculty and students were unafraid of concepts such as “truth,” or “good” and “evil” — words not only foreign to, but suspect in, the secular university. The students, mirabile dictu, were not intimidated by intellectual debate; ideas were not threatening to them, nor was free ranging inquiry immediately challenged as “offensive.” In fact, I never once heard the word “offensive.” Controversy was not something to be avoided. I quickly realized how long it had been since I had spoken at a school without speech codes and “equity officers.”

It was the experience of lecturing at such institutions that reminded me of what universities once were.

Hunter's point is well-taken: today's Christian universities are essentially conservative institutions where the Western cultural commitments to free speech and an unfettered search for the good, the true and the beautiful still continue to exist.

By contrast, the late modern dogma of relativism makes the unfettered search for truth impossible. By applying a hermeneutic of suspicion to all debate and reducing arguments about truth to nothing but a superficial cover for underlying racism, patriarchy and colonialism, the modern university dismisses old-fashioned truth seeking as naive and insincere. Therefore, all discourse must be examined for political bias and purged of all political incorrectness. The search for truth is turned into the quest for inoffensiveness as the acids of cultural relativism turn all academic discourse into a clash of wills to power.

Now the real problem that CAUT has with Christian universities having faith statements comes to light. They hate and fear any commitment to any kind of truth because for them all truth-claims are nothing but power-grabs. Unable to take the debate over what is true and good and beautiful seriously, they impose relativism on everyone dogmatically - thus showing them selves to have a serious irony deficiency.

The issue is not that Christian universities have a faith stance or a commitment to certain truths like the existence of God, the problem is that they have the wrong faith stance according to the CAUT. If they took an unofficial position of cultural relativism, they could blend right in with the other universities and the CAUT would not spend time "investigating" them.

How strange it is that those who call themselves relativists when they want to blame Christians for saying that Christianity is true and materialism is false, are so dogmatic when it comes time to deciding what a true university is allowed to be or not be. If they are really so anti-dogmatic, why not just let a thousand flowers bloom? Why not just let the conversation go on? Why not allow a healthy debate between serious people about the big questions?

What are they afraid of?

A Possible Scientific Explanation for Anti-Christian Witch Hunts

A story in the New York Times (!) describes the liberal (actually leftist) bias which exists in the contemporary university in a story entitled: "Social Scientist Sees Bias Within."

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

Read the rest here.

I propose that here we have a perfectly scientific, empirical explanation of why the staff of CAUT could go on a McCarthy-style witch hunt against small, Christian universities and not feel that it was being biased or illiberal. A significant blind spot obviously exists (to put it with the utmost in charity) in such a group when it thinks that stamping out diversity of opinion is the way to protect academic freedom or when it gratuitously conflates religiosity with narrow-mindedness. The problem is "leftist group think."

The fact that the Society of Personality and Social Psychology is so in-grown is no accident. It is the result of systematic bias and discrimination. But it would be utterly irresponsible to assume that this one particular learned society is somehow an aberration or unique. I propose that similar studies of other disciplinary bodies would yield similar results. I invite anyone who disputes that claim to test it empirically and let me know the results, which I would be happy to publish here on this blog.

So, the problem is group think, which is caused by systematically excluding certain views from the academy. The most obvious solution is not Professor Heidt's call for affirmative action, but rather simply academic freedom for religiously-inspired universities which spring up from the grass roots. What is needed is openness to civil society and less, rather than more, social engineering from above.

The lesson to be learned from all of this for the CAUT is that if they are reallly serious about increasing academic freedom and encouraging diversity, they have no better allies in the cause than small, Christian universities and their unique perspective on old debates.

HT to Al Mohler's blog, where I found the link to this story.

Pushing Back Against the Anti-Christian Witch Hunt on Campus

Congratulations to Dr. Paul Allen of Concordia University in Montreal for organizing a petition to push back against the McCarthy-style witch hunt currently being waged by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) against small, Christian universities in Canada. The National Post reported in a story on Tuesday entitled: "Professors group accused of anti-Christian bullying" that:

"What we have here is an academic union ganging up on these smaller Christian universities, and I thought it was high time that people from the public universities take a stand," said Paul Allen, an associate professor of theology at Concordia University in Montreal.

The protest is a direct response to reports that the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) issued against Trinity Western University in British Columbia more than a year ago, Crandall University in New Brunswick in July and Winnipeg's Canadian Mennonite University in October.

"It bothered me that this is anti-religious ideology masked as supposedly an academic freedom issue," said Mr. Allen, who has started a petition to warn about CAUT's actions. "This was an opportunity in the current [secular climate] to go after religion."

The petition, which now has 140 signatures, said the investigations are unwarranted and invasive.

Mr. Allen and many others who signed the petition are members of CAUT, which has 65,000 members. Academics at the schools that were investigated are not members.

Read the rest here. The National Post also has an editorial this morning entitled: "Stop the anti-Christian witchhunt on campus." Its description of the process by which a small group of radicals on the Association's staff are abusing their positions in order to perpetuate their own biases against all things Christian is withering:

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) — which describes itself as Canada’s “national voice for academic staff” — says it has investigated four small Christian colleges and universities in the past 18 months because it wants parents to know what kind of institutions their sons and daughters might attend. In other words, we are told, there is nothing nefarious in the 65,000-member union’s action. It is merely performing a valuable public service.

This is disingenuous nonsense. The CAUT is on a thinly disguised anti-Christian witch hunt. There is no other way to describe it.

The investigations were instigated entirely by CAUT executive and staff. The staff at the four universities aren’t even members of the association, so do not come under its mandate. No authorization was sought from the association’s members. There was no resolution passed at any annual meeting encouraging senior staff to scrutinize the schools’ hiring practices. No complaints were received from members — or anyone else — about the faith-based hiring and teaching at the schools: Trinity Western University in British Columbia, Crandall University in New Brunswick, Winnipeg’s Canadian Mennonite University and Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ont.

Association leaders seem simply to have gotten it in their heads that where Christian values are part of a school’s hiring standards and curriculum, good, independent scholarship is impossible.
So they launched probes all on their own.

Dr. Allen's petition can be found here. It reads:

We object in principle to CAUT’s arbitrary restriction of academic freedom to individuals and its failure to consider the corporate dimensions of that freedom. We note that the very concept of academic freedom arose historically in religiously founded institutions. In a time when colleges and universities are under great pressure to serve the interests of commercial and political initiatives, religious institutions can play a special role in preserving academic freedom.

We also observe that the missional specificity of religious institutions is not without analogue in public institutions, which may contain within them institutes or research centres with their own acknowledged pre-commitments. Both remain free associations of scholars.

We call on CAUT to cease its harassment of these institutions, for which there is no mandate from the membership at large. That harassment is inconsistent with the ethos of religious freedom affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada and human rights law.

This is a moderate, historically-informed, liberal, sensible statement which reflects the kinds of attitudes found in institutions where true academic freedom flourishes. Increasingly, true academic freedom is found to flourish less and less in the most secularized environments and more so in traditionally religious institutions. The university was founded in the bosom of the Church and will likely survive there even when the major, publicly-funded universities of the Western world degenerate into ideologically-driven bastions of cultural Marxist-inspired political correctness.