Squelch U.
Though this article is about an Obama adviser insulting Hillary Clinton and the consequences she faced as a result, it actually says more. Here’s the basic context:
A former adviser to Barack Obama, who resigned Friday after calling rival Hillary Rodham Clinton “a monster,” said Obama may not be able to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Iraq within a year as he has promised on the campaign trail.
Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winner author, made the comments in two separate interviews with foreign media while promoting her latest book. The comment that led to her resignation came in an interview with The Scotsman, and she immediately tried to keep it from appearing in print.
“She is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything,” The Scotsman quoted her as saying. A few hours after the comments were published, Power, an unpaid adviser and Harvard professor, announced her resignation in a statement distributed by the Obama campaign.
Therein lies the subtext. Starting with the fact that she’s a Harvard professor, home of
the recently released Final Report of the Task Force on General Education, the result of years of labor by the Harvard faculty. One acute observer, himself a denizen of the academy, notes that as a result of that heavy-lifting, “we now have a useful, readable constitution for postmodern undergraduate education in America. The only problem is that it is a constitution for an intellectual and moral banana republic.”
Too harsh? Try this, from the aforementioned report: “The aim of a liberal education is to unsettle assumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people.”
No doubt Socrates thought he was doing something vaguely akin to that. But Socrates “disoriented” young people with all of those probing questions in order to get them to grasp the truth of things.
However…….
The basic assumption of the Harvard faculty report is that there is no truth-of-things; it’s all “appearances,” all the way down.
Appearances are what count. How things look and feel and seem, trump the way things are. Politics and academia are intimately bound.
No doubt there are honorable exceptions on the Harvard faculty — teachers who believe that their responsibility is to introduce some of the brightest young people in the world to the riches of the intellectual life, understood as reason’s quest for truths worth believing because they are, well, true. But for those members of the Harvard professoriate whose views dominated the Task Force on General Education, reason can’t get at the universal truth of things, for there are no such universal truths.
The report says that one of the goals of a Harvard undergraduate education is to empower students to “choose for themselves what principles will guide them.” But isn’t the question of what those principles are important? Apparently not, if you’re comfortably perched, with tenure, in the intellectual sandbox of postmodernism.
One of the students thus empowered is now running for president. And he’s one Harvard adviser down, at least for the record.