The Ailing State of American Universities
Modern education is the core reason behind the troubles and chaos that inflict mankind.
Our lives depend on the leadership of other men and women. The quality of a person’s leadership is largely determined by the quality of his or her education. Weak leadership, the result of poor education, has brought mankind to the brink of destruction.
Modern education is the root cause of the wars, violence, family division, sexual perversion, juvenile delinquency, crime, psychological illness and racial strife that plague our nations.
Man has more knowledge than ever, but also more troubles and problems!
From the beginning of mankind, the educational systems of this world have disseminated and perpetuated false values and ideologies, distorted histories, perverted psychology, arts and humanities, and nation-destroying political lies and propaganda. The application of this wrong knowledge is behind all the troubles that inflict mankind.
Universities in particular have become successful in misleading and distorting the minds of students—the future leaders of societies and nations.
Today’s colleges are failing in two primary ways: 1) what they are teaching and 2) how they are teaching it. Not only are college students feeding on a dangerous mixture of truth and error, they are being instructed in entirely the wrong way.
College campuses have become the virulent breeding ground for destructive thought. The corridors of today’s universities are thick with an atmosphere of immorality, moral ambiguity and rabid secularism. Unless radical changes occur soon, this facet of modern education will thrust greater troubles upon mankind, specifically the Western world.
Cesspools of Liberalism
Ben Shapiro, a recent graduate from the University of California, authored a book highlighting the extent to which America’s universities indoctrinate students in the tenets of liberalism. The content of the book is not only shocking, it’s powerfully condemning!
“For years, the university system has brainwashed its students to believe fervently in the tenets of liberalism. The universities accept into their waiting clutches young, open-minded students ready to learn,” Shapiro wrote. “From race to the environment, from religion to sex, from the war on terror to the Arab-Israeli conflict, universities push a never-ending line of liberal claptrap. The higher education system indoctrinates America’s youth” (Brainwashed, 2004; emphasis mine throughout).
Regarding the barrage of left-leaning (not to mention immoral and ideologically unsound) classes that have crept into college curricula, Roger Kimball said, “With a few notable exceptions, our most prestigious liberal arts colleges and universities have installed the entire radical menu at the center of their humanities curriculum …. Every special interest—women’s studies, black studies, gay studies and the like—and every modish interpretative gambit—deconstruction, post-structuralism, new historicism … has found a welcome roost in the academy, while the traditional curriculum and modes of intellectual inquiry are excoriated as sexist, racist or just plain reactionary” (Tenured Radicals, 1998).
Descriptions of some of the courses offered at colleges across America cement Kimball’s point.
The Washington-based Young America’s Foundation regularly publishes “Comedy and Tragedy,” a report listing hundreds of immoral, secularist and politically corrupt courses offered by colleges around the nation.
In the introduction to its 2003-2004 report, the authors noted the following: “The ninth year of this study finds that academic standards continue to deteriorate. Students are offered more and more bizarre and biased courses that reflect the narrow ideology of liberal professors. Courses in which the faculty imposes its views on race, sex, economics, history and politics are not only proliferating, but are increasingly becoming requirement to receive degrees.” Hold on to your seats as we review a few of the courses offered.
Yale University offers Introduction to Lesbian and Gay Studies: “A study of works that have as their theme gay and lesbian experience and identity in the 20th-century United States.”
The University of Michigan offers How to be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation: “Just because you happen to be a gay man doesn’t mean that you don’t have to learn how to become one.” As if the pervading pro-homosexual atmosphere on college campuses isn’t enough of an “education.”
Bucknell University offers Witchcraft and Politics: “Explores witchcraft, spirit possession, and cults of the dead [as] idioms of power and as vehicles for protest, resistance, and violent social change.”
For sci-fi buffs, Georgetown University offers Philosophy and Star Trek. “Star Trek is very philosophical. What better way, then, to learn philosophy, than to watch Star Trek, read philosophy, and hash it all out in class?” Is this not ludicrous? Not only is studying Star Trek a clear dumbing down of academic standards; the fact that students will “hash it all out in class” indicates an atmosphere of intellectual and philosophical ambiguity.
While instruction about the failed history of Marxism and its negative effects on nations is worthwhile instruction in a college history class, the promotion of this disastrous political ideology should never occur. Not so, according to many prominent colleges around the nation. Courses with a distinctly pro-Marxist agenda are currently offered at universities such as Brown, Cornell, Princeton, Duke and on and on the list goes. Amherst College even offers Taking Marx Seriously, while the University of California at Santa Barbara offers Black Marxism.
Titles of a few other classes include: Interpreting the Queer Past (uc–Berkeley), The Media and Aggression Against Women (ucla), Practicing Feminism: A Study of Political Activism (Williams College), Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Harvard) and Backgrounds of Homo-erotic Literature (Rutgers).
Meanwhile, as America’s colleges and universities teem with unsound and perverted courses, the more worthwhile and factually and historically relevant courses are becoming more sparse.
“The increased number of such courses and the decline of traditional studies rob students of a quality education, even at so-called elite schools” (ibid.). The report went on to list the following facts:
· Of the seniors at the top 55 colleges and universities in the United States, only 23 percent could identify James Madison as the father of the Constitution.
· Forty percent of the students could not identify the correct 50-year time period in which the Civil War was fought.
Renowned historian David McCullough stated before a panel of U.S. senators in April 2003, “When you have students at our Ivy League colleges saying they thought Germany and Japan were our allies in World War ii, you know we’ve got a very serious problem.”
The fact is, today’s college students choose from a smorgasbord of ethically vague, morally corrupt, secularist and politically warped courses but are starved of a large selection of historically accurate, factually correct, ethical and morally sound classes. Dangerous liberal thought is running rampant and unchecked throughout America’s system of higher education.
Liberal Faculty
Throughout their college careers, students’ minds are predominantly influenced by the faculty under whom they study. Tomorrow’s world is being shaped, to a very large extent, by today’s teachers.
Facts exposing the sharp shift to the left that has occurred among faculty at American colleges were highlighted in a striking article titled “Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty” earlier this year. “It appears that, over the course of 15 years, self-described liberals grew from a slight plurality to a 5 to 1 majority on college faculties,” the article said (Berkeley Electronic Press, The Forum, Volume 3, Issue 1).
In a 1984 Carnegie study, 39 percent of professors identified themselves as liberals. In a 1999 North American Academic Study Survey, this number was 72 percent; only 15 percent of the faculty members classified themselves as conservatives, down from 34 percent in 1984.
Liberal instructors dominate the faculties of American universities; college faculties are four times more liberal than the general public. Notice some of their embarrassing antics.
Ward Churchill is a popular tenured professor at the University of Colorado. He earns thousands of dollars to speak at colleges around the nation, and his books are required reading at over 100 universities. Who is this man? In a widely read essay that gained Churchill notoriety outside of university culture, he condoned the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed over 3,000 Americans and likened America’s war to remove Saddam Hussein and destroy terrorism to Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship. Churchill’s comments went beyond being antiwar; they were not dissimilar to the kind of propaganda produced by militant Islamists.
Prof. Richard Sklar of the University of California–Los Angeles, speaking to his political science class, “described socialism as a ‘great idea’ and Communist dictator Mao Tse-Tung as a ‘great leader’” (Shapiro, op. cit.). Mao was one of the greatest murderers in history; he killed more than 40 million people.
Discussing pedophilia, Prof. Harris Mirkin of the University of Missouri is on record as stating, “Though Americans consider intergenerational sex to be evil, it has been permissible or obligatory in many cultures and periods of history” (New York Times, April 30, 2002). Notice the use of the term “intergenerational sex” to soften his proposition that pedophilia has been around for a long time and is not as evil as most Americans deem it to be.
Bruce Rind, assistant professor of psychology at Temple University, concurs with Mirkin, writing, in conjunction with several co-authors, in a 1998 study that “negative effects on children who had sex with adults or were coerced into sexual activity with someone their own age ‘were neither pervasive nor typically intense, and that men reacted much less negatively than women’” (Kansas City Star, April 1, 2002). An unmistakable movement to legitimize pedophilia pervades many American universities.
Sexual promiscuity is promoted by faculty at most universities. Deemed to be part of the university experience, any kind of sex with any number of partners is encouraged by many college instructors.
“At uc–Berkeley, they have all sorts of naughty fun in class. One course … concerning male sexuality made national headlines. All the students in the co-ed class publicly discussed their sexual fantasies. Porn stars guest lectured. … During another class assignment, students went to a gay strip club …” (Shapiro, op. cit.). At Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, Prof. Susan Scotto teaches students how to strip in her stripping course. The mother of two strips at local bars in her spare time.
For the final assignment of Prof. Hope Weissman’s 1999-2000 pornography and politics course at Wesleyan University, students were told to “create your own work of pornography.” Students presented their assignments to the class via self-made video or, if they so wished, live in front of the class!
Sexual perversion of every form saturates America’s colleges and universities. The sex lives of thousands of America’s college students are made available to the world through thousands of pornographic websites. People from around the globe are logging on to watch the sex antics occurring within America’s colleges!
The faculty members of America’s universities become responsible for the education of our young people after parents pack them off to college. Instead of equipping their young, malleable minds with the tools and an education that will assist them in building a stronger nation and a better world, our college faculties are handicapping today’s students—the leaders of tomorrow’s world.
To make matters worse, the structure and operation of college administrations facilitates the indoctrination of youth. Take the academic tenure system, for example. University professors are offered tenure upon fulfilling certain criteria, granting them the right not to be fired without justifiable cause. Originally designed to protect the academic freedom of professors, the tenure system has been corrupted to the point where universities are now filled with hard-core liberal professors with the “academic freedom” to design and teach distorted, morally corrupt and politically warped ideology.
Not 200 years ago, Ward Churchill would have been arrested as a traitor for speaking against his nation as he does; today he is embraced by students and faculty and paid thousands of dollars to speak his divisive and nation-destroying words.
Under the stewardship of college faculty, a diet of anti-American, morally bankrupt and sexually perverted intellectualism is being funneled into the naive and vulnerable minds of today’s college students.
The World’s Greatest Need
The educational institutions, especially the colleges and universities, have never before been in such dire states.
“In many ways, things have never been worse. All those radical trends that got going [in universities and colleges] in the 1960s and gained steam in the 1970s and 1980s are now so thoroughly entrenched that they are simply taken for granted” (Wall Street Journal, May 11). Modern education is in critical condition!
True education is this world’s greatest need!
This whole world needs to come to realize that the right kind of education is essential to achieving true success and happiness in life. You need to understand that true education will not only bring material, physical success, but that it will foster lasting emotional and spiritual success in your life.
The foundational elements of true education are revealed spiritual knowledge and development of righteous character.
Read Proverbs 9:10 in your Bible to see that true education requires not only acknowledgement of God, but acceptance of His revealed knowledge as the foundation of all knowledge: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy one is understanding” (New King James Version). True understanding and education begins with revealed knowledge from God—the “Holy one.”
Right education is grounded in God’s law and revealed spiritual knowledge.
God identifies the fundamental cause of the failure of mankind’s educational institutions in Hosea 4:6: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.”
Knowledge about God and His laws cannot be found in today’s universities and colleges. His very existence has been invalidated by the theory of evolution.
This is the reason behind the failure of modern education, and the subsequent failure of mankind.
Only upon learning and embracing the revealed knowledge of God can mankind ever remove the troubles and problems that plague this world and experience the eternal fruits of true education.
To learn more about what it means to be truly educated, request your free copy of Education With Vision.