Twilight of the Universities

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis prophesies the twilight of the universities. “In a sort of ghastly simplicity,” he writes, “we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” Today, the space where intellect, wisdom, and common sense once commingled, forming the intellectual heart — the very source of John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University — has become a vacuole of attrition. Various ideological succubae have drained naturalness and intelligence until all that remains are malformed sentiments puffed and prodded and propped, creating a surrogate organ unfit for human nature but perfectly suited to the deadening identity politics that have swept through our institutions. This is loss without gain; Newman would understand.

At the heart of identity politics is the fallacious and ideological piety that a person’s “discomfort” is a result of embedded and pervasive prejudice. The microaggressions he is made to endure, being either un- or sub-conscious on the part of the perpetrator, are all too conveniently free from basic principles of verification and are instead extorted into existence, and into governing policies as apodictic fact. And that is the point, isn’t it? If the agenda is intrinsically fraudulent, then it can only be manufactured into existence by equally fraudulent language games in which every drive is a lust to rule.

This extorted reality, wholly artificial and yet viciously inalienable, attempts to render dissenting, nuanced, and Christian voices not participants in the dialogue of the liberal arts but nonentities. The Christian approach is nullified by claims of victimhood, which, for those with eyes to see, is similar to Moloch, that bronze statue of costly sacrifice that seeks to consume the young in a diseased fire. For this new progressivism to function, it must take on the patina of dialogue. It finds a congenial partner in its own reflection, which neither disagrees with itself nor alleviates the highway of superimpositions suffocating intellectual discourse, goodwill, and common sense.

I have experienced a Catholic institution undergoing this ideological takeover. Of great importance is that these ferociously quick changes are newer, unlike at other American universities, which are now nothing more than celebrated incubators of “wrongthink.” That newness makes the loss a far more poignant and potent moving image of decline and fall. Such radical ideological shifts have occurred primarily in the past few years; prior to that, the institution had an often unexpressed but nevertheless real sense of traditional principles. Like all universities, it has had a history of highs and lows, but nevertheless it retained the rarity of an animal on the extinction list found again. It always re-found and re-formed itself around the naturalness of traditional living, and it imbued that within its educational principles. It was never a Stanford or a Berkeley, but neither did it offer discipleship to modern infatuations, nor was it one of the many universities formed admirably in response to the intellectual and moral morass, such as Hillsdale, the University of Dallas, or Ave Maria. It was a university that had somehow escaped, again and again, ideological makeover — until now. What remains is a protracted burial of sorts. There is, for those still living, heartrending grief. What is lost when the order and integrity of an educational system heave and die is the relation of educator and student, of wisdom as a journey from the profane to the sacred, from ignorance to truth.