Do not be wise in your own eyes;
Fear the Lord and turn away from evil. – Proverbs 3:7
A friend of mine who spent his life teaching in higher ed wrote a piece calling for support for the man who exposed Jason Arday’s life of deception. Arday’s lies were all over the place and constant. They included loads of plagiarism. The guy’s lies were on the order of some movie about some guy who posed as a pilot on some airline sometime in the past—you’ve seen the movie, right?
Sadly, Arday responded to being found out and becoming infamous by killing himself.
Specializing in hissy fits, higher ed is now huffing and puffing over this thing. Arday was black and had a tenured position at some school in some country teaching something about “education,” which really tells you all you need to know about this thing.
My friend was trying to get people to sign a petition in support of the higher ed teacher who exposed Arday. He’s been fired for his friendless and thankless work, so a few teachers have protested his firing by signing a petition.
What caught my attention, though, was my friend telling his readers not to sign the petition unless they mattered within higher ed. He told PhD candidates not to sign because their signature would have no influence.
This is the mindset of higher ed, and the reason so many of us have come to despise their trashing of the life of learning and thinking and reading and writing. Allan Bloom exposed it all 35 years ago in his seminal jeremiad against his colleagues and their admins, The Closing of the American Mind. If you haven’t read it, get it and read it. Note that Bloom was a gay philosophy prof at some school somewhere on the south side of Chicago.
President Trump couldn’t find a more concentrated hatred of himself anywhere in North America than the teachers and admins of almost any higher ed school. He’s pricked their bubble well and good for him!
When the teachers of higher ed care more about what the voters think of them than what they think of themselves, it might be time to send our children and grandchildren to them with a faint but growing hope that they’ll not have ideology forced down their gullet, but things useful for producing the educated electorate necessary for the survival of democracy.
