Jaffa was wrong about the root of today's academic problems.
Relativism and non-judgmentalism lie at the root of today’s academic rot, according to the conservative consensus about the post-1960s university. Harry Jaffa was a prime architect of that consensus. In “The Reichstag Is Still Burning,” he argues that the rejection of a belief in a single truth about our place in the God-created universe gave rise to the student rebellions against the Western canon. Once all cultures were deemed “objectively equal in dignity” and all moral preferences and lifestyles were seen as grounded only in subjective “value judgements,” the erosion of the traditional disciplines and the incursion of identity politics into the university were sure to follow. The solution to the destruction of serious learning, counsels Jaffa, is to recognize once again the “truth about man, God, and the universe” and to make that truth the lodestar of academic activity.
This analysis is unpersuasive.
_____________________
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of the bestselling War on Cops and The Diversity Delusion (available now). Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The American Mind