The Death of the University

“Ding-dong the university is dead,” sang the Wicked Witch of the West.

The singular thread that holds the fabric of Western civilization together is the pursuit of truth. Socrates and Jesus, pillars of Western intellectual and spiritual development, both died for truth. Though they lived centuries apart and one was a Greek, the other a Jew, both men considered the pursuit of truth as mankind’s highest calling.

St. Paul wrote, “For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him” (Romans 10:12). Another way of putting it might be, that in the Western tradition, “Truth is the Lord who calls on all.”

It follows that the enemies of the West necessarily despise truth. For them, the best course of action is to sever the thread that holds the cloth of Western civilization together.

Fast forward to Nietzsche, the German writer who died in 1900. With his infamous, “facts are precisely what is lacking, all that exists consists of interpretations,” he sought to destroy the idea of objective truth. Though he failed to cut the thread, he managed to fray it. The Leftists who came after him — evil geniuses and useful idiots — picked up the scissors of Nietzsche’s twisted logic and ran to finish what he had started. Maybe their mother’s never told them not to run with scissors.

If there are no facts, as Nietzsche insisted, there is no objective truth and all is subjective. This is relativism in a nutshell. When all is relative, the word “truth” is rendered meaningless because one person’s subjective truth cancels out the next ad nauseam until nothing is left. This is nihilism, a world where nothing is true but the power to create subjective, necessarily fleeting “truths.”

The university, charged with encouraging and protecting the pursuit of truth, was targeted by the Left in the twentieth century by a variety of malignant forces, the Fabian Society and the Frankfurt School and its Critical Theory crazies to name two. Through organizations such as these, the Left, mindless and industrious as ants in an ant pile, made the Marxist Long March through the university system where it has all but evicted truth.

In an X post, Jordan Peterson called the university out for what it has allowed to take place inside its once-hallowed halls, “Gender-critical views are those that can distinguish male from female. When they make acknowledging the most basic truth a crime, it's high time to let the institutions of ‘higher education’ die.”

Another way of putting it would be “to put them out of their misery.”       

The Left has successfully taken over our universities and thinks it has the high ground and can dictate the terms of surrender. The terms are these: nothing needs to make sense.

Take, for example, former president of Harvard Claudine Gay. The DEI hire had to resign from her post after being accused of over 40 acts of plagiarizing. Add to that her lack of a response to antisemitism on campus after Hamas’ attacks in Israel in October and you’ve got a cocktail that not even the left can swallow.

But they can spin it. The university newspaper, The Harvard Crimson reacted with, “Plagiarism is a cardinal offense for academics. In December, it also became the latest cudgel in the conservative culture war on Harvard and diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Never mind the absurd leap from plagiarism as the “cardinal offense for academics” to using it “as a cudgel” on DEI. The message is clear: Harvard creates truth and anybody who denies it is evil.

Plagiarism is defined as “the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.” For the relativists embedded in our universities like fever-infected ticks in the neck of a prized fact hound, truth is something to be taken from God and reworked into the image of man.

DEI reduces humans to pawns in a bureaucratic game of chess. When diversity trumps excellence, equity absorbs equal opportunity, and inclusion amounts to exclusion to anybody who doesn’t play along, you know you’re in the Twilight Zone. Welcome to the Leftist machine.