活人之夜教育阿特拉斯大學
未找到專案。
活人之夜

活人之夜

5 分鐘
|
五月 18, 2016

1.       WE DEMAND the hiring of at least 10 additional tenure-track ethnic studies professors and a commitment to the retention of these professors, prioritizing underrepresented groups within the ethnic studies programs….

2.       WE DEMAND the development of a recurring and comprehensive identity and cultural humility training to be instated as a requirement for all faculty in all departments….

Stanford stanforddailycred

These are among a list of “demands” recently issued by the Who’s Teaching Us Coalition, a student group at Stanford University. Demand #1 would require that the new ethnic studies professors bypass normal promotion and tenure standards. Demand #2 would require all faculty, in all of Stanford’s Nobel-Prize-stuffed departments, to spend time practicing how to avoid stepping on racial and ethnic toes.

WTU also wants the Stanford speech code to include “a dedicated, responsive platform for reporting and tracking microaggressions from faculty,” with a requirement that these accusations be used in promotion and tenure decisions. It wants the next-appointed president and provost to be non-white and either female or transgender. It wants Stanford to require all students to take two courses “that address diversity as it relates to issues of power, privilege, and systems of oppression.”

The list goes on, but you get the idea. Egalitarian activists on other campuses have issued similar manifestos, especially in connection with incidents like the protests at the University of Missouri and at Yale last fall.

THE WESTERN CIV CONNECTION

But the Stanford case is significant because of the circumstance. WTU issued its statement not in response to a racial incident, as at Mizzou, but to a petition for reinstating a Western Civilization requirement.

The petition came from The Stanford Review, an independent, conservative-leaning magazine, which published a lengthy case for why students should learn the Western sources of “values like free speech, due process, skepticism of authority, rationalism, and equality under the law.” The petition attracted enough signatures to be put to a straw vote by students (a straw vote only: the curriculum is set by faculty and administration). It lost six to one. The campus newspaper warned that accepting the proposal would mean centering Stanford education on “upholding white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations.” WTU was of course vehemently opposed and engaged in some obstruction.

Louis Agassiz Statue

In one sense, the opposition is hardly surprising. Many egalitarians on the left are proponents of postmodernism, multiculturalism and a race/class/gender approach to all issues, and thus have a hostile attitude toward Western Civ. In the late 1980s, Stanford was the locus of another such critique in a previous cycle of political correctness. The university had long had a Western Civ requirement, like Columbia, the University of Chicago, and many other top institutions, but it had been watered down to a sequence on Western Culture, which included readings from the Hebrew Bible and Homer to Marx and Freud. Even so, it was too much for the left. Noted intellectual historian Jesse Jackson led a cast of hundreds chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho! Western culture's got to go.”

In that previous cycle, one of the dominant complaints was that the canon of works in courses on civilization, literature, philosophy, and other fields consisted mainly of writings by Dead White European Males. Bill King, president of the Black Student Union at the time, complained that Stanford is

denying the freshmen and women a chance to broaden their perspective to accept both Hume and Imhotep [27th century BC Egyptian vizier, sage, architect, astrologer, and chief minister to the pharaoh Djoser], Machiavelli and Al Malgili [15th century Algerian Islamic scholar and activist], Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft [18th century English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women’s rights]. . . . The Western culture program as it is presently structured around a core list and an outdated philosophy of the West being Greece, Europe, and Euro-America is wrong, and worse, it hurts people mentally and emotionally in ways that are not even recognized.

Ancient Egyptian and Islamic civilizations are certainly worth studying in a proper cross-cultural education, but they are not the sources of the student activists’ outlook. That outlook comes from the same category of Dead White European Males the students don’t want to study.

Many conservatives advocate courses in Western civilization as the source of Enlightenment ideas: reason, science, and progress; individualism, the pursuit of happiness, and individual rights; freedom, including free markets and free speech, limited government, and the rule of law. These were indeed the achievements of modern European and American thought. They were advances in human civilization though their value lies not in their Western origins but in their truth about the good society as such, and they have been adopted in many other cultures.

THE WESTERN ANTI-MODERNS

At the same time, however, the anti-modern Counter-Enlightenment that arose in the late 18th century and still dominates many disciplines opposed these themes. The European thinkers of this era are the sources of the most common student claims.

Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), for example, claimed that civilization had destroyed what he thought was the equality among primitive men by introducing differences in wealth, status, and achievement. Rousseau denounced “moral or political inequality, the different privileges, which some men enjoy to the prejudice of others; such as that of being more rich, more honored, more powerful or even in a position to exact obedience.” Note the premises: inequality is odious; standards are conventional, not objective; and one person’s gain is another’s loss. All of those premises animate contemporary egalitarianism. In addition, Rousseau elevated emotion over reason, dwelling on the hurtfulness of the invidious comparisons that inequality brings—a first step toward the touchy obsession with “microaggressions” on campuses today.

The primary source of campus egalitarianism, however, is Karl Marx (1818-1883). His theory of class conflict between capitalists and workers has been extended to other classes: race, sex, ethnicity, sexual preference, and sexual identity, doubtless with fragmentations yet to be devolved. But Marx’s conceptual framework is unchanged:

  • Individuals are socially constituted by their class identity; not by individual character, choice, or achievement.
  • Class conflict is asymmetrical. On every dimension, one class is dominant, the other subordinate—the conceptual scheme is that of oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and victims. Hence the many references in campus manifestoes to “marginalized” people who have grievances.
  • The subordinate, oppressed, victim class has the moral high ground against its opposite.

The asymmetry is a fixture of campus activism. The black woman at Yale who felt aggrieved by the possibility that a Halloween costume might slight her racial identity felt entitled to scream obscenities at a white male professor.

karl marx wikimedia commons

In the same vein, those who see themselves as disadvantaged because of their ethnicity complain of “cultural appropriation” when others adopt the symbols, language, dress, or other tokens of the ethnic heritage they identify with—like the Latina soccer player at Oberlin College who fumed when a white Anglo teammate used the term “futbol.” in a friendly email. But no white Yankee would even think of complaining that much of the world has “appropriated”—i.e., seen the value of and embraced—ideas and values that first arose in the West.

The postmodern movement of the late 20th century, finally, sought to undermine all objective standards of beauty, truth, and value, leaving only the differing attitudes and standards accepted by convention among fragmented classes, with language not a medium for discussion but an instrument of power—as the very terms presuppose. “Aggression” means launching an unprovoked attack; “appropriation” means taking something away from someone. Even language that is clearly rude does neither.

These strands in Western thought are the real sources of identity politics on campus. Students who want to understand, defend, and perhaps question their assumptions should be the first to sign up for Western Civ. Opposing such courses will not change the fact that they are dwelling in the night of the living DWEMs.

探討

Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

Roger Donway, “The Postmodern Assault on Reason.

Bradford P. Wilson, “Looking into the (Ed School) Abyss.

大衛·凱利

作者簡介:

大衛·凱利

大衛·凱利是阿特拉斯協會的創始人。作為一名專業的哲學家、教師和暢銷書作家,他一直是客觀主義的主要支援者超過25年。

David Kelley Ph.D
About the author:
David Kelley Ph.D

David Kelley founded The Atlas Society (TAS) in 1990 and served as Executive Director through 2016. In addition, as Chief Intellectual Officer, he was responsible for overseeing the content produced by the organization: articles, videos, talks at conferences, etc.. Retired from TAS in 2018, he remains active in TAS projects and continues to serve on the Board of Trustees.

凱利是一位專業的哲學家、教師和作家。1975年獲得普林斯頓大學哲學博士學位后,他加入了瓦薩學院哲學系,教授各級課程。他還曾在布蘭迪斯大學教授哲學,並經常在其他校區講課。

凱利的哲學著作包括倫理學、認識論和政治學方面的原創作品,其中許多作品以新的深度和新的方向發展了客觀主義思想。他是認識論論文感官的證據》的作者;客觀主義中的真理與寬容,論客觀主義運動中的問題;粗獷的個人主義:仁慈的自私基礎;以及《推理的藝術》,這是一本廣泛使用的入門邏輯教科書,現已出版第 5 版。

凱利曾就廣泛的政治和文化主題發表演講和出版。他關於社會問題和公共政策的文章發表在 《哈珀斯》、《科學》、《理性》、《哈佛商業評論》、《弗里曼》、《論原則》等雜誌上。在1980年代,他經常為 《巴倫週刊》財經和商業雜誌 撰寫有關平等主義、移民、最低工資法和社會保障等問題的文章。

他的著作 《一個人的生活:個人權利和福利國家》 批判了福利國家的道德前提,並捍衛了維護個人自主、責任和尊嚴的私人替代方案。1998年,他出現在約翰·斯托塞爾(John Stossel)的ABC/TV特別節目“貪婪”中,引發了一場關於資本主義倫理的全國性辯論。

作為國際公認的客觀主義專家,他廣泛地講授安·蘭德、她的思想和作品。他是電影《阿特拉斯聳聳肩》的顧問,也是《阿特拉斯聳聳肩:小說、電影、哲學》的編輯

 

主要作品(部分):

概念與自然:對現實主義轉向的評論(道格拉斯·拉斯穆森和道格拉斯·登厄伊爾)”,《理性論文》第 42 期,第 1 期,(2021 年夏季);這篇對最近一本書的評論包括對概念的本體論和認識論的深入探討。

知識的基礎。關於客觀主義認識論的六講。

存在的首要地位”和“感知的認識論”,傑斐遜學院,聖地牙哥,1985年7月

普遍性和歸納”,在GKRH會議上的兩次演講,達拉斯和安娜堡,1989年3月

懷疑論”,約克大學,多倫多,1987年

自由意志的本質”,波特蘭研究所的兩場演講,1986年10月

現代性黨”,卡托政策報告,2003年5月/6月; 導航員,2003年11月;一篇被廣泛引用的文章,關於前現代、現代(啟蒙)和後現代觀點之間的文化分歧。

"I Don't Have To" (IOS Journal, Volume 6, Number 1, April 1996) and “I Can and I Will” (The New Individualist, Fall/Winter 2011); Companion pieces on making real the control we have over our lives as individuals.

Libertad civil
Educación
Historia