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Monday, March 11, 2024

What happens when universities abandon the pursuit of truth and instead....

...are "securing brutalism in the world that they were founded to oppose?"

It's a question raised by Jeffrey Tucker in an article in the Epoch Times titled, What Happened to Intellectual Life? In view of the investment parents make in the higher education of their children, it's an important question and Tucker's analysis is spot on.

He begins by mentioning a hoax in a "prestigious journal" about cellular function. "The authors were entirely fake," he tells us and the "text and images were generated by artificial intelligence and packed with unbearably obvious gibberish." And yet, it got by the "expert scientists" vetting the journal's submissions. Hmm...gives you some insight into the experts, eh?

Tucker and a friend were discussing the problem and pulled up an AI site. He submitted the first thing that came to mind asking for a paper proving that humans should live in refrigerator boxes. (Check out the street people in any major city and you'll probably find real life examples.) At any rate, "within seconds" Tucker had a "compelling paper with complete arguments and citations and every accouterment of scholarship in modern academia." Yes, we should all live in refrigerator boxes (and eat bugs I suppose).

Tucker's experiment illustrates the "great meltdown of elite academic culture" and the statistics back it up. Last year, over 10,000 published papers on medical research had to be retracted due to scientific fraud. (Source) Many of the bogus studies come from "paper mills" and the peer reviewers who are often paid large sums, simply pass them by. According to the source:

The products of paper mills often look like regular articles but are based on templates in which names of genes or diseases are slotted in at random among fictitious tables and figures. Worryingly, these articles can then get incorporated into large databases used by those working on drug discovery.

Tucker calls once famous and respected universities like Oxford and Salamanca "living ruins of what we used to call intellectual life." The high ideals of earlier ages in  these "sanctuaries set up with internal freedom for its scholars and security from corruptions of the outside world" with a desire to pursue truth has almost totally disappeared. Instead "The university is expanding and securing brutalism in the world." Judging from attacks on pro-life and conservative speakers in recent years, the search for truth is dead on campus. Embrace the woke agenda of abortion, transgender mutilation of children, etc. or face silencing and violent pushback. Check this out!


It isn't just conservative speakers invited to campus being attacked; it's professors who don't carry water for the woke agenda. Tucker addresses that as well. 

Many [professors] have been forced out in the past few years -- railroaded out by the cancel brigade....What remains is an idealogical red guard that has captured most of professional academia, imposing an orthodoxy that fails every test of rationality....The world has every reason to fear the hegemon of the university and its imperial ambions to wreck the idealism of the people on the outside.

What is the sad situation at present? "The world is starved for high ideals, truth-seeking, and intellectual courage." The university system that was founded over a millennium ago to enlighten a dark world is in free fall. Rather than encouraging the search for truth, it attacks and silences the majority. That movement is led by the elitists. Joe Biden reflected it in his ranting rage during the state of the union even insulting and attacking the Supreme Court Justices sitting in front of him. Biden the Barbarian epitomizes our rude and ruthless oligarchs. And they are doing all they can to make sure the academies serve their purpose and create little barbaric clones in their own image.

The good news is that the universities are in decline. According to a 2020 Hechinger report hundreds of colleges and universities are in financial stress. Of course, ivies like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton with their multi-billion dollar endowments don't have to worry much, but many other universities are in trouble. COVID exacerbated the problem. With luck, many of those polluting the minds of students will fail and disappear. No loss there!

But what's the real solution? Tucker says, "Everything we once called academic civilization needs to be rebuilt from the ground up." He doesn't tell us how, but assures us that it won't come from "established academia." Rather, it "will take place within new institutions." 

What are they? Where will they come from? Tucker doesn't say, but I think we're seeing the tiny roots sprouting around the country. 

The tree of knowledge will grow from the seeds planted in new, small colleges and universities that are combining academics with teaching trades and others like the solid Catholic schools embracing and fostering the faith. Then there are the academic movements at the lower level like the K-12 Chesterton Academies and the Hillsdale charter schools focused on classical education. Also, homeschool families are growing self-reliant kids with critical thinking skills who are challenging the ridiculous assertion that they lack social skills by achieving incredible success in a variety of areas.

This is not the time to wallow in gloom and doom but to do all we can to foster the healthy young plants that will feed us in the future with trees bearing rich fruit: the true, the good, and the beautiful. Let's pray for it!

20 comments:

  1. I liked your article very much. Like the previous article "Sunday Meditation: The Nature of Love" it is just good stuff. You have a way to communicate the Faith.

    BTW we made our weekly Lenten pilgrimage to Our Lady of LaSalette during which we remembered your intentions.

    God bless

    Richard

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  2. Thanks Richard, prayers are much appreciated as are your kind words.

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  3. My advice to young people these days is to learn a trade and forego college/university. Globalism and increasingly, the satanic world of A.I. are eliminating jobs requiring a college degree. We have to return to a society that knows how to make things and fix things. Plumbers, auto mechanics, and electricians are in demand today a lot more than political science degree majors and definitely people with doctorate degrees in feminist, queer oppression, fluid genderism.

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  4. Picking the wrong "trade" can be a hazard as well - think of picking buggy repair at the turn of the twentieth. And there can only be so many plumbers.

    Hillsdale is a sore spot because they have plumped for taxpayers to pay for their charter schools, ignoring the fact that the pied Piper will have to eventually be paid. And there will be hidden government strings to the money.

    Fortunately, online ed allows college degree to be quilted together, while working, without the need to submit to edmortgage (means deadly embrace) at age 17.

    Finally you rightly decry the hoaxes being perpetrated on academic journals but fail to point out the hoaxing of the GOP by president warp speed. I just watched Rick Grenells astonishing video declaring him "the most gay friendly president ever". We seen to be locked into this lockdown deepfake former president like a victim of Stockholm syndrome. There are alternatives if the trumpsters would only wake up from their deep coma.

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  5. Do you have to bring up Trump in every comment, rohrbachs? I'm no fan, but I live in the real world where one sometimes is faced with all bad choices, some worse than others. Sometimes not to choose is to choose the worst.

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  6. Do you have to keep defending president warp speed. Is there a way you could apologize for having banned my ahem bang on accurate comments about him before we had to have him shoved down our throats in 2020 and 2024?

    Here's just one of my comments "I don't need them to grovel but trump and wife don't seem repentant about their past lives, leading me to assume they could revert to type just as easily. Most of his accomplishments have been on paper or hot air. Even Judge Neil "Scalia - walking around person's" Gorsuch.
    Alan Keyes, while not perfect, is a lot more impeccable ( and thus less vulnerable to feminist whinging). He has suffered a good deal from media abuse over not embracing daughters lesbian lifestyle. He acutely understands the problems of today.
    He deserves our support for 2020."


    Rick Grenell is begging to be rebutted but he says trump was good with obergefell*from the beginning*. I hadn't known that, that's why I'm sharing it now. It is clear that we would not have had the genital mutilations and suicide gaslighting of parents now if someone truly conservative would have been president in 2016.

    Now Trump's got a grip on the GOP platform that had promised to abolish abortion as it did slavery. How sure are you that he is not a Democrat plant and if so even more dangerous than Biden.

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    1. You always have plenty to say on attack, but I haven't seen much criticism of Joe Biden. Nor have I seen one word offering a real solution. Alan Keyes was not on the ballot in 2020. Trump may very well be part of the uniparty. I have no illusions, but I will not take the position of those who say don't vote. We are going to have a president. Who will do the least damage? That's my question. And then I will shrug my shoulders about politics and beg the King of Kings for help and pray for the country trusting in God to bring good out of every bad situation, because I believe that, "All things work together for good to those who love the Lord and serve according to His purpose." (Romans 8:28) So I will try to love the Lord more and serve Him more faithfully.

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  7. Mr rohrbachs:

    "The meaning of HOAX is to trick into believing or accepting as genuine something false and often preposterous." - Webster

    Did Trump perpetrate the hoax or was he a victim of it himself? Was the hoax actually perpetrated by the medical community, Big Pharma and the Deep State both nationally or internationally?

    If you cannot answer these questions then you garner sympathy for Trump as victim. Trump would never have been able to stage a comeback but for people like you and Big Fanny in Georgia.

    If Trump gets back into the White House then you have no one to blame but yourself.

    God bless

    Richard W Comerford

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  8. Trump facilitated the hoax while pretending to be naive. He's a reality actor from way back and he played according to script.

    Keyes or another true conservative was not on 2020 ballot because magans couldn't keep their eyes off the father of warp speed's Twitter scroll.

    It's pathetic how we let our country implode in 2020 and fail to say the buck stopped at trump. Even if he was stupid enough to be gulled by fauci he has no business to be in office. And now we're getting fooled a third time.

    GOP had the platform to abolish abortion but it won't by the time trump and family are through with it. Prolife was a hoax too, Dobbs a (less than) nothing burger.

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    1. Mr R
      re: Trump facilitated the hoax while pretending to be naive.

      And you know this how?

      God bless

      Richard W Comerford

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    2. Mr R
      re: Keyes or another true conservative was not on 2020 ballot because magans couldn't keep their eyes off the father of warp speed's Twitter scroll.

      Maybe this is the reason Keyes was not on the ballot:

      "Aside from his Presidential runs, he was the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Maryland against Paul Sarbanes in 1988 and Barbara Mikulski in 1992, as well as in Illinois against Barack Obama in 2004. Keyes lost all three elections by wide margins."

      God bless

      Richard W Comerford

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    3. Mr R
      re: Even if he was stupid enough to be gulled by fauci he has no business to be in office.

      He kept us out of war. Unusual for an American President. And he was pro-life. At least much more pro-life then you appear to be.

      God bless

      Richard W Comerford

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    4. Mr r
      re: "GOP had the platform to abolish abortion but it won't by the time trump and family are through with it."

      Again. You know this how?

      Your blind hatred for Trump and his family only generates sympathy for him.

      God bless

      Richard W Comerford

      Delete
  9. I doubt if the babies saved in red states after Dobbs would agree. A study indicate that 32,000 babies are alive today because of Dobbs.

    https://www2.cbn.com/news/us/32000-babies-saved-after-roe-v-wade-overturned-its-triumph

    Laws have a teaching effect. Those states that outlawed abortion sent a clear message to their moms and many chose life. Are those little ones really "(less than) nothing burgers?"

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  10. You won't make any headway with baby pictures, any more than those who use them to support ivf.

    Dobbs taught that abortion was something states could decide, which crippled the best argument for abolition. So *all the babies who get aborted* from now on can haunt you. We could have had abolition. Now it's exponentially harder thanks to president rape exceptions and his brilliant states rights strategy.

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  11. "Mr rohrbachs:
    Re: "Trump facilitated the hoax while pretending to be naive."

    And you know this how?

    I do not know how much the Trump organization is paying you but you are certainly being helpful for Trump's re-election efforts.

    God bless

    Richard W Comerford"

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  12. Mr rohrbachs
    Re: "Prolife was a hoax too, Dobbs a (less than) nothing burger."

    The pro-life community points out that hundreds of thousands of innocent lives (and immortal souls) have been saved since Dobbs.

    No man of good will would begrudge even one saved life.

    God bless

    Richard W Comerford"

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  13. "Recall Kavanaugh’s concurring argument that, because the Constitution says nothing about abortion, it is “neutral” regarding the issue, and therefore the Supreme Court should also be, as he says several times, “scrupulously neutral.” Just as there were those amici, he tells us, who would have the Court uphold Roe’s abortion right, there were others who would have the Court declare the fetus a person under the Constitution, thereby requiring the states to prohibit abortion. The Dobbs decision, he continues, rejects both positions. The Constitution, he tells us, is neither pro-choice nor pro-life. With Dobbs, he concludes, the Constitution’s and the Court’s original neutrality is restored.

    The problem is that Kavanaugh is wrong. Dobbs is anything but neutral to abortion. In fact, it remains stubbornly “pro-choice,” indeed, just as “pro-choice” as Roe. It has only moved that choice from the individual woman to the “people and their representatives,” as the Justices repeatedly put it.

    Nor is it even possible for the Court to be neutral on abortion. While it is true that the Constitution does not mention abortion, it does mention life. Kavanaugh’s position, then, entails that the life of the newborn child and the life of the unborn child are treated in entirely different ways. From a Constitutional point of view, the life of the latter would not qualify as life. Otherwise, the issue could not be turned over to legislative bodies."

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