From Peter Lawler, a professor of politics and political philosophy at at Berry College, here's a piece titled "
What Gov. Scott Walker Misses About Higher Education/Most Republican leaders, including potential presidential candidate Scott Walker, don’t understand that focusing college solely on careers serves leftism."
You really do find in higher education a lot of complacent politically correctness, relativism, and partisan self-indulgence. “Civic engagement” for college credit seems often to mean enlightening the rubes in the local communities about their true interests, which are almost always in the direction of redistribution in the service of equality, green initiatives, insufficient liberation regarding “relational autonomy,” sensitivity to diversity, and so forth....
But if Walker had looked more closely, he would have seen that on most of our campuses political correctness and careerism now go hand in hand....
Rod Dreher at The American Conservative reads Lawler and concludes:
It really does fall to us conservatives who appreciate and support the humanities to stand up to people like Gov. Walker. They mean well, but what they don’t understand is that it is difficult to impossible to quantify the value of learning in the humanities. You can’t map virtue on a spreadsheet, and you can’t do a pie chart to demonstrate why it helps the bottom line to learn the best that humanity has thought, written, composed, painted, and so forth. As Lawler avers, the wisdom embedded in the humanities, as traditionally understood (read: not “Queering John Locke,” “Post-Colonial Narratives in Lady Gaga,” etc.), offer the only firm standpoint from which to defend the human person against the Leviathan of Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley.
IN THE COMMENTS: traditionalguy said:
Berry College is the private north Georgia. Liberal arts school founded to extend college opportunity to poor mountain folks that had no chance at scholarships to big State Schools. Berry school is now the focal point for College scholarships for abandoned children that have been raised in foster families under a Foundation that donates the money for both. That money comes from one man who sells chicken....I mean Chik-Fil-A sandwiches.
I doubt this is directed against Walker. It may help him by making reform of education the issue.
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