The breakdown of college and country

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The dreadful events that have afflicted colleges this spring are symptoms of a mortal disease, contracted long ago and metastasizing now. If it is not cured, it means destruction, not only for colleges, but for the societies that need them.
The disease is mortal because it affects the central purpose of college. The word college means partnership. Partnership for what? For millennia, the answer was learning, especially learning the best and highest things. The young need to address themselves to these things at the point of maturity and before being immersed in careers. Whatever those careers, they will be directed toward these purposes or they will leave. Typically, the young students work with adult faculty members who have devoted their lives to knowing these fundamentals. Done properly, it is a wonderful life for everyone involved. Its purpose is not, however, to change the world, but to understand it.
Now a new purpose has been adopted. Radiating from the historicism and nihilism that make up postmodern thought, colleges are now explicit that knowledge of abiding things is impossible. Everything changes. It then follows quickly that we should be the ones to change it. We must join a cause. This is simply the opposite of college’s original, long-standing purpose. It leads to madness.
One of the benefits of college pursued in the old way is that students learn to think before they act. There is so much to know, and knowing is actually higher than doing, the only basis upon which doing can be justified. This is difficult for young and ambitious people, of course, because they are ready to get on. They must learn to discipline themselves and find things out. They must learn that their own careers, vital to them, are not the most important thing. Everyone lives a life and does work. The question is, who does that well?
A partial solution lies in a better disposition toward the right to have an opinion, which surely we do. Wars break out on college campuses because everything revolves around opinions about a cause. Sober-minded people inevitably come to regret the suppression of opinion that follows.
A better solution lies in remembering that every act of learning involves the alteration of an opinion. We learn in the classics that the virtuous soul, possessed of the moral and intellectual qualities that make up a good human being, is open to the world. Aristotle invites us to remember that the source of knowledge of a thing is not in the opinion of anyone, but in the thing itself. The conversion of opinion to knowledge is the classic way of describing philosophy.
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This spring many colleges simply ceased to function. They could not hold class. Commencements were canceled. And no serious person can feel anything but sympathy with and anger on behalf of the Jews who were ridiculed, threatened, and actually harmed. These colleges became war zones, because war is actually what they are organized to make these days. That is a very different activity from learning.
This collapse is already spreading outside colleges into many places in the country, especially parts of our cities that are effectively no-go zones. This collapse is driven by many of the same principles that are destroying colleges. In the end, we must save our colleges to save our nation and the civilization of which it is an anchor.
Dr. Larry P. Arnn is the twelfth president of Hillsdale College.