AcademicDisasterGate

How long will the professoriate be able to maintain its balancing act that values fashionable, politically correct ideas over intellectual virtue?

According to Hoover Institution scholar Peter Berkowitz, the ClimateGate scandal is just one more example of the fragility of academia’s hold on its lofty status.

These days, the undergraduate curriculum is so disjointed from years of deconstruction that only a handful of schools like Columbia and the University of Chicago can even agree on a common set of books that students must read to become familiar with Western history and culture.

While some professors have loosened requirements in order to teach “boutique classes,” focusing on their areas of expertise, others have done it to attract more students to their classes.

However, Berkowitz speculates that the real reason for tossing higher education standards aside is that in order to function on our nation’s campuses where “everything is relative,” these faculty members want to believe that “objective knowledge is impossible.”

This philosophy has severely damaged the integrity of scholarship, “since scholars are likely to have colleagues and graduate students they support and whose careers they wish to advance. . . and the peer review process gives scholars ample opportunity to reward friends and punish enemies.”

The most problematic aspect of this issue is that “our universities don’t recognize they have a problem.”

In fact, faculty members are quite likely to dismiss public concerns about curriculum, peer review, hiring and promotion and tenure decisions “as cynically calling into question their good character.”

Although “professors are supposed to serve as guardians of authoritative knowledge and exemplars of serious and systematic inquiry,” Berkowitz views our nation’s campuses as a breeding ground for fashionable but toxic ideas that undermine intellectual virtue and “give intellectual vice ample room to flourish.

Just look at ClimateGate.”

Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.