Few students were willing to vocally press any injustice-claim upon their peers.īut something has changed since I graduated. Everyone was-to use his word- nice. The only universally insisted-upon truth was that there was not necessarily any such thing as a universal truth. I read Bloom a little over a decade ago, when I was a senior at Yale, and his account of the campus climate still rang totally true. The American university lost its self-justification because it could provide no account of justice aside from a cheap, pseudo-Socratic “I don’t know.” By failing to present a clear value proposition, Bloom argued, universities were failing to educate-to draw students out from within themselves toward something higher. The university has become handmaiden to the metaversity.Īllan Bloom’s canonical The Closing of the American Mind is largely remembered for its high-brow yet demotic exposition of how the American university became so committed to value-neutrality that it lost the ability to render a compelling account of its own value. College is not more important now than ever. The woke ideas gestating for decades in academia have not suddenly swept through society because of their inherent strength, but rather because they are uniquely well-suited to shallow, impulsive minds. Our obsession “with gender” may owe less to Judith Butler and John Money than to Tumblr and TikTok. The true roots of our societal obsession “with race” may owe less Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw than it does to Facebook and Twitter.

These students arrive with brains pre-wired to rebel against the university’s most basic cognitive demand: reflective contemplation. Rather, colleges are being reshaped by the students. College campuses no longer shape young souls. But while it is necessary to understand the faulty intellectual wiring that has been laid within the university, it is insufficient to explain the power surge that has short-circuited our public discourse and-it seems-essentially fried so many bright young brains.Ī new force has emerged that deforms young minds before they ever arrive at university: the social internet. Peter Wood’s essay provides two necessary and overdue contributions to understanding the madness that has gripped America’s college campuses-and by extension our ruling class: a forthright recognition of false political language and an account of the sociological origin of the Critical Race Theory movement.

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