Should the Right Create "Activist" Universities?

Yes.

From time to time, I will write short pieces on the principles that animate Montana Classical College.

The Problem of the Activist University

Do new universities and colleges of the NEAR future need to be "activist" in pushing students toward the Right? The answer proposed here is: yes.

Many think that the Left corrupted our universities by making them politically partisan instead of truth seeking institutions. Many classical liberals or conservatives think, therefore, that it would be a grave error for the Right to respond in kind by making its own partisan educational institutions—that they too would make the solemn error of distorting truth seeking by subordinating it to practice.

There is something to be said on behalf of the conservatives. If or to the extent that an institution is devoted to changing the world in a particular way, it runs the risk of both willfully and unintentionally ignoring evidence that suggests that such particular change cuts against the truth. If one runs a pharmaceutical company, then viruses look like financial opportunities. Such a person might presuppose that a disease that kills the old and the unhealthy should be solved through a massively profitable vaccine rather than through a serious call for citizens to attend to their health in a big way. In other words—and it is almost too trite to say this—one’s interests threaten to distort one’s perception of how the world is.

But, there is a deeper reason than those an average conservative might put forward. We can become so intent on changing things that we ignore whether such change is either possible or whether it is actually good. To put this one more way: seeking the truth is like the mind’s attempt to see the world as it is without changing it or in a sense without touching it in a way that moves it; action is about moving the world and making it otherwise, and all action presupposes an understanding of what things are and how they should be. So, a university that pushes its students to the Right might make them so overcommitted to their presuppositions that their thinking becomes ossified into dogmatism at the same moment that such students think that they are liberated from dogmatism because they are not on the Left.

Such concerns can never be lost sight of. However…

A few arrows against these well-meaning conservatives

1) As is well documented, our top universities have reliably moved Left for a long time, with most others following suit, just more or less slowly. Programs that once served as guardians of the Western great books are being axed wholesale or diluted one book at a time.

2) Only the tiniest handful of schools would be prepared to openly say that you ought to love your own nation more than others, and that you should be prepared to be a citizen and guardian of your own country. Most promote the very opposite. They promote deracination, the forgetting of biological differences between the sexes, and preparation for being mere consumers in some kind of technocratic world state that attempts to extinguish the possibility of genuinely noble action. This is what global citizenship means.

In other words, our universities—and NOT only our universities—seem to seek a world in which the very conditions that make citizenship and truth seeking possible are eliminated. The quest for equity overtakes and overwhelms these goals. The hope to sustain the so-called liberal world order, which is to say, making the world vassal states of a deracinating ideology (liberalism, as noble as it tried to be in its origin, has fallen steeply) logically points toward a world state, since that is the only way to gain the kind of monopoly of force that can actually (potentially) eliminate all conflict. The actors who hope for such a world see the existence of separate and distinct states as obstacles to equity and commercial progress. A world state, or just a contemporary state that hopes to eliminate wrong think, has and will have technology at its disposal that will make it increasingly hard to think thoughts that question the presuppositions of equity and universal human rights, among many other things.

This all might sound like it goes too far or that it exaggerates. But hasn’t the media industrial complex tipped its hand a few too many times in the last couple years to think otherwise?

An activist university to the Right is required that will lead students to fight, across separate spheres and mediums, against the vast array of forces pushing for the world described above (not everyone sees the way in which their actions point to or presuppose some kind of world state; that is what our Nationalism vs. Globalism course will try to show).

3) It follows that more institutions need to be built from the ground up that openly promote citizenship and nationalism. They need to be insulated from the prestige chasing of academics who know more and more about less and less.

As Camille Paglia points out in Sex, Art, and American Culture, universities need to cultivate a class of TEACHERS who are generalists; who don't just teach their pet class in preparation for their next publication. These teachers will be life long learners who have learned broadly across disciplines. Teachers need to be able to see things from the perspective of eternity; or at least from the perspective of thousands of years. This helps us see how incredibly new some of our conventions are; and also how old some of our problems are that these conventions attempt to solve. Paglia’s thinking on this is part of why MCC hopes to offer courses across disciplines; in the Nationalism and Globalism course, I have read and studied some of the books many times; in some cases, I am reading them for the first time.

Paglia hates being associated with the Right, but she often is because she has never lost sight of the importance of NATURE and the limitations and possibilities it sets upon human life. So, a college that is devoted to the understanding of NATURE is naturally Right leaning. Nature is both complex and simple. But it is a term of DISTINCTION and DIFFERENTIATION. The Left seeks to eliminate deep forms of distinction and difference.

The attempt to understand nature, a fixed limit on what changes a thing can undergo, is the thing that separates the Right activist university from the Left activist university. It may be the case that men of action from the Right will not always understand nature as well as one who is more contemplative, BUT, they will fight for a world in which such a contemplative understanding remains possible.

Likewise, a university that cultivates nobility in its students prepares those students for deeds and tasks that will set them apart from others. They will seek out possibilities for extension to make themselves excellent. Such students would be worthy defenders of their nation state. They will see that to live a good life, their nation must be separate from others. Not necessarily bellicose, but certainly with its own special traditions, with its own way of life.

—Brian C. Wilson

@MTClassical