Weaker Ideas

Kim du Toit has an excellent education post up at Geopoliticus, The "Power" Elite, inspired by the piece from which I got last Saturday's Quote of the Day, and another piece from Pajamas Media by Mary Grabar that I strongly recommend as well. Kim's pretty insistent that you read both before his essay. I concur. Read 'em all.

I have one quibble. Professor Grabar says (and Kim quotes):

I blame it on women, specifically those women who, instead of working their ways into the club through rules of evidence, common values, and objective scholarship, have pushed in their alternate “ways of knowing.” The feminization of education has led to the idolization of Oprah. In the matriarchal upheaval in the academy, the great works of the canon that draw from our Western tradition, like Milton’s majestic Paradise Lost, are replaced by crudely rendered emotive investigations into oppression, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or any of the “multicultural” offerings in the latest anthology.

In addition to eviscerating the canon to add women’s writing, of whatever dubious value (personal letters, diary entries, popular books), the academic feminists’ project was to attack the base of our way of thinking, which they correctly traced back to the notion of a monotheistic God who created a universe with an order based on reason, however indiscernible that at times might be to those he endowed with reason. The matriarchs’ attacks began on linearity, logic, argumentation — the very notion of the individual thinking self. Theorists promoting the “maternal presence in the classroom” accused even the thesis statement of the freshman five-paragraph essay of having embedded within it masculine goal-oriented thinking that in a rapacious manner eliminates weaker ideas.

My only quibble is that it didn't begin with women in academia.

The denigration of reason began with Kant - a point Ayn Rand made, in her own inimitable way, repeatedly.