Ayaan Hirsi Ali Shares Her Thoughts on the Anti-Israel Campus Protests
“Now we are witnessing the completion of the university’s unraveling.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has always been an important voice on issues related to this.
She writes at Substack:
The Contagion of University Pro-Hamas Protests
The situation unfolding across college campuses in the United States is a complicated one, and bears reflection. I do not propose anything definitive, but I wanted to share a few thoughts.
A Very Brief History of the University:
The first question we must ask is “What are universities even for?” It is not an easy one. They began as institutions to train clerics in theology and philosophy, and evolved gradually into places for training gentleman scholars. Oxford and Cambridge in the 19th century did not live up to the model St. John Henry Newman describes in The Idea of a University, but they did a much better job than we do today. Over time, led by the Germans, universities became multiversities, where scholars ceased to attempt to build a comprehensive view of the world, instead locking themselves in siloed sub-fields.
Next, American universities led the transition away from scholarship and towards professionalization. People started studying “business arts,” as if business were the same sort of activity as the pursuit of truth for its own sake. I have nothing against business. Making a good living for one’s family is noble. But insofar as it is an art, it is a servile one, not a liberal one. Accompanying professionalization was, paradoxically, radicalization. People who wanted to get on with life started studying to be accountants and engineers; radicals took over what remained of the liberal arts. This decay is best chronicled by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, a book I encourage you all to read.
Now we are witnessing the completion of the university’s unraveling. We hardly even produce professionals now, but activists who take a few Zoom classes on racialized communism and spend the rest of their time scrolling TikTok and indulging resentment. Middle managers may not be philosophers, but at least they do something useful. A degree in Queer Theory prepares you for no life beyond perpetual adolescent whining. The professors of the 60’s gave up the classics to focus on changing the world. Well, they succeeded. Moral formation has been replaced by sweet, glorious self-pity and the narcissistic pursuit of utopia. Beauty is something to be deconstructed by art and architecture students in ever-uglier buildings. And truth? In their minds, there is no such thing. Only power remains. How terrible it must be to see the whole of existence through culturally Marxist eyes! Terrible, but, at least, cognitively undemanding.
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