The politically-correct, identity-politics education, of which Professor Gates is a champion, has destroyed the historical purpose of education, leaving us an ignorant and divided people.
More consequential than Professor Gates' racist rant against a Cambridge police officer is the core rot in American education introduced by his academic specialty, black studies, which is an excrescence of 1960s and 1970s student radicalism.
Harvard's Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is, of course, not solely responsible for the muddle-headed mess that is American education today. But the politically-correct, identity-politics education, of which he is a champion, has destroyed the historical purpose of education, leaving us an ignorant and divided people.
Student radicals of the late 1960s and 1970s demanded "relevant" subjects, but those subjects gave them no useful knowledge or skills, thus leaving them outside the mainstream of employment and contributing to their bitterness and feelings that they were victims of discrimination.
Black studies and the other identity-politics specialties are radicalizing preparation for work as community organizers. Their effect is to establish a separate culture that is critical of the ethos upon which the United States was founded.
They produce attitudes like Michele Obama's declaration in February, 2008: "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country . . ." and her 1985 Princeton senior thesis: "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second." 

One of Professor Gates' notorious fellow black-studies teachers was City College of New York Professor Leonard Jeffries, who in the 1970s spoke of Africans as "sun people" and whites as "ice people." In forthright Afrocentist bigotry, he proclaimed that "whites are cold and cruel; blacks are warm and compassionate." Jeffries was outspokenly and viciously anti-Semitic, attributing the slave trade and racial oppression to the Jews (in fact, the slave trade originated, and still does, with African Muslims who bought captives in tribal warfare, then sold sold them to slave dealers).
Professor Gates' black studies field, and similar ones such as feminist studies, queer studies, and Hispanic studies, have steered too many callow students away from hard academic subjects and taught them to wallow in self-pity, to carry a chip on their shoulders, and to see the United States as an imperialistic, oppressor nation.
Near-bottom-of-the-list performance of American students in science and math, compared to students in other countries, can in part be laid at the feet of Professor Gates and his fellow professors in the racist and sexist academic specialties. Since the late 1960s, they have attracted too many aspiring, minority students away from analytical fields such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, economics and finance, and foreign languages. Academic standards in soft subjects like black studies, are lower than in the hard subjects, contributing to a proliferation of mediocrity.
Technological excellence is essential for economic competitiveness and the creation of jobs. We will almost never equal or beat Asian nations on production labor costs. We must stay ahead of the curve by inventing new technologies and new products. But soft subjects in school leave us unprepared.
In that regard, Yale University historian Donald Kagan, in an article he wrote for Commentary, quotes former president of Harvard University Derek Bok and Dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis, along with the late Allan Bloom.
Mr. Bok:
Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.
Mr. Lewis:
In a recently published book on the decline of Harvard, Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education, [Lewis] cites the excuse offered by one member of the faculty committee: the committee thought the best thing was to put a row of empty bottles up and see how the faculty wanted to fill them. Lewis responds, acidly:
The empty bottles could be filled with anything so long as the right department was offering it . . . But there is absolutely nothing that Harvard can expect students will know after they take three science or three humanities courses freely chosen from across the entire course catalog. The proposed general-education requirement gives up entirely on the idea of shared knowledge, shared values, even shared aspirations. In the absence of any pronouncement that anything is more important than anything else for Harvard students to know, Harvard is declaring that one can be an educated person in the 21st century without knowing anything about genomes, chromosomes, or Shakespeare.
Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) suggests the underlying malady:
As they see it, discourse on campus is seriously inhibited by the orthodoxies of political correctness. Affirmative action has undermined the integrity of faculty hiring. The great canonical masterpieces have been downgraded to make room for lesser works whose principal virtue seems to be that they were authored by women, African Americans, or third-world writers. The very ideals of truth and objectivity, along with conventional judgments of quality, are thought to be endangered by attacks from deconstructionists, feminists, Marxists, and other literary theorists who deny that such goals are even possible.
In addition to degrading the hard-subject competence of minority students, black studies, feminist studies, queer studies, and Hispanic studies are antithetical to Western civilization. Their perspective is that people are the victims of European, dead, white males.
Historically, education's function was character formation, which involved passing along to the younger generation the traditions of Western civilization. See "The Ideals of Education vs. Tyranny."
In his Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture (1933), Werner Jaeger capsules the classical Greek conception of education, another standard against which we can measure present-day secular education ideas. He wrote:
The ancients were persuaded that education and culture are not a formal art or an abstract theory, distinct from the objective historical structure of a nation's spiritual life. They held them to be embodied in literature, which is the real expression of all higher culture.
Plato said of the Iliad that Homer was the teacher of the Greeks, who dramatically presented the ideals of honesty, courage, loyalty, patriotism, friendship and other qualities that educated Greeks valued as essential aspects of Greek culture. In the "Symposium," speaking of the Iliad, Plato has Phaedrus say, "Now Achilles was quite aware, for he had been told by his mother, that he might avoid death and return home, and live to a good old age, if he abstained from slaying Hector. Nevertheless he gave his life to revenge his friend, and dared to die, not only in his defense, but after he was dead."
Professor Jaeger continues:
Education is the process by which a community preserves and transmits its physical and intellectual character . . . men can transmit their social and intellectual nature only by exercising the qualities through which they created it – reason and conscious will. Through the exercise of these qualities man commands a freedom of development which is impossible to other living creatures – if we disregard the theory of prehistoric mutations in species and confine ourselves to the world of experience.
Contrast this to the liberal-progressive-socialistic practice of multi-cultural and PC education, designed expressly to degrade and erase the foundational traditions of Western civilization, particularly Judeo-Christian morality.
I’m classically trained myself and a lover of it. Nevertheless, I’m also aware, as you seem to degrade, the fact until the 19th century, the idea that Slavery was wrong to be eliminated did not take hold. May I suggest a pun contained in a truism: nothing is merely black and white. Do I love what the ancient had given us? Yes. But I do not white-wash (pun) their contributions. You obviously bull-doze over the slavery upon which our wonderful Greeks created their civilization – the immorality of slavery appears irrelevant to you. And I’m certain you are aware that from the 1860′s to the 1960′s in our great country which I love, Slavery was replaced by institutionalized Racism. I suggest that the demand for reparations for slavery was inappropriate political remedy (by the 1960′s all former American slaves were dead). However, you should think of the situation now, 50 years after the end of institutionalized Racism, as the post-racial Obama era. What your looking at I believe is the beginning of the end of reparations to living victims of Racism. The reparations which required include the need to restore to a people their identity – apparently you yourself have not been as thoroughly trained as I have before open admissions at City College in the 1960′s. That apparent in your disregard of the psychological damage embodied in to many victims of Racism.
You apparently have little esteem for Gandhi. That’s manifest by your glorification of Death for the sake of Avenging one’s Friend. The end of war maybe impossible. And Napoleon’s lesson of giving out medals to soldiers has proven to be an effective and inexpensive reward for successful combat performance. But I’d like to deconstruct a remark of yours as follows: Don’t you agree that today, in the Obama era, it’s rather stupid to glorify sacrificing one’s life for the sake of revenge. Perhaps I’m a Jew, and therefore entitled to pride myself in my relatedness to the Jew Jesus. Jesus, not Greek, sacrificed himself on the Cross, but it was for all of humanity. Doesn’t that show some progress away from the Greeks? And then we had the Dark Ages. I can only assume that you would gloss over that moment in our glorious Western history. The fact of the Holocaust – at the hands of the civilized and classically trained Germans – what do you make of that.
I guess you do not care about the one-half women-population of our Planet Earch who have been educated that their only place is at home, in the kitchen, or prostrated, in bed, ready for her man. Do you really think lectures to women in the classics would help them realize than their only alternative is to satisfy your hunger, appetite, or sexual need to ravish their bodies, as we learn by the example of Helen of Troy, in my eyes the true unconscious heroine of our classical plot. Was not her face, the face that launched 1,000 ships? You are a Republican no doubt. And therefore I think you’ve made some progress. Governor Palin? himmmm. I see her ravishing possibilities. Had she been elected President, we would have had the sexiest one. I wonder if her encounters with the male leaders of the world lead to great diplomatic steps forward. Italy, with her Belasconti, might replace Britain as our closest ally.
There’s more – but I haven’t the time. I haven’t the even to correct my typos here for which I’m sorry. But I hope you don’t assume it’s due to a lack of a classical education. I’m actually in the process of preparing an article for publication, perhaps in the Journal of Philosophy, on the subject of the Identity of Indiscernibles. Philosophically I’m into Wittgenstein II – a direct descendant of that Classical flawed many of us love.
But I’m grateful to you for creating here an opportunity to assume the role of that marvelous Anti-Semite (marvelous in spite of it). But besides that, I’d like to observe here that the above is my sample of what the often obscure Continentals (Europeans) – and Gates at Harvard – Deconstruction.
Have a nice day. And please excuse my typos & grammar partly you my hp keyboard, one-finer typing, and no time to edit. But I have not decided that Blogging on a Conservative Web page such as yours, warrants an effort to demonstrate my inherent ability to produce a perfect English language commentary by a Graduate of the Ploretariat Harvard.
Post-script: I’ve inadvertently omitted an essential observation: I find it disgraceful, and un-American, for you to take this opportunity to malign Mr. Gates. What has been called the Gates-gate incident has a very simple analysis involving out great Constitution. A man was arrested for Disorderly Conduct in his own home or on his own Porch. A Legal impossibility. Not only is that illegal, but it’s un-Constitutional and therefore un-American. Being a professor who so highly values education, It’s rather surprise that you do join the President in acknowledging the stupidity of the act. My accounting for that is simple. Your interest is not that of your self-professed quest for the noble search for TRUTH. Rather, your interest is far more committed to promoting the agenda of the Conservative wing of the Republican party. Isn’t that the Truth?
Bravo! Thanks for a great assessment and critique of current higher education. As a long-time academic (25 years teaching experience at the college-university level), I’d say that you’re analysis is very accurate.
Memo to Ludvikus–It wouldn’t have taken much more time to edit and proofread your post than it took for you to type the paragraph explaining why you didn’t have time to edit and proofread.
Editing and proofreading are like a lot of other things in life: Those who can, do. Those who can’t spend a lot of time explaining why they don’t have time and why it isn’t worth their effort anyway.
Thanks. Although I do not write in the vein of the erudite, I can understand the content and references.
I guess I miss something in my wandering about with those who are accused of debasing the feminine qualities in females as well as their brilliance in mental activity.
Wilberforce was a voice from within his base of belief in Christ to stop slavery. Edwards was ahead of his time in supporting medicine.
Smart, educated people do stupid things. Dumbness is not relegated only to uneducated people of the street. In academia – speaking with grads of the educational system as from elite?? high schools and colleges/U’s I never cease to be amazed at the defects in their education.
When discussing the flow of History as in above references I never cease to shake my head in disbelief at the ignorance of American History (1900 – 1980).
I have spend a lot of time with Racial minorities and Immigrants. They are always amazed at the Truth after they learn to trust an old white guy who is one of the immigrant minorities ::grins:: whose family came from the Old Country.
My classical education required me to learn two languages for reading. I was required to read widely.
Here is an uneducated opinion, one from the streets. Stupid is as stupid does. This stupid stuff is part of mankind and many from all walks are guilty as sin. Opps, revealed some of my underpinnings in thought.
So thanks for the article and your communication of ideas
Thanks. Although I do not write in the vein of the erudite, I can understand the content and references.
I guess I miss something in my wandering about with those who are accused of debasing the feminine qualities in females as well as their brilliance in mental activity.
Wilberforce was a voice from within his base of belief in Christ to stop slavery. Edwards was ahead of his time in supporting medicine.
Smart, educated people do stupid things. Dumbness is not relegated only to uneducated people of the street. In academia – speaking with grads of the educational system as from elite?? high schools and colleges/U’s I never cease to be amazed at the defects in their education.
When discussing the flow of History as in above references I never cease to shake my head in disbelief at the ignorance of American History (1900 – 1980).
I have spend a lot of time with Racial minorities and Immigrants. They are always amazed at the Truth after they learn to trust an old white guy who is one of the immigrant minorities ::grins:: whose family came from the Old Country.
My classical education required me to learn two languages for reading. I was required to read widely.
Here is an uneducated opinion, one from the streets. Stupid is as stupid does. This stupid stuff is part of mankind and many from all walks are guilty as sin. Opps, revealed some of my underpinnings in thought.
So thanks for the article and your communication of ideas
The Professor does not get to be excused of Dumb. He used his racial bias to harass the police and to excuse his behavior when he was beyond the realm of acceptable behavior for a land owner and American citizen.
Opposition to excessive force will always bring a response from the force wielders. And if so, live with the consequences. Speak eloquently, Speak with passion. But eliminate the stupidty.
History is filled with Man’s Inhumanity to Man. Defacing the Image of God in Man is always wrong. Truth seekers, “Continue the search for Truth.”
Thanks. Keep writing.
PS – perhaps speak with some India citizens who were there, about the success of Ghandi. Might provide some insight into the bias of our educational system.
Guess I’m not the only one around here who offers legal opinions before passing the bar exam (re: posts #2 and #7). As has been noted, it’s a free country http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2009/08/03/teachable-moments/ in the comments that followed.
I believe Sedonaman is an attorney. Perhaps he knows whether disorderly conduct occurred. Sedona, if you’re reading: please don’t send me a bill.
I haven’t passed the Bar (except the one around the corner – but only because alcohol gives me indigestion).
But I’m a formally trained paralegal professionally (Long Island University), and have extensive experience drafting brief for attorney. It means I’ve done the work and the attorney got the credit and the dough.
Besides, what the lawyer does is not that difficult for someone, like myself, whose also classically trained.
You seem to glorify the work of lawyers – by your overestimation of the bar exam. Not to long ago one had the option of clerking for a practicing attorney as a means of entry to this lucrative profession.
Regarding “disorderly conduct” that just a Statute whose exact wording you look up on the Web. But also, you can go to any Law Library that has the Case Law of Massachusetts and find the scope of this law regarding the transactions to which it applies.
But you do not need to do that even, because – assuming you have exposure to American popular culture – you might be familiar with the celebrity jurist, Judge ANDREW NAPOLITANO. And the beauty of your challenge, Dear Socrates, is how easy it is to satisfy. Hope that does not give you too much indigestion? Because it proves not only that the arrest was STUPID, but illegal, UNCONSTITUTIONAL. And that’s un-American. You REPUBLICANS out, particularly Rush Limbaugh, if you wouldn’t be such hypocrites, you’d be the first to shout: “a man’s home is his castle.” You are so shocked that you lost the election, that you will not acknowledge that a man cannot possibly, legally, be arrested – while at home – for disorderly conduct.
Furthermore, the issue is not one of morally: the un-palatability, volume, or incivility of a man’s defecation in the privacy of his own home when you had no right to barge in in the first place. That charge was not “loud and tumultuous” defecation. The charge was disorderly conduct. If you were neither biased, nor stupid, you would stick to the charge.
Now here’s the law being presented to you by a judge WHITE with impeccable credentials.
http://www.mofopolitics.com/2009/07/29/video-fox-news-judge-andrew-napolitano-gates-arrest-violated-the-federal-constitution/
“If you were neither biased, nor stupid, you would stick to the charge.” Or maybe just overreacting. “To err is human, to forgive divine.” I notice there is no particular furor over the fact that the charge has been dropped. I also read the statute and thought there was grey area, as, although the officer was in the home of Professor Gates, he was at first trying to find out the identity of Gates, but by his account was instead greeted with an accusation, and some degree of hysteria. So my thought process was, at that point, Gates could have been seen as interfering with a legitimate investigation. Except that the requirement involves “significantly” impeding an investigation, which would be hard to allege, because within a few minutes he provided what was requested.
It seems there is a part of the statute that has to do with the person at whom the abusive language behavior is directed being unable to remove himself from the environment of the the disorderly person. So although Crowley was in Gate’s home, he was not free to leave, because he was acting on a report of suspicious-looking activity. (Except that the arrest came later.) Gates may was not out in public, but the officer was. If found it all very interesting.
Disorderly condut can be nothing more than hostile language, yes?
And if you write a book called “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” and a million people read it, it’s free speech, true? But if you walk up to him on the street and taunt him extendedly, and follow him around, you could get into trouble.
Please understand, my opinion/speculation carries no weight.
Thanks for adding to the discussion.
Post #8 would have meant not that you are necessarily wrong, but that neither your take on “disorderly conduct” nor Mr. Swanson’s would have carried the same weight as it would if you had legal expertise. It turns out you most certainly do. I guessed that you are not an attorney, because they always tell you they are one even before they are asked.
Look gentlemen. There are at least three (3) Police Reports published on the Web. And pictures. And statements.
You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand what happened if you have a Classical Education, graduated a relatively good American college, understand the most basic principles of our Constitution, have Common Sense, a logical mind, and follow my argument.
(1) Gates was Arrested for Disorderly Conduct “while at home” (I do not appreciate that I’m forced to use Al Shapton’s phrase, but it’s accurate.
(2) Gates was arrested before he stepped off his Front Porch.
(3) The were two officers inside the house and while inside the police officers already had the name of their suspect. It was “Henry Louis Gates.” Listen to the tapes. Gates was described as “uncooperative” by name” Henry Louis Gates is uncooperative.
(4) If “Uncooperative” means also “loud and tumultuous” why on earth does the police ask him to step outside and arrest him immediately? Wasn’t that stupid? Why not ask him to step back inside instead?
(5) Do not forget that Obama graduated at the very top of his class at Harvard, and graduated as a lawyer. Obama clearly says, as does the police report, that “Henry Louis Gates” was arrested. This arrest is so incredibly stupid that it makes hard to understand.
(6) Police, barging in illegally, motivated by suspicion of break in, realize that they have the rightful tenant present, a cripple, whose very upset at how he’s being treated by at least two policemen, is enticed to step outside where before one of the cops even has his own arms out of the doorway, we see Gates already in handcuffs on his way to jail.
These are facts that are readily available on the Web, if you just look and read.
From my Classical education, I learned how to reason about empirical facts. The charges were dropped. So I’m neither second-guessing a judge or a jury.
Furthermore, by intuition tells (there’s nothing wrong with engaging in speculation if that may guide as to do the right thing) me that things will only get worse for the Cambridge Police Department. Empirical situations never lead to certainly. But as a great non-Classical comedian would say: “It’s not Gates that’s going to be in deep shit.” Pardon my non-Classical expression. It’s so appropriate.
We don’t need to pull up the Race Card to express outrage under these circumstances here. If sufficient to note how “un-American” (yes, a McCarthy[sic] expression). What is more un-American than violation of the Constitutional rights of a Citizen. And it is not my Classical Education that reminds that a very distinguished Chief Justice – Tannery – had ruled that former Negro slaves or their descendants could not be Citizens of the United States.
(A) The man was arrested while at home on a disorderly conduct charge.
(B) No such thing as a matter of law is possible.
(C) Man’s constitutional rights were violated.
There’s nothing else necessary to establish how stupid the Cambridge Police was. No need for a Summa Com Laudi Harvard lawyer like O to realize such incredible stupidity. It’s un-necessary to discuss Racism – stupidity is sufficient as an affirmative defense in the court of public opinion.