by Stephen Soukup
American universities prioritize ideological "discovery" over education, leading to absurd research and lost funding—jeopardizing both the humanities and hard sciences.
Have you heard about the politics of lesbian feminist cyborg dogs? I’m not sure I have that description entirely correct, but I am sure that it doesn’t really matter. A professor at SUNY Oneonta recently wrote a paper—one that, surprisingly, a journal published—titled: “Queer canine becomings: Lesbian feminist cyborg politics and interspecies intimacies in ecologies of love and violence.” And yes, it’s as dreadful as it sounds:
This article offers a queer lesbian feminist analysis attuned to lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities. Specifically, the article places queer and lesbian ecofeminism in conversation with Donna Haraway’s work or the cyborg and companion species to theorize the interconnected queer becomings of people, nature, animals, and machines amidst ecologies of love and violence in the 2020s. It takes two key case studies as the focus for analysis: first, the state instrumentalization of dogs and robot dogs for racialized and imperial violence, and second, quotidian queer and lesbian-dog relationalities and becomings.
Have you heard about scientific research, including medical studies, being canceled at universities nationwide, particularly at Columbia? That too is dreadful:
The National Institutes of Health is terminating 232 grants for scientific research at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, about a quarter of the center’s research portfolio, Dr. Joshua Gordon, the chair of psychiatry at Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, wrote in an email to faculty Monday….
Notice of the grant cancellations comes after the Trump administration announced Friday it was cutting $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University, saying it had failed to protect Jewish students from antisemitism amid pro-Palestine activism on campus.
Taken together, these two dreadful stories explain quite a bit about the American higher education system and its severe pathologies. More to the point, they also explain why the current conservative optimism about the potential to “fix” higher education by cracking down on DEI and other such “reform” efforts is likely misplaced.
As I note in my book, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, the origins of the American higher education system were noble and suited to the purpose of “education”: Harvard was founded to train Unitarian and Congregational clergy, Yale was founded to teach theology and religious languages, Dartmouth was founded to teach Christianity to Native Americans, Princeton was founded to serve as a seminary for Presbyterian ministers, and so on. The major part of the problem began just after the end of the Civil War, when a wealthy Quaker bachelor and railroad magnate named Johns Hopkins died and left what was then an astounding sum – $7 million – to found a hospital and an affiliated university. That “affiliation” is where the trouble started.
Johns Hopkins was meant to be different from the rest of the nation’s universities. Modeled on Germany’s famous Heidelberg University, it was intended to be a bastion not just of learning but of “discovery” as well. It was designed specifically to produce new knowledge and to embrace “progress” as a defining value. In the speech he gave at his inauguration, Daniel Colt Gilman, the University’s first president, declared that its mission would be “To educate its students and cultivate their capacity for lifelong learning, to foster independent and original research, and to bring the benefits of discovery to the world.” Today, the University declares that its mission is not to teach its students the knowledge of the world, but to uncover “knowledge for the world.”
This mission made perfect sense for the hospital and medical school—and still does today. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for most of the rest of the University, those departments intended to deal with the humanities and the social sciences. Unfortunately, Johns Hopkins became the model for the American “research university,” and, as such, its model was applied appropriately to the hard sciences and woefully inappropriately to the rest of the higher education system nationwide. The idea that “discovering” new knowledge should be the primary function of a history department or an English department, rather than teaching students about history and literature, respectively, is ludicrous. Yet that is precisely the nature of today’s universities.
Over the course of the next fifty years or so, the mission of the American education system was further perverted and made even more ridiculous by one of Johns Hopkins’ most “esteemed” graduates, the execrable John Dewey. Dewey was America’s first truly “great” homegrown philosopher. He was also the man most responsible for the attitudes that predominate in the American education system today. Again, as I note in the book, “Dewey disdained the idea of an existing body of acquired human social and moral knowledge that could and should be passed down from generation to generation in the form of custom and tradition. He believed that knowledge was not something that could be learned but something every individual student had to discover for himself.”
John Dewey’s “revolution” in education theory, coupled with the concomitant revolution in the mission and purpose of higher education combined to create the monster that is the American university. Today, conservative education reformers intend to tame this monster. They are as enthusiastic as they have ever been, genuinely hopeful about the future of higher education as DEI retreats and federal grants are rescinded.
But they are likely to be disappointed.
As the two stories at the top of this column show, the problem with American higher education isn’t that it has been overrun by leftists or that it has embraced foolish and destructive ideas like DEI. Those are problems, to be sure. But they are secondary problems, derivatives of the formative mistake at the core of the university’s affliction. The truth of the matter is that the humanities and social sciences serve fundamentally different purposes from the hard sciences and mathematics. Humanities – even such seemingly frivolous subjects as “women’s studies” – serve a purpose, namely to educate students about man’s accumulated knowledge. The hard sciences, by contrast, serve to train specialists and to push the boundaries of what is known, to discover and innovate. By mingling the two—mostly out of convenience—the higher education system compels the former to constantly “discover” new knowledge, mostly by creating it out of whole cloth (lesbian cyborg dogs and whatnot), while it holds the latter hostage to such patent ridiculousness and the consequences thereof.
In the past couple of days, there have been countless stories and anecdotes about scientists and medical researchers at Columbia who are extremely angry at the university’s leaders for allowing their federal funding to be cut and for allowing the absurdities of the post-colonial, postmodern nonsense of the social sciences to put their valuable work in jeopardy. They should be upset—as should every American. Unfortunately, such is the nature of American higher education today. And until we recognize that “education” and “discovery” largely belong at entirely separate institutions, all involved will continue to suffer.
Stephen Soukup
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/15/adios-mi-hermano-a-champion-of-freedom-is-called-home/
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