Daniel Henninger nails it in his critique (“University Presidents Flunk Out,” Wonder Land, Dec. 14) of the pusillanimous testimony of the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and M.I.T. The hearings show the acuity of one of many few observations of Karl Marx that accorded with actuality: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
The mental rot that’s now at a sophisticated stage in larger training started within the Nineteen Eighties, when radical teachers of the “progressive left” took over from students, most of whom had been political liberals. Mr. Henninger’s pointing to the sooner malign affect of Herbert Marcuse is spot on, as I identified in a 1998 e book. Marcuse’s thesis that the decrease courses ought to have extra rights than these extra lucky has enabled universities to inflict an array of unequally utilized practices that favored these they thought-about “oppressed.” It generated insurance policies starting from affirmative motion in admissions to the enactment of speech codes to stop discomfort—as if 4 years of liberal arts training ought to coddle moderately than problem and educate.
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