Too much of the university today is caught up in the trendy leftist strain of feminism and Third Worldism. For example, some feminists will say we shouldn't read the classics because women didn't write them. Or a University of California committee on general education strongly objects to requiring that American History and democratic tradition be taught to undergraduates, but easily agrees to a proposal to teach all students "global interdependence." In the name of respecting pluralism, intellectuals are reluctant to support the idea of common human truths.
I have even heard people comment that Abraham Lincoln did not speak as an American, but as a white Protestant male; or that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke only as a black male. One student of Hispanic origin recently remarked, "I can't read Freud because its not my culture." Well, Freud's truths are about more than one culture; they're about how human beings operate. And Lincoln's and King's ideas are the very stuff of our civic tradition.
Radical individualism, reinforced by a university hostile to common human truth, results in young peole who have no ability to make relationships and connect to some broader social purpose. They are steeped in an ethical relativism which prevents them from looking to a standard outside their immediate lives and peer groups for guidance. This state of affairs, in turn, leads to anomie, apathy and even anarchy in our society, and a susceptibility to totalitarian solutions. If there are no standards that are worthwhile, if there are no traditions, if there is no wisdom of the past, that is cultural suicide.
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