The Forum > Article Comments > Jacques Barzun and the decline of universities > Comments
Jacques Barzun and the decline of universities : Comments
By Rafe Champion, published 8/12/2011IN 1968 Barzun published The American University which critiqued problems still endemic in tertiary education.
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I guess the first place to begin is in the understanding of the word university and its association with the word universal. Especially in a time when all forms of knowledge from all times and places are freely available to anyone with an internet connection
How then does one find the tools for a truly universal understanding and evaluation of the human situation and therefore of the totality of human culture.
If you are at all familiar with Rafe's work and the company that he keeps you will find that he is a champion(sic) of the Western world view and its alleged superiority over all other world views. Best summed in the phrase the West versus the rest.
Officially defined knowledge in all times and places has always been used to exercise power and control over the people that exist within any given cultural time and place. So too with all of the presumed knowledge allowed and promulgated in the academy.
Western universities or more correctly mind-factories, exist to promulgate the Western form of presumed knowledge about the world. In 2011 they are all extensions of the military-industrial complex. Indeed many of them have long ago sold their "soul" to the complex.
All of popular culture is now governed by the presumptions of political and scientific materialism. All of official popular propaganda promotes an exclusively materialistic interpretation of Man and Nature.
Rafe might like to pretend that man does not live by bread alone, but he is very much convicted of a world view that limits human beings to nothing more than a never ending promulgation of bread and circuses in which we are quite literally amusing ourselves to death
And the eating of Black Ducks.