Good essay, but anyone who thinks that the new "university" in Austin Texas is going to make any real positive different to what is taught in the academy and US culture at large is sadly mistaken.

These three references describe the complete absence of Real Wisdom in the academy.
http://www.beezone.com/adida/jesusandme.html
http://www.beezone.com/beezones-main-stack/ilchurst.html
http://www.dabase.org/up-1-3.htm
The author received a 1st class honors degree in philosophy with major components in art and literature at Columbia university. He also has a masters degree in English literature from Stanford university. He got distinctions in every subject. So too when he studied at three Christian seminaries.

These paragraphs describe the situation at Columbia university in the sixties. It is obviously much worse by many degrees in the academy. Such will also quite obviously be the case at the new "university" in Austin.

"There was no real academy at Columbia. There was simply an academic reduction of philosophy, a departure from the academy situation as suggested in the tradition of Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, and such, where the pursuit of Wisdom, or some higher unitive realization, was what it was all about, and where the philosophical state as a disposition transcending opposites was what it was all for.

What is Truth. What is True Wisdom, and the life of True Wisdom? Columbia had nothing to do with these questions. The dead end of all that was otherwise proposed in the world was made clear to me there."

As soo as Steven Schwartz acknowledges that it is invariably due to people leaving Universities educated but endarkened (as in not enlightened) the sooner the trend can be arrested !
As soon as discipline & responsibility are waived, indiscipline & uselessness take over.
Just about every politician & high ranking bureaucrat has attended University. Shouldn't we have exemplary leaders & conditions if Universities really were places of learning ?
How much more evidence do we need that such people are utterly unsuitable to manage Nations !
Political parties need to recruit people & their advisors from industry & practical backgrounds, not mere theorists whose minds have been saturated with pointless information & a sense of self-importance !
Humanities don't need studying, they just need to be instilled by example !

Excellent article. In the West we have lost theology at Murdoch and anthropology at UWA. The rot has been setting in for some time with reliance on asian students who almost uniformly shun the humanities.

"The role of higher education is not to tell students what view to take but to teach them how to gather facts, analyse arguments and reach their own conclusions"

There are more than a few other vice chancellors who seem to have forgotten that. Here is an academic who actually knows what he is talking about. The value of the reasoned argument seems to have been forgotten in todays society. Instead we have these mobs of anarchists taking to the streets because they do not have the wit to analyse the problems.

David

I might also add that perhaps it is time for the previous institutes of advanced education, such as Swinburne, RMIT and Churchill, to stop pretending to be universities and make the old universities go back to what they were once good at and now have failed abysmally, teaching the humanities.

David