I am blogging from the Reno airport this afternoon. I spent the last three days discussing Erasmus, the Christian humanist who was a contemporary of Machiavelli and Martin Luther. Erasmus was famous for not taking sides in the schism that was about to blossom into the Protestant Reformation. He was at first supportive and later critical of Luther, but he refused to endorse the creation of a new church, independent of Rome. He was committed first and foremost to the liberal arts and the freedom of the mind. The most frequent targets of his wit were the monks and theologians of his time, for whom learning was nothing less and never anything more than a slavish obedience to whatever dogma was current among them at the time.
I thought of this when I noticed this piece by Michael Goldfarb in The New York Times. It is about the closing of Antioch College, which was established 155 years ago by a free-thinking Christian group. What killed it? The main cause was that after the 1960's it was gradually transformed into a vast left-wing propoganda machine, with branches all across the country. The administration no longer gave much thought to the ancient institution it was responsible for. Worse was what happened at Antioch College itself.
Antioch College became a rump where the most illiberal trends in education became entrenched. Since it is always easier to impose a conformist ethos on a small group than a large one, as the student body dwindled, free expression and freedom of thought were crushed under the weight of ultraliberal orthodoxy. By the 1990s the breadth of challenging ideas a student might encounter at Antioch had narrowed, and the college became a place not for education, but for indoctrination. Everyone was on the same page, a little to the left of The Nation in worldview.
Much of this conformist thinking focused on gender politics, and it culminated in the notorious sexual offense prevention policy. Enacted in 1993, the policy dictated that a person needed express permission for each stage in seduction. (“May I touch your breast?” “May I remove your bra?” And so on.) In two decades students went from being practitioners of free love to prisoners of gender. Antioch became like one of those Essene communities in the Judean desert in the first century after Christ that, convinced of their own purity, died out while waiting for a golden age that never came.
These are the people with whom Erasmus struggled. The world will never see the end of them.
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