It is nothing short of a foregone conclusion that the life of a graduate student will be anything but enviable.  But when the graduate student is a staunch critic of the leftist, “politically correct” dogma that pervades the Liberal Arts and Humanities departments of America’s colleges and universities and also happens to be majoring in one of these departments, life can be virtually unbearable.

Life can be unbearable for a person in these circumstances, but it doesn’t have to be.  Speaking as one who fit this description to the letter, I have some measure of authority on this matter.  To be sure, my time in Temple University’s doctoral program in philosophy is not one that I recall with any fondness.  As a friend and alumnus of Temple once remarked, if the “Politically Correct” zeitgeist is the Beast, then Temple is its belly.  Truer words have never been spoken.

If not for the assortment of quotations from various philosophers with which they were mixed, the bumper sticker like slogans that in one form or other adorned the halls of Temple’s philosophy department could easily confuse it with the campaign office of a politician from the Democrat party.  Actually, even this is an understatement, for rare indeed is the Democrat who dares to be as openly radical as any of Temple’s tenured philosophy professors.

It would be an exaggeration to claim that each of my days at Temple was sheer drudgery.  In spite of my political and philosophical differences with the faculty (and students), I managed to get along reasonably well with most of them, and some, my dissertation advisor in particular, did what they could to help me along. Credit must be given to those to whom it is due.  However, if I ever had the illusion that the academic generally, and the academic philosopher especially, was a figure willing to courageously follow the trail of Truth regardless of where it may lead, I was forcefully disabused of it upon entering Temple.  For that matter, I discovered that my less ambitious hope for the academic, that he would always seek to enrich his imagination by expanding its boundaries of what was possible, that by leaving no idea unexamined, he would dare to achieve ever greater clarity and rigor of thought, similarly stood no chance of being realized. 

With the prejudices that he loathes, the average academic philosopher—and every academic philosopher at Temple—never concerns himself.  He either ignores them or ridicules them.  For instance, before I could begin work on my dissertation, I had to take several preliminary examinations, one of which was on the history of philosophy.  While it contained essay questions on thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Hume, Kant, and Hegel, there wasn’t a single question on any philosopher from the entire medieval period.  That one of the most fascinating and extensive periods of Western thought, a period stretching, by some measures, from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the dawn of the Renaissance, and which includes such powerful and influential figures as Augustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockam, figures that not only preserved and contributed to the formation of the classical Greek tradition that is the legacy of Plato and Aristotle but who as well gave rise to much of the shape of modern philosophy—some of the most salient problems of which the medievals “anticipated” by centuries—should be flushed down the memory hole, is really nothing short of a scandal.

As Father Frederick Coppleston noted sixty years ago in the second installment of his magisterial, nine volume A History of Philosophy, it had been quite some time by that juncture that the old modern idea that the Middle Ages were in truth Dark Ages of superstition and bigotry had itself been exposed as a piece of bigotry.  Yet at Temple—as well, no doubt, as at most secular institutions of higher learning throughout our country and the whole Western world—this bigotry persists to this day. 

But this prejudice against the lengthiest chapter in the life of Western civilization, a series of episodes without which that civilization loses its intelligibility, conspires with other specimens of bigotry to discredit the West.

As anyone who has spent any time at college knows all too well, Race, Gender, and Class are the three great preoccupations of the leftist academic.  All of the ideas and events of which Western history is constituted are ultimately reducible to these three phenomena, and since the history of the West is the history of European or white peoples, what this means for our academic is that this history is a history of “Racism,” “Sexism,” and “Classism.”  And since for nearly 2000 years Christianity has been the dominant religion of the peoples of Europe, it is, at the very best, an accomplice to the racial, gender, and class oppression that the White Man has visited upon the human race for millennia.

At bottom, the philosopher’s is a calling to be nothing less than a subversive.  In principle, even if not in fact, no presupposition, no idea, is immune to the penetrating gaze of his mind’s eye.  But the academic philosopher has betrayed that calling.  For any number of reasons—none of them of a philosophical character—he has chosen to deploy his resources in intellect and passion in the service of lending uncritical support to the conventional wisdom, the “Politically Correct” status quo that has long since become enshrined in our popular and public culture.

To mitigate the misery of having to make a dwelling in this bastion of uncritical and unimaginative thinking, this cauldron of hostility toward the White Heterosexual Man, the graduate student sharing none of the prejudices of his leftist mentors and colleagues should think of himself, as I thought of myself, as an anthropologist living among a foreign, exotic tribe, or a spectator strolling through a museum exhibition of an extinct species of one sort or another.  That is, while such a grad student must not relinquish any of his own convictions because of any pressure he may feel to conform to the ideological bigotries of his teachers and peers, and while he should always speak honestly about what he believes, he should speak as little as possible and repeatedly remind himself that, since his stay in this environment is temporary, he ought to view it as an opportunity to see up close and personal this animal in his native habitat, the committed doctrinaire leftist who, tenured and surrounded by nothing but like minded beings, can run wild.  In no other precinct of public life—government, Hollywood, the news media—can leftists give such unadulterated expression to their prejudices, for in every other area they are forced to reckon with large numbers of people—voters and audiences—who either reject their biases or have little taste for the brazenness with which the ideologue asserts himself.

It is indeed tragic that it is this situation to which graduate students (and, to a lesser extent, undergraduates) have to look forward.  But until such time that academic leftists either abandon their “futurism”—interestingly, the exact same exclusively future-oriented focus embodied by the very “capitalist” culture that they claim to abhor—by recognizing that they betray their vocation by seeking to make good little “activists” of their students, or are replaced by academics who both know and revere the purpose for the sake of which the university came into existence centuries ago, this is the condition in which students will find themselves. 

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.