#19 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Thursday May 6)
Good morning,
HOWARD UNIVERSITY—EVIDENCE OF SPIRITUAL DECAY AND MORAL DECLINE?
This almost seems like a headline from The Onion, but it’s true. In its infinite wisdom, this great historic Black university has eliminated its Classics department and, apparently, the teaching of the classics.
The Dean of Undergraduate studies disputes the extent of this report. But that’s not the point. I offer it instead as an example of the slow chipping away of our shared intellectual, philosophical, and cultural heritage (by “our,” I do not need Whites or Christian men, but all of us—the legacy passed down to us, and the lessons learned and written about by those before us). I cannot say more than the renowned Harvard professor Cornell West and his co-author, Jeremy Tate, CEO of the Classic Learning Test, had to say in their Washington Post editorial two weeks ago (thank you to Gene Page, Ken Kahan and others for forwarding this):
“Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.
Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them…
…This classical approach is united to the Black experience. It recognizes that the end and aim of education is really the anthem of Black people, which is to lift every voice. That means to find your voice, not an echo or an imitation of others. But you can’t find your voice without being grounded in tradition, grounded in legacies, grounded in heritages.
Engaging with the classics and with our civilizational heritage is the means to finding our true voice. It is how we become our full selves, spiritually free and morally great.”
Best, Glenn