Anthony Furey: Moral relativism is destroying intellectual inquiry at our universities

...“Moral relativism clears the ground for a new kind of absolutism. The emerging curriculum in the humanities is in fact far more censorious, in crucial matters, than the one that it strives to replace.”

But this isn’t just about the handful of protests the student clubs get up to. The problem has leaked into all of the humanities – the once sacred home for all forms of inquiry.

It’s about dismantling anything connected to the past, anything that suggests we can learn from the people who came before us: “The Marxist theory of ideology, or some feminist, poststructuralist, or Foucauldian descendent of it, will be summoned in proof of the view that the precious achievements of our culture owe their status to the power that speaks through them, and that they are therefore of no intrinsic worth.”

In other words, too many of the departments are screwed. What do we do now?

The change George Will predicted coming almost 30 years ago never did because while he was right to note that the silent majority clearly agreed that education was going down the tubes, they weren’t the folks running the academy. All you need is enough relativists to become heads of departments and that sets the trend...