Is There a Democratic Right to an Elite Education?

As of March, 2019 there is no response from any U.S. officials or media to my communications or those of others concerning my matters. 

It is particularly bizarre to receive no response from the police to my evidence of serious criminality creating a public danger in New York.

American media contacted are "unable" to respond and "prohibited" from answering my communications in a society that, allegedly, protects a "free and independent press." 

My next essay focusing on further dangerous contamination of New Jersey's water supply and more carcinogens discovered in different soil samples from various parts of the state, together with new allegations of child-molesting networks and greater corruption among lawyers and judges, will be sent to Justice Ruth Bader-Gingsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court; William P. Barr, Esq., U.S. Attorney General; the Cuban Embassy to the United States of America; and The Los Angeles Times. 

"In the Anglo-American legal system, we have for centuries tempered the desire for finality in legal judgments with a desire to correct severe substantive or procedural errors."

Professor Michael S. Moore explains this fact without making the additional and very relevant point for my situation that criminal fraud upon a tribunal in the form of false testimony provided by a witness paid by so-called "ethics lawyers" to lie constitutes heinous criminal conduct and makes a state court decision based on that fraud not only invalid, but also void ab initio under the U.S. Constitution and other laws: 

"Even under current federal American law, the old view that courts have inherent power to reopen their own judgments survives; Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60 (b) enumerates five traditional grounds for reopening a judgment and then adds a safety-valve provision specifying that a judgment can also be reopened for 'any other reason justifying relief from the operation of the judgment.' Under this provision, 'the degree of unfairness may properly be reconsidered in determining whether a court is justified in disturbing the finality of a judgment.' Moore, Moore's Federal Practice, sec. 60, App. 37. As courts recognize, this 'catch-all' or safety-valve provision is 'a grand reservoir of equitable power to do justice in a particular case.' Compton v. Alton Steamship Co., 608 F.2d 96, 106 (5th Cir. 1979)." 

Michael S. Moore, "Law as Justice," Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jeffrey Paul, eds., Natural Law and Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge UK: Cambridge U. Press, 2001), p. 115, at p. 135.

Nearly identical language may be found in the New Jersey Rules of Court and other provisions of state law governing civil procedure. 

New Jersey Bar Association proceedings fall under the category of civil litigation.      

My list of sources for this essay may seem somewhat eclectic. The relevance of the works cited to my argument should be pretty obvious -- even with regard to sources read decades ago -- that are only now associated with the thoughts expressed in this text. 

Writing always involves a process of living with (or within) many textual dialogues of different kinds. 

This is true not only for me, but also for many others influenced by contemporary hermeneutics and cultural theory.

Writing this essay is a daily war against alterations of the text by persons committing computer crimes seemingly with the blessings of New Jersey officials. 

Alterations in spacing between sentences and other attacks on this text must always be expected.  

I will do my best to defend the work and make corrections as they are needed.

I will continue to write.  

Primary Sources Listed in Alphabetical Order:

Megan Daum, "Variations on Grief," My Misspent Youth: Essays (New York: Picador, 2001, 2015), pp. 147-168. ("What is Education For?") 

Dwight Garner, "Locked Down No More: Albert Woodfox, of the 'Angola 3' Relives the Horrors of Prison," The New York Times, March 5, 2019, p. C1. ("Book Review.")  

Michael S. Roth, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2014), pp. 19-61.

Bertrand Russell, "On History," Philosophical Essays (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1966), pp. 60-69.

Mitch Smith, "At Struggling Rural Colleges, No Future For History Degrees," The New York Times, January 13, 2019, p. A1.

Michael Gold & Edgar Sandoval, "23 Years After Murder, Victim's Wife and Brother-in-Law Are Convicted," The New York Times, March 11, 2019, p. A16. (Persons tried and convicted in 2019 for a murder that took place in 1996.)

Thomas Fuller, "Released After 36 Years, Thanks to Fingerprint Evidence That Was There All Along," The New York Times, March 22, 2019, p. A16. (Fraud and misconduct by lawyers makes temporal limitations irrelevant allowing for a civil suit after release of the wrongfully convicted defendant well beyond the normally applicable statute of limitations.) 

Deena Yellin, "Finding Justice: Sex Abuse Victims Receive More Time to Sue Institutions," The Record, May 14, 2019, p. A-1. (Extensions of time limitations in the interests of justice in civil matters are accepted by New Jersey's Supreme Court providing a precedent directly relevant to the situation brought before the courts by me and others.)  

Legal Materials Listed Chronologically:

Brown v. Board of Ed., 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 315 (1978).

John Hart Ely, The Constitutionality of Reverse Discrimination, 41 University of California Law Review 725, 735 (1974).

William Simon, The Ideology of Advocacy: Procedural Justice and Professional Ethics, Wisconsin Law Review 30, 36-38, 52-59 (1978).

James R. Elkins, The Paradox of a Life in Law, 40 University of Pittsburgh Law Review 129, 130, 139-143 (1979).

John Hart Ely, Democracy and the Right to be Different, 56 New York Law Review 397 (1981).  

Michael S. Moore, Moral Reality, Wisconsin Law Review 1061 (1982). ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.") 

Laurence H. Tribe, God Save This Honorable Court: How the Choice of Supreme Court Justices Shapes Our History (New York: Random House, 1985), pp. 103-107. 

Michael S. Moore, Moral Reality Revisited, 90 Michigan Law Review 2424 (1992).

David Luban, "Natural Law as Professional Ethics: A Reading of Fuller," Ellen Frankerl Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jeffrey Paul, eds., Natural Law and Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge UK: Cambridge U. Press, 2001), p. 176. 

Michael S. Moore, "Law as Justice," Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., Jeffrey Paul, eds., Natural Law and Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge UK: Cambridge U. Press, 2001), p. 176. 

Ronald Dworkin, Keynote Address, 72 Fordham Law Review 1387 (2004). ("Symposium: John Rawls and the Law.")  

Laurence H. Tribe, The Invisible Constitution (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2008).

Eric J. Segal, Lost in Space: Laurence Tribe's Invisible Constitution, 163 Northwestern University Law Review 434 (2009). 

Secondary Sources Listed Alphabetically: 

Walter Allen, The English Novel (London: Pelican, 1954), pp. 341-363.

Richard Bernstein, "Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind," Robert Hollinger, ed., Hermeneutics and Praxis (Indiana: Notre Dame U. Press, 1985).

Richard Bernstein, "What is the Difference That Makes a Difference?: Gadamer, Habermas, Rorty," Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Philadelphia: U. Penn. Press, 1986), pp. 58-93. 

Richard Bernstein, "Richard Rorty's Deep Humanism," 39 New Literary History 13-27 (2008).

Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Radical Evil: A Philosophical Investigation," 8 Democratiya 60 (Spring, 2007). (Review of Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation, New York & London: Polity, 2002, 304 pages, also entitled "Philosophy and Evil.")

Anthony Burgess, The Novel Now (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), pp. 203-216. 

Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: Avon Books, 1972), pp. 711-734.

Robert P. Crease & Alfred Scharff Goldhaber, eds., The Quantum Moment: How Plank, Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2014), pp. 137-164, pp. 165-181. (Epistemological implications of the quantum revolution described historically.)

Paul Davies, "Time Asymmetry and Quantum Mechanics," Raymond Flood & Michael Lockwood, eds., The Nature of Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 125-134. 

Emma Donoghue, Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), pp. 106-139. 

Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 1-21, pp. 331-337.

Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge MA: Harvard U. Press, 1991), pp. 317-332 (Translation by Betsy Wing.)

Eleanor Flexner, Mary Wollstonecraft (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), 217-243. 

Stephen Fry, Moab is My Wapshot (London: Arrow Books, 2011), pp. 357-427. 

John Glendening, The Life and Times of Josiah Royce (Madison: U. Wisc. Press, 1985), pp. 319-334.

William Godwin, Memories of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Ontario: Broadview Literary Text, 2001, 1798), pp. 43-124. (Edited by Paula Clement and Gina Lucia Waller.) 

Jennifer Hornsby, Simple Mindedness: In Defense of Naive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge MA: Harvard U. Press, 1997), pp. 157-220. (The limits of science in logical thought and philosophy of mind.)  

Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (New York & London: Harper-Collins, 1983, 1992), pp. 1-48.

Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (New York & London: Riverhead Books, 2014), pp. 193-215. 

Luis Kronnenburger, ed., Novelists On Novelists (New York: Doubleday, 1962), pp. 36-40. (Charles Dickens on William Makepeace Thackery.) 

Marjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2008), pp. 251-280. (Metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics in the history of modern science.)

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Vintage, 1985), pp. 565-605.

David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Arcade Pub., 1994), pp. 323-329.

David Macey, Michel Foucault (New York: Pelican, 1983), pp. 415-435. 

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Indiana: Notre Dame U. Press, 1984), pp. 264-278. 

Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy (New York: Random House The Modern Library, 1999), pp. 228-251.

Jane Mayer, [Rachel Maddow?] The Dark Side (New York: Doubleday, 2008), pp. 182-212.

Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time: An Autobiography (Washington D.C.: Regnery, 1971), pp. 395-460. ("What is memory?")   

Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant Garde (New York & London: Verso, 1995), pp. 30-68. ("One Time, One History?")

Benoit Peters, Derrida: A Biography (London: Polity, 2010), pp. 267-287. 

Kevin Phillips, 1775: A Good Year for Revolution (New York & London: Penguin, 2012), pp. 431-444. 

Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge UK: Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 121-145.

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 1978, 2009), pp. 17-127. ("Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism.")

Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual: Four Selves -- The Four Historical Conceptions of Being (New York: Dover, 1959, 1899), pp. 47-87.   

Richard Ruland & Malcolm Bradbury, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (New York: Viking, 1991), pp. 3-58.

Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2012), pp. 231-334. 

Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1983), pp. 291-579.

William Somerset Maugham, "After Reading Burke," On Literature (London: William Heineman, 1967), pp. 52-76. 

Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (New York: Ballantine, 1991), pp. 415-445.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View (New York: Plume, 2007), pp. 209-288.

Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge UK: Cambridge U. Press, 1975), pp. 127-221.

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge MA: Harvard U. Press, 1989), pp. 3-107.  

Scott Turow, Ordinary Heroes (New York & Boston: Grand Central Pub., 2005). (A novel dealing with events post-World War II and the "finality" of legal judgments.)  

Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York & London: Harper-Collins, 2011), pp. 407-681.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (Boston: Little Brown, 1945), pp. 225-262.

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance: An Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner, 1964, 1933), pp. 237-292. 

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1935), pp. 175-233.

Bruce Wilshire, Fashionable Nihilism: A Critique of Analytical Philosophy (New York: SUNY, 2002), pp. 65-93. 

Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge MA: Harvard U. Press, 1984), pp. 197-256.

Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), pp. 230-242. (Compiled and edited by Paul Edwards in a form that is entirely posthumous for the author.) 

Education is Not Job-Training.

"STEVEN'S POINT, Wis. -- Chancellor Bernie Patterson's message to his campus was blunt: To remain solvent and relevant, his 125-year-old university needed to reinvent itself." (N.Y.T., 1-13-19, p. A1.)  

Reading this opening paragraph in the Times coverage of an old controversy that I have explored in several essays at these blogs was a bit of a shock but also intriguing.

Please compare "Nihilists in Disneyworld" and "Why Jane can't read" with "America's Nursery School Campus" and "Guerrilla Aesthetics and the Lobotomizing of the American Mind" then see "Whatever happened to the liberal arts?"

It often seems to me in pondering discussions of this troublesome issue concerning not only American higher education, but also developments in Western culture or in "our" national intellectual life, that proponents of the rival positions are inhabiting different realities and seeing (or discussing) radically different phenomena or issues while believing themselves to be addressing the same controversy or concerns. 

Worse, as usual in public debates in U.S. society and politics, the true motivating "feelings" of the respective parties (for good reasons) are rarely fully articulated. 

There are some people who simply hate the idea of the poor and/or minorities and/or women, as the case may be, spending four years "in the June of life" -- to quote Will Durant -- in the "aristocratic" pursuit of reading great poetry, analyzing philosophical masterpieces, debating historical questions, experiencing profound dramatic performances, listening to fine music, enjoying sculpture and paintings of transcendent beauty then indulging in formal discussions of the merits and importance of such works:

"Some longstanding liberal arts degrees, including those in history, French and German [literature and culture] would be eliminated. Career-focused programs would become a big investment. Tenured faculty members could lose their jobs." (N.Y.T., 1-13-19, p. A1.)

It is assumed by proponents and critics of these suggested changes that decline in enrollment at this school and others like it would be reversed by enhancing the so-called "employability" of blue collar or lower-middle-class American students and graduates. 

Often students at such schools are the first members of their families to attend institutions of higher learning hoping to improve their prospects after graduation.

Four-year degree programs were the traditional ticket to a better life for many young people, notably for the post-World War II generation of first- or second-generation "ethnic" Americans defeating Hitler and escaping urban ghettos to reach the affluent suburbs through detours in liberal arts and professional schools. 

It is more likely today that a focus on "practical" concerns or "clear career pathways" leading, theoretically, to prompt employment for graduates will in fact result in a decline in the academic reputation of universities adopting such reforms and a much greater decrease in enrollment of persons actually interested in obtaining a genuine education at four-year schools.

Employers may be inclined to hire graduates of schools with better academic reputations on the assumption that products of more traditional university programs will be better thinkers who are also able to express themselves with greater skill than the more "practical" graduates of what will become glorified vocational schools. 

Education at the university level must be about the enrichment of the inner-life of the student because it should be concerned, appropriately, with the kind of person the student wishes to be (or become) in a moral sense. 

Genuine higher education changes the student and often professors as well by making persons "sharing" an encounter with great works more humane because they are members of a community of learners. 

Perhaps an educated person with a moral or aesthetic life that is full and complex who can draw upon what Mathew Arnold called the "best that has been thought and said" is always (or usually) a highly resourceful and imaginative or creative worker who is more capable of assuming and discharging his or her responsibilities than another person (unless we are thinking of someone very exceptional) who is totally lacking in higher education. 

It is not an "indulgence" or "luxury" or an "attempt to be all things to all people" for a good university education to provide persons, equally, regardless of the accidents of race, gender, economic class or any of the other artificially constructed categories that are so central in American society and into which all of us may be fitted in one way or another to be equipped with the tools that will allow each of us -- as individuals -- to decide on the meanings of our lives and, thereby, on what or why we "achieve" or are "successful" in forging our fragile identities whatever rewards are earned eventually in the marketplace. 

Every person, I suggest, has the right for such an experience or to try for this elusive goal of becoming the person he or she is through education. 

The true goal of a university experience is for each student to be the best thinking and feeling human being that he or she can be over a lifetime through the guidance of more experienced readers and writers, scholars and moral thinkers in youth, when this guidance is most needed, in order for the student's true self and authentic values to be revealed (or discovered) with the passage of the years.

For non-traditional students intellectual "youth" or "lack of cultural awareness and development" is a problem that can be remedied or dealt with, or a condition to be improved, at any age.  

There was a time when such thoughts could be expressed in America without fear of being deemed "controversial" or accused of a "hide-bound conservatism" at best or racism and sexism at worst. The P.C. brigade considers this position "elitist" which seems to them like a bad thing. ("'The Scarlet Letter' and the #Me Too Moment.") 

For some participants in this debate my so-called "lofty sentiments" may be O.K. for Princeton or Yale undergraduates, but not for African-Americans or Latinos and other poor students, including many rural whites, attending state colleges and public universities whose overriding concern should be employment allowing for the prompt payment of ever-higher taxes and interest on student loans to say nothing of knee-jerk loyalty to the G.O.P. while avoiding America's overcrowded prisons. 

"We do not care about anybody's inner-life," university administrators say, "but only about what is convenient for the bottom line at universities and in society."

This inspiring point of view is what Marxists call a "class-based analysis" that aside from racism and sexism detectable just under the surface of the rationale offered for proposed denials of genuine education to many people is and can only be based on fear.    

Education is a human right.   

" ... critics say that in trying to carve out a sustainable path for Steven's Point -- and build a model for other struggling, regionally focused universities -- administrators are risking the very essence of a four-year college experience." (N.Y.T., 1-13-19, p. A22.) 

Not surprisingly:

"The turmoil is not unique to Steven's Point where nearly half the students are first generation in their family to attend college. [sic.] In large parts of the Midwest and Northeast, public universities far from urban centers are hurting for students and money. And they are facing painful choices." (N.Y.T., 1-13-19, p. A22.) 

The worst choice is to change university education in order to transform a fundamentally personal-aesthetic or spiritual experience into job-training for the lower orders in public schools and genuine liberal arts or science training in private schools for "elites."

By my use of the word "spiritual" I am not referring to anything religious, but to the non-material or qualitative aspect of the psychology of learning during a high-level university education which is available in any accredited university for the student who seeks it thanks to professors committed to providing it. 

To do such a thing (job-training for the poor, Plato for the rich) is to create a two-tiered system that denies access to authentic educational experiences that are essentially spiritual or psychological in nature, as I say, to the poor who are, mostly, minority group members or other disadvantaged students. 

This is to "ghettoize" the higher education offered to some persons while enhancing the value of the more expensive education available to others who may be no more or less talented than their economically underprivileged fellow citizens.    

It is frustrating to argue this issue with people who do not seem to know what is meant by education or why history and philosophy, for instance, as well as the arts and sciences feature in the traditional curriculum. 

It is usually philosophy that is deemed "pointless" by persons who see themselves as very "practical" or focused on the proverbial "bottom-line." 

In the most recent version of this controversy in America "history" has become the object of scorn for the "bottom-liners" in academia. 

History is dismissed as an "utterly absurd" major by many alleged scholars who say, helpfully, "concentrate on the future because there is nothing you can do about the past" and, besides, "what is past is soon forgotten and need not matter anymore." 

This attitude fails to recognize what history is, or the extent to which the past is always present in our lives, especially in American society, and also the best indication of what we will have to deal with now if we are to avoid painful dilemmas in the future. 

The very proposed denials of education, under whatever rubric is used to accomplish the goal, to African-Americans, primarily, is illuminated -- along with much else in our social life -- by the four hundred years of history on this continent surrounding the tragedy of slavery and its legacy. ("Dehumanization.") 

Bertrand Russell has provided me with a far more eloquent defense of history as an essential subject of study for every educated person than any that I can provide.

It is crucial to appreciate that, say, American Constitutional law simply is U.S. history in a reflective as well as generative sense. It is incomprehensible why we bother to have the 13th and 14th Amendments without recalling something called "The Civil War" and the issue over which that struggle was waged: 

"Of all the studies by which men [and women] acquire citizenship of the intellectual commonwealth, no single one is so indispensable as the study of the past. To know how the world developed to the point at which our individual memory begins; how the religions, the institutions, the nations among which we live, became what they are; to be acquainted with the great of other times, with customs and beliefs differing widely from our own -- these things are indispensable to any consciousness of our position, and to any emancipation from the accidental circumstances of our education. It is not only to the historian that history is valuable, not only to the professional student of archives and documents, but to all who are capable of a contemplative survey of human life. But the value of history is so multiform, that those to whom some one of its sides appeals with especial force are in constant danger of forgetting all the others." (Russell, "On History," p. 60, emphasis added.)

In speaking of "acquiring citizenship of the intellectual commonwealth" and the "contemplative survey of human life" Russell may have articulated what is meant by higher education and why it matters to every human being fortunate enough to receive one at any stage of life. 

I am sure that university education can be made available to every person who desires it with the understanding that what is provided is a matter of respect for the equality and dignity of every person and not a guarantee of greater solvency upon graduation.

This leads me back to the most controversial aspect of this debate not only for me, but also (I am certain) for American society -- fear.   

Fear motivates the protests of persons concerned that public education at the university level not be seen as "all things to all people." 

We are a very frightened population in the first decades of the new century. One of the things that is truly dreaded is equality because -- perhaps for the first time in our history -- equality is within reach for millions of people who could only dream of such a thing in past decades. 

We are afraid of many other people in the world who are described as "terrorists" because they object to being bombed or killed by U.S. forces. 

It disturbs us to know that 70% of new Ph.D.s in America are foreign born because so many of America's young people today are denied a solid basic education in the early grades of schooling so that they are not equipped to pursue higher education. 

Defective early education is a greater problem than any alleged "impracticality" in liberal arts education. 

We need foreign students to remain competitive even if many people hate them, nevertheless, and wish to see such scholars expelled from the country. 

Fear usually leads to hatred that generates only more fear.

The most obvious fear supporting restrictions on higher education, or more of a "job-focused approach" is a hidden concern that, with higher education, there may be more Barack Obamas in America's future. Horrors.   

We are increasingly frightened by poor and desperate "brown people" (who are equally terrified of "us") as they make their way to the nation's southern border with the slim hope of being able to eat regularly and drink healthy water for a change. (My advice is stay away from New Jersey.)

These dangerous "Mexicans," as President Trump describes them, although most migrants are from Central America -- which Mr. Trump believes and has said on several occasions  is "part of Mexico" -- are seeking to avoid the consequences of U.S. efforts in previous decades in their part of the world. 

Among these consequences are out-of-control "narco-traffickers" and puppet fascist regimes installed and maintained by Washington officials. It should surprise no one that millions of victimized people are coming to the U.S. and will continue to do so.

Most of all we are frightened of one another and losing all sense of community in America. 

"White Nationalist" groups are terrified at the thought of money being spent on the higher education of the children of migrants who must be plotting, in their eyes, to transform the U.S. into a "Third World country." 

I cannot count the number of times I have heard Americans complain that they "do not wish to live in a Third World country." A quick glance at the cities and towns in which we already live today would reveal that many sections of the country qualify as comparable to underdeveloped nations thanks to inadequate access to health care and poor education for the vast majority of residents.

In fact, one way of helping to alleviate this problem of declining quality of life may be to extend opportunities for higher education to more people who are bound to contribute to the economy in time. 

It is certainly true that not only new arrivals but many minority group members and lots of women express real terror about the Trump presidency's likely future policies and the so-called "drift" to fascism in America. 

Persons who are described as "different" or outside the "politically correct" sub-group are to be feared and can only become more dangerous, we are told, if they are actually educated in this country at the taxpayers' expense. 

This is one of the points at which the disagreement becomes sharp for me because I favor education (more of it and life-long access to it) for everyone: African-Americans, whites, women, migrants, often necessarily publicly financed and regardless of anyone's politics. 

One hopes that greater education will make moronic or hateful political opinions more scarce and that there will be fewer readers of The New York Post. 

Education -- especially the study of history -- is uniquely conducive to the goals of democracy, as Mr. Jefferson understood so well, and it may be the best or only true antidote to irrational fear -- fear that we may experience concerning "others" or even of ourselves. 

A violent history, like it or not and often tragically, is something that we must share as Americans. 

Coming to terms with the painful past (and our memories) is therefore the only true understanding of ourselves necessary if we are to create the meanings that we require to lead fully human lives. 

Accepting and transcending America's bloody past is made possible by education or, to use an older word "cultivation" of the arts and sciences from which our inner resources are always constructed. 

For this reason education is often described as something with a material cost that is also, as I have argued, a "spiritual good" to which every man and woman has a right in a democracy even if economic circumstances only allow some of us to realize that right. 

What history teaches most forcefully is that the more we recognize and accept our common humanity the less we will fear one another or project our own tendencies to violence and self-loathing on to other nations and peoples. 

As we come to appreciate the founding values of American society developed over the past two centuries (and still evolving) the better citizens we become and the greater is our respect for the "perfection" of the American project of "freedom with equality" that remains the task for every generation of Americans. ("Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution.") 

Critiques of liberal education.  

One of the peculiarities of the current attacks on traditional ideas of liberal education, or the role of universities in American life, is that there is not only a conservative but also a liberal hostility to universal humanistic education reflected in so-called "reforms" that are the focus of the Times article.   

For many trendy self-styled "multi-gendered" academics critical of the traditional curriculum Western civilization and the very notion of "excellence" or even "greatness" is suspect or the enemy.     

For fashionable intellectuals "practicality" in higher education is not the problem. 

All liberal education is happily dismissed by "tenured radicals" as gloriously impractical (or arbitrary) as is the classical concept of the well-rounded person shaped by exposure to "the best that has been thought and said." 

The very idea that there is a single canonical list of the "best that has been thought and said" in the humanities, again, as articulated by the much dreaded "Dead White European Males" (DWEM) is absurd, or a reflection of the illegitimate power of an inside group, often living white European and American male intellectuals with a few token women and dark-skinned persons thrown in for the sake of appearances, and (not surprisingly) laughed at or explained away as merely the product of power-relations a la Nietzsche or Foucault. ("Guerrilla Aesthetics and the Lobotomizing of the American Mind.") 

Shakespeare is no more worthy of attention than Mickey Mouse except for "biases" we take to be objective standards when they are and can only be mere "preferences" reflective of illegitimate hierarchies. 

Critics of classical education or advanced study of the humanities as opposed, I guess, to the "inhumanities" of the sciences, are more dangerous enemies of the liberal arts -- or of true learning for that matter as traditionally understood -- than the proponents of a business model for U.S. universities. ("America's Nursery School Campus.") 

It is ironic that such critics are usually employed as university professors or cultural commentators trained themselves in one or another of the traditional areas of the humanities. 

Harold Bloom has referred to intellectuals expressing such deflationary opinions as the "school of resentment." 

Liberal critics express a kind of self-disgust or admit feeling utterly fraudulent in their professional lives like disenchanted or disappointed "lovers" of disciplines that have fallen on hard times or that turned out to be worthless.  

This mood is also far from unusual among lawyers and legal academics and was one of the charges brought against the Critical Legal Studies Movement (CLS), inaccurately in many cases, but with a ring of truth in other instances. ("The Critical Legal Studies Movement" and "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory" then "Ronald Dworkin's Jurisprudence of Interpretation" and "Charles Fried and William Shakespeare on Interpretation.") 

Defeatism and weary acquiescence in mediocrity are not uncommon among journalists and police officers as well as politicians in U.S. society and may reveal a cultural fatigue at this moment in our history that is worthy of serious attention. 

The emergence of a proud sense of fraudulence among professionals is yet another symptom of the crisis afflicting Western civilization as a whole that is described in Russia, for example, as a "crisis of nerve" by scholars unaware that they are quoting Gilbert Murray on the causes for the decline of Greek civilization in the ancient world to describe Mr. Trump's America.

There are discussions in Left Bank cafes and in Paris media of a widespread American "loss of self-confidence" that delights Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi as well as the enemies of the West in the form of ISIS and other forces in the Middle East that have not been "defeated" or "disappeared" but only spread and morphed into persistent militant forces throughout a highly troubled region.  ("Where we are now.") 

Dissident professors doubt whether the humanities matter anymore, but not because their study is an insufficiently practical way to spend a few years early in life or because the liberal arts will not help students to qualify as carpenters or dental assistants; rather, the failure of liberal arts education has been the alleged discovery that "goodness," "beauty," "liberty" and "equality," or say "love," are all "relative" concepts and can mean whatever you want them to mean or nothing much at all. ("Whatever.")    

To believe that such grand words are empty of content or "lack a referent" is to conclude that Western civilization's effort to come to terms with such concepts over millennia is bankrupt and pointless anyway. 

This is a far greater challenge for humanistic education than the old question of whether reading Shakespeare "matters" when you are trying to get a job. (Yes, it does.) 

If there is no need for logic or careful argumentation and efforts to write clearly and well in order to express our concerns or persuade others as to the "correct" opinions to hold and if we can dismiss empirical evidence drawn from the social sciences as "part of the patriarchy" persons will resort to violence or censorship very quickly in a heterogeneous society that has become balkanized or tribalized where there is an increasing lack of any common discourse or values and politics has become a war of all against all. 

We now express disagreement by destroying another person's creative work (or texts) because everything is about power anyway and morality is subjective. There is no right and wrong we are told. (Again: "Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" then "Shakespeare's Black Prince.") 

"The proposal was especially bitter for liberal arts professors, who have viewed their disciplines as the backbone of the college experience but now fear losing their jobs. Stevens Point administrators have winnowed an initial list of majors to eliminate (English and Political Science were among those spared), but some faculty members said they remained queasy, uncertain about what additional changes the future will bring." (N.Y.T., 1-13-19, p. A22.)    

Among the reasons for the divide on this issue at universities are the more intractable and substantive conflicts dividing U.S. intellectuals concerning politics and culture.

Some of America's academics and artists see themselves as standing on the barricades holding the barbarians at bay to protect the monuments of civilization, or to preserve Western culture from the new philistinism of P.C. warriors, who are often colleagues in English or philosophy departments (LGBTQ persons seem to be prominently represented in this group) even as they constitute new threats to all that "we" hold dear in the few remaining strongholds of civilization among which New Jersey can not be included. 

I am highly sympathetic to the concerns of persons, academics or not, who struggle to rescue Shakespeare or Mozart to say nothing of Aristotle or Kant, from "tenured terrorists" (Roger Kimball) who wish to make such geniuses "more relevant" or to improve or re-write their masterpieces for the Facebook generation.

The arrogance or stupidity of persons presuming to "bring the classics up-to-date" by making them more "inclusive" boggles the mind and may be the most profound form of anti-historical sentiment. 

Many of the greatest works in the history of our civilization are intended to exclude all but a few persons not for political reasons, but simply because of the demands they make of readers or recipients. 

This is not offensive "elitism" but only honesty.

The notion that we, as students and readers of a masterpiece, should seek to be worthy of the work rather than expecting its creator to worry about whether "everyone" can understand all that he or she has written despite limitations of, say, ignorance or lack of experience or simple imbecility is bizarre.   

Among the things that the serious and life-long study of history can give you is a cure for the famous "condescension of posterity" to which all of us are prone when contemplating our ancestors' lives and their achievements. 

Albert Einstein did not live to see "The Simpson's" television show but is not to be considered "stupid" because he would fail to recognize a reference to Homer Simpson or laptop computers. 

If conservatives are motivated by fear of the "little brown people" or "poor and/or non-traditional students" or simply "dark-skinned others" then liberals often express secret fears of authority-figures, or aesthetic standards, or paternal/maternal figures (Robert Brandom calls them "the noble dead") that inspire even very learned men and women to "break cultural furniture" or to seek to destroy the monuments of our civilization in order to get even not only for boring assignments in illustrious graduate schools, but also for their parents' war in Vietnam that took so many friends and lovers from them far too soon. 

"A plague on both their houses" to quote an obscure poet.

The truth about all of this, as usual, is found between extremes on the Left or Right of the political spectrum.

We need students, young people, ALL of us to read our history critically (but fairly) because the narrative of our origins and purposes as a people is much more horrible and ugly, obscene and violent as well as beautiful and inspiring than we have been led to believe in high school "social studies" classes and goes a long way towards explaining the very debates about the utility of historical scholarship that now inspire so much animosity and lingering resentments. 

"And even those like Dana Warren, a longtime philosophy professor who did not take a position on Dr. Patterson's plan, said they [the liberal arts faculty] believed the campus was at an inflection point." (N.Y.T., 1-13-19, p. A22.) 

This is to identify an important cultural moment in American society in the age of Donald J. Trump:

" ...'Everyone is just scared about the bottom line,' Dr. Warren said. 'The suspense movie music has reached its crescendo, and either something's going to jump out from the corners or something really good is going to happen.' ..." (N.Y.T., 1-13-19, p. A22.) 

Do the humanities matter?

We are experiencing a decline in the national commitment to humanism -- defined as belief in the value of every person's life together with "shared" pride in human achievements especially when it comes to the greatest accomplishments of the most gifted men and women -- even as the reality and celebration of community in American society also wanes.

I have suggested that these cultural developments are related to (or may be reflected in) the decline or abandonment of the humanities in higher education and the adoption of a "business model" for universities. 

Higher education may be "big business" in America, but its greatest importance has little to do with economics in the short term -- how much it costs to go to school -- since it is much more concerned with the issue of what sort of persons we choose to be (or become) at this moment of transition in global history. 

History again: The U.S. will no longer be the exclusive superpower in the world in the second-half of the twenty-first century. 

America will have to share power and influence in a multi-polar global community that includes a revitalized Russia and the massive Chinese economy and what remains of the European union.

It is necessary to reflect on America's national identity by way of a return to the founding documents of the nation. 

This is a hermeneutic task for which Donald J. Trump's America is ill-equipped. 

Worse, Mr. Trump himself can provide very little leadership or guidance to meet this challenge. 

Coinciding with these developments is the parallel decline of organized religion as a force in national life.

Religious affiliations were one source of community in past decades. 

Religious institutions can no longer provide that binding role for Americans or Europeans. 

America is fortunate, however, to possess entirely secular symbols of nationhood and a "heritage" of jurisprudential-political ideas captured in the public structures associated with U.S. society by persons from all over the world. 

From the Statue of Liberty to the Washington and Lincoln monuments and other government buildings, the Liberty Bell, and U.S. Supreme Court building appropriately resembling the Temple of Athena in ancient Greece -- these monuments to the values of Enlightenment reason and the equal liberty of every human being cannot perform their binding role when citizens are unaware of what they symbolize and have lost their commitment to the values the "republic" was created to serve and fulfill. 

America's trendy intellectuals no longer accept the universality of reason or anything else, apparently, and do not believe in the dignity of every human life, except for the LGBTQ community and/or members of one's own race or gender, perhaps, and/or persons sharing one's political affiliations. 

Beauty as a value in aesthetics is challenged by a generation of thinkers describing a soiled bed-sheet placed on a white museum wall, for instance, as equivalent to a Rembrandt self-portrait found in the same museum because "it's whatever you like." 

We are told often enough that "everything is relative" or "whatever." I disagree: 

"The claim of this book is that broadly-based, self-critical and yet pragmatic education matters today more than ever, and that it matters far beyond the borders of any university campus. The demand for useful educational results have gotten louder, and threats to liberal education are indeed profound (from government regulators, from the business sector, from within the university). In an age of seismic technological change and instantaneous information dissemination, it is more crucial than ever that we not abandon the humanistic framework of education in favor of narrow, technical forms of teaching intended to give quick, utilitarian results. Those results are no substitute for the practice of inquiry, critique, and experience that students' [apply] to experience [in order to] understand the world around them -- and to innovatively respond to it -- A reflexive, pragmatic liberal education is our best hope of preparing students to shape change and not just be the victims of it. ..." (Michael S. Roth, Beyond the University, pp. 10-11, emphasis added.) 

To cure the cancer of self-doubt and overcome divisions that make it impossible for America and the Western world to act in a unified manner we need to begin with respect for one another as equal and free human beings (this includes the LGBTQ community provided they grant the same respect to others) with the right to think and speak, differently, also honestly and bravely, about what we all believe and feel today assuming that we can find something everyone believes or accepts or will not protest. 

To do this "speaking" well education is desperately needed along with the tolerance made possible only by genuine liberal education that, if we are lucky, may permit each man and woman to become over a lifetime a civilized human being coping with inevitable loss and pain (even mortality in the end) by drawing strength from the rich legacy of genius that is humanity's birthright.