"Relativism," contra Jaffa (and Bloom), was merely administrative compromise. But the academy no longer believes all sin is relative...
Diagnosing Academia's Disease
What’s the root of academic rot? Is the fundamental cause of the corruption of American higher education academy relativism, hatred, or something else entirely?
Absent the teaching of human truth, absolutism preys on our atomized youth.
Both the burning of the Reichstag and the decline of the American university resulted from the choices of philosophers. Jaffa’s final address is a condensed version of the book Allan Bloom should have written, but couldn’t.
Without a common understanding of the human person and the human good, academia is reduced to job training, politics, or consumerism.
We may never find a grand, unified theory of the “single truth," but we do not need it to know that men are not horses and beauty is truly good.
Since Jaffa wrote "Reichstag" in 1989, the campus left has adorned its ideology with a few new terms—but its underlying relativism remains the same.
