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It was Colby Cosh’s article in Thursday’s National Post that brings me to this. He was writing about the now sadly mocked (and I’m quite sure sadly pained) NDP candidate, master’s graduate (“Race, Class, & Gender Dynamics In Interdisciplinary Teams”) and school board trustee, Alex Johnstone, who was put in the pitiful position of having to admit that, until this week, she did not know anything about, or possibly even heard of, the very demon-pearl of death-camps, Auschwitz.

I’d like to be clear that I’m not here to add to the personal mockery — the Internet has taken care of that. Rather, I’d like to take up just one — I think the central one — of Cosh’s observations: “It seems some part of our system for producing intellectually responsible grownups has failed Johnstone.” He’s right. He’s absolutely right. And the only emendation I’d make on his statement is to get rid of “seems.”

Some universities — and, in particularly, some humanities departments — have, over the last few decades, wandered far from the primary purpose of what these institutions were designed for: to teach what is worth knowing; to train the intellect; to acquaint students with, and help them appreciate, the glories of the human mind and its finest achievements.

Concomitantly, they have descended into pseudo-studies, become infatuated with low pop culture, become obsessed with faddish social justice issues, turned hypervigilant on their students’ “comfort levels” and are pruriently concerned with sexism narratives, cause politics and “identity” zealotry. They bear almost no resemblance to the institutions of higher learning — higher in its full applications — that they, at least ideally, have always aspired to be.