http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2009/06.04/bacca.html

“universities serve as society’s critics and conscience. We are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but of doubt — of understanding rooted in skepticism and constant questioning, not in the unchallenged sway of accepted wisdom. More than perhaps any other institution in our society, universities are about the long view and about the critical perspectives that derive from not being owned exclusively by the present. ”

I think the Church carries the day in those categories…

“The enhancement of our role as critics and doubters must come as well through the education of our undergraduates, where we seek, in the words of the new General Education program, “to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar . . . to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.” As we adapt to a rapidly changing world, we must build anew on Harvard’s long traditions of liberal arts education and of humanistic inquiry. These traditions can generate both the self-scrutiny and self-understanding that lead through doubt to wisdom. ”

and

“The privilege of academic freedom carries the obligation to speak the truth even when it is difficult or unpopular. So in the end, it comes back to veritas — the commitment to use knowledge and research to penetrate delusion, cant, prejudice, self-interest. ”

Oh, that’s right, it all comes down to veritas – this from a University that ran its previous president down the Charles on a skiff for suggesting that women and men might not be interchangeable!

I happen to hold degrees from both The Catholic University of America and Harvard University. I think often of the difference in the Latin text on each institution’s seal – Harvard’s is emblazoned with “Veritas” while CUA’s seal bears the phrase “Deus Lux Mea Est”.

Given the secular inability to define “Truth” as anything other than self-orientation, I will stick with “God is my Light.”

Pardon me while I fall down laughing at the idea that deconstructionism is a conservative project! I’m surprised that it’s not labeled as “fascist”; apparently “conservative” here is used simply as a pejorative.

However, Martin Earl has an excellent point in that most readers do not want to be “empowered” in the way that the deconstructionists promote. If we read only to act as “avenging angels,” imposing our own vision on the “text,” why bother reading at all? And in fact English departments are seeing declining enrollments. I can’t blame the students, for I myself would never have majored in English if the discipline had been then what it is now in most colleges and universities. Will the academy ever come to its senses, like the prodigal son, and repent?