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A Professor's Logic
by Glenn Woiceshyn
Dear Editor,
Re: "The Myth of a Golden Age in Higher Education"--by Michiel Horn--Oct/28/97--The
Globe and Mail
According to history professor Michiel Horn, the mountain of evidence we have indicating
that our universities have become cesspools of mediocrity (and much worse) over the
past few decades should be rejected. Also, those complaining about the ominous trend,
such as Prof. David Bercuson et al (Re: Petrified Forest: the Crisis in Canadian
Universities--Oct. 18), should be ignored.
Why? Because, according to Prof. Horn, people generally suffer from a psychological
delusion about a past golden age in education, and people in the 1950s and 1920s
also complained about universities.
In other words, to hell with our evidence because we all are psychologically deluded.
One would normally expect a history professor not to display such logical bankruptcy,
except that logic was one of the first victims of modern university education. (In
Prof. Horn's field of history, the collapse of logic gave rise to cultural relativism
and revisionism, where any tribe can rewrite history to glorify its ancestors.)
Prof. Horn merely offers us one more piece of anecdotal evidence indicating the serious
intellectual crisis in our universities. For him to conclude by asking for more government
funding of universities is a malicious insult to Globe readers and taxpayers.
Best Premises,
Glenn Woiceshyn
© 1997 Glenn Woiceshyn. All rights reserved.
This article can be found on-line at at http://www.capitalism.org/glennw. |
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