Just when it seemed that the secular university could not sink any lower into darkness, we have a semester of calls for genocide against Jews. What?!?
By now, most of us have likely read about how cultural Marxism has shaped the contemporary secular university. It teaches a narrative of the oppressor and the oppressed. And applied to our current hour, Israel is the oppressor, and the Palestinians are the oppressed.
Even after the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023, excuses are being made along these lines: “But Israel is the oppressor!” This superficial view of morality extends no further than the economic and political. Whoever is in power is the oppressor, whoever is without is the oppressed. No longer does the truth of the cause for which a group fights matter. It only matters that a group is considered oppressed. Their solution is to train up a generation of advocates and social engineers who will set the world to rights and tell everyone how to live.
This is all part of the picture of the decay occuring on campuses across America. But there is another part I would also like to highlight. There is a loss of moral clarity at the secular university because there is a loss of clarity about foundational truths. It would sound humorous to most at the secular university to suggest that the university’s goals should be piety and the knowledge of God. Academic skepticism denies the possibility of such knowledge. Most would say that in our day, the university is a place to learn unbelief and impiety. We are not surprised to hear of a student de-converting or professors teaching that “God” is a tool of the oppressor. The moral bankruptcy of the contemporary secular university is grounded in a long history of denying what is clearly revealed about God in general revelation.
Anecdotal Evidence from American Universities
To set the stage, let me give some context from my own service in the secular university. I am a professor of philosophy and religion at Arizona State University. This last year, I have been especially busy calling attention to discrimination against conservative Christians and Jews by secular university professors. I am almost entirely alone in calling attention to this among ASU professors.
This kind of discrimination came to expression early last spring at ASU when a group of honors professors attempted to block Dennis Prager from speaking at the honors college. There are many things a person might disagree about with Prager, but their stated reasons were that he is a bigoted, white nationalist who is against the LGBTQ+ community. When I told Prager that these professors called him a white nationalist, he just laughed and said that was a first. He has defended the Biblical view of marriage as between a man and a woman. But these professors interpret his views on marriage, not to mention the predominant view of marriage in world history, as an act of bigotry. To defend the Biblical view of marriage is enough to get you banned from ASU’s honors college.
Also this fall, a pro-Palestinian student group disrupted the student senate meeting at ASU. They began to throw rocks at the building. Outside the Middle East, who does that? Jewish students had to be escorted to safety by campus police. Unironically, other pro-Palestinian groups on campus are sponsored by the communist party of Arizona and similar organizations that use race and oppression as their lens to interpret the rest of life.
Broadening our scope, we have recently seen three of the most powerful university presidents in the country give testimony before Congress. The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT were unable to respond to a simple question asking about whether calls for genocide against Jews violate their university policy. In the wake of this debacle, the president of Penn stepped down almost immediately. A few weeks later, the president of Harvard did as well. But only after she was supported by over 600 Harvard faculty and the Harvard Corporation. In a post-resignation op-ed, she admitted to plagiarism but then blamed her resignation on a conspiracy against her and the DEI establishment.
How did we get to such a place at the secular university? What happened to the liberalism at the heart of the secular university? These are questions we should give time to answering.
The Not-So-Neutral Neutrality of the American University
Supposedly, a liberal arts education was an education that liberated the individual from ignorance and fideism. Under John Dewey’s influence, a liberal arts education was meant to prepare the student to be a citizen and contributor to the modern economy. Stationed at Columbia University from 1905–1930, Dewey played a critical role in forming educational philosophy in the twentieth century.
The American pragmatic educators, of which Dewey was a part, claimed to remain neutral about political and religious divisions and instead focused on training students to make their societies better places to live. For them, “better” meant economically and materially more comfortable. This democratic education allowed all members of society to be educated without requiring a solution to the religious and political divisions among them. This was really just a continuation of the Academic Skepticism that has beset the Academy from almost its very beginning.
However, the cultural revolution of the 1960s brought about changes to this pragmatism. Most notably, Herbert Marcuse introduced “repressive tolerance,” a concept wherein unwanted viewpoints were weeded out in the name of advancement. What Marcuse noticed was that the pragmatists’ neutrality was not sustainable. Education must take a position on the truth of the matter. It must answer the most important questions that students face if it is to help them find meaning in life. And thus, educators cannot be wholly neutral. They must instead teach from some moral basis.
The ‘Morality’ of Marcuse and Marx
When I hear Christians say that university professors no longer believe in truth, I must disagree. While they may deny Jesus Christ as the Truth Incarnate, they do believe in the truth of the material dialectic—that the ever changing matter of the universe is ultimate. For Marcuse, this meant being intolerant of views on the right and tolerant of views from the left. Sound familiar?
It is worth noting that this narrative was accompanied by moral licentiousness. Marcuse assumed the general structure of Freudian teaching about sexual repression and sexual liberation. He combined the presuppositions of Marx and Freud into his critique of American culture. Morally conservative influences were considered part of the benighted past that needed liberation into a libertine future.
We know today that students do not go to secular universities and become more godly. Instead, the common story is one of increased immorality and godlessness. Sexual immorality is practiced in the dorms and justified in the classroom. The strategy of thinkers like Marcuse is to appeal to general principles of pluralism and tolerance to then weed out the previous moral commitments of a bygone “Christian” system.
From here, we begin to get a picture of the moral code by which such secular professors assess the world. The claim is that capitalist countries and their sponsored states are defenders of ignorance and self-centeredness. They encourage an individualism that allows capital to end up in the hands of a very few who then oppress the rest of society. This oppression can be both active and passive. The passive form is in the mere fact of accumulated wealth not being used to end suffering in things like poverty and sickness. This is has been labeled “structural racism” or any similar kind of structural oppression. The person with such wealth is asked to “check their privilege,” and the central privilege that connects all others is called “whiteness.”
Still Marcuse was not the original progenitor of class distinctions. That goes back to Karl Marx and his material dialectic, which provided an easy way to evaluate and divide the world. Demographically applied, there are the oppressors, and there are the oppressed. For the secular mind, this explained the age of exploration and colonialism. This was also the story adopted by the Marxist countries during the Cold War and the leftist American college professor. It explained the West as those who were without qualification perpetrators of oppression. And this is the narrative you hear today on college campuses around America.
Pragmatism was always a weak foundation on which to build a life or a university. Because these professors were and are merely secular, they are unable to look to what is eternal and transcendent for the basis of morality and meaning in life. When you step back and observe it, theirs is a very bleak and hopeless to see the world. What do they have to offer to their students by way of lasting meaning? The best they have is training in advocacy to advance social justice agendas, which brings us back to antisemitism on college campuses.
Standing Against Cultural Marxism with God’s Truth
Given these considerations, we can now make sense of why Hamas is being supported at secular universities. University presidents at prestigious schools are being called to step down, and in some cases, actually are stepping down, because these same presidents are unable to denounce calls by students for the genocide of Jews. Donors are pulling their money over rampant antisemitism on campuses. And yet, we find faculty at these universities supporting these presidents and their student clubs calling for genocide of the Jews. How did we get here?
The answer is seen, at least in part, in education’s drift from “neutral” pragmatism to a secular progressivism. Nature hates a vacuum—and so does the education system. Teaching is undeniably moral, and events of today are the inescapable result of the philosophies described above. But what is the solution?
Hamas is a religiously motivated terrorist organization that relies on unspeakable acts of violence, as demonstrated in their attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. But in the eyes of the cultural Marxist, Hamas is fighting for the right cause simply because they are economically disadvantaged. The secular professor, therefore, can minimize Hamas’ murderous behavior and cast them as freedom fighters.
At least, this is one version of the hero archetype for which the American psyche is well-disposed. America, too, was founded by oppressed people against an oppressive regime. Perversely, with all theological aspects of the origin of America erased, the secular professor might even say that it is pro-American to support Hamas, because it is always right to side with the oppressed. Lord help us!
Still, what should we expect from our college campuses? Awash in generations of cultural Marxism, a return to Academic Skepticism and Pragmatism will not solve the deep problems of the American University. Instead, we must call attention to the emptiness of cultural Marxism and the oppressor/oppressed narrative. Even more though, we must return to establish university education on foundational truths. There are basic questions that all humans face, and finding meaning in life requires answering those questions. These have to do with authority, reality, and value. These are foundational questions for the rest of what we study.
Even if the secular university successfully argues that it is not the place for revealed religion, it is the place where we study general revelation. And general revelation clearly reveals God and the moral law. The founders of Princeton knew this when they stated that the goals of that college were “piety and the knowledge of God.” The scriptures teach us that there is a clear general revelation. Whether it is Psalm 19 telling us that the heavens declare the glory of God; or, Psalm 145 that all of the works of God reveal Him; or, Romans 1:18–21 where we find that although God is clearly revealed in creation, humans have suppressed this truth in their unrighteousness. It is because of this that we need redemptive revelation in the scriptures to explain how God will deal with us in our sin.
The American University has been far from these truths of general revelation for a long time. It takes a crisis to get people to stop and think. What we see now at the secular university is just such a crisis. Cultural Marxism can and should be challenged as a false philosophy that denies what is clearly revealed to all about God and our highest good. Academic skepticism should be exposed as a rejection that God is knowable and the purpose of education is to study the works of God. There is no neutrality or way to avoid the need for truth. We must lay the foundation for education on these truths about God. For in no other way, can we find life, liberty, and the pursuit of education.
