“In certain large areas … the effort is now being made to clamp down the freedom of the human spirit. Universities have been so reorganized that they have become tools of those who believe in a special political, economic, or racial creed.”
This was not written today.
It was written by Abraham Flexner in the 1930s about what was happening at universities in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
Flexner was the founder of the institute at Princeton, where Albert Einstein and many other European academics who fled the scourge of Nazism and fascism had found refuge.
Abraham Lincoln supposedly said, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government of the next.”
We should be very concerned about what is happening today at many of our most prestigious so-called institutions of higher learning.
The groupthink, lack of willingness to listen to and politely debate opposing viewpoints, violence and antisemitism bode ill for the future.
Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
If we don’t heed the warnings of history, we will be doomed to repeat it.
Kaj Ahlburg
Port Angeles