Radical Left Rejects Rational Ideas That Make the World Go 'Round

From the letters to the editor, at the New York Times, "Role of Humanities, in School and Life":

The humanities professors who spoke out on the causes of declined student enrollment did not mention a major factor that’s reshaped humanities education since 1970, when the decline began: postmodernism.

In the 1990s, when I was an English major at the University of Michigan, postmodernists dominated humanities study, and in their zeal to critique “Western culture,” they pointedly spurned old Enlightenment notions of “the classics,” “science,” “reason” and even “knowledge” itself — categories that they quarantined in dubious scare quotes as if they were hazardous materials. I fled my passion, literature, for a practical and rational-minded career in medicine.

While the professors justifiably cite inadequate funding and marketplace demand for scientists and engineers as causes of the marginalization of the humanities, they also ought to look inward at their profession’s rejection of the rational ideals that make the educated world go round.

AUSTIN RATNER
Brooklyn, Oct. 31, 2013

The writer is the author of two novels and a physiology textbook.

Yes. Indeed. That might be worth pointing out, that the radical left has destroyed decency and rationalism in American life. It can't be said enough, so don't stop saying it. Shout it from the rooftops: THE RADICAL LEFT IS DESTROYING ALL THAT'S GOOD IN THE UNITED STATES!!

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