Going on Faith: The sinking morality of higher education

As most of America’s heart broke following the heinous actions of Hamas on Oct. 7, there were a few who shrugged it off and began immediately pontificating, organizing, and writing letters about the onus Israelis carry as to the torture and murder of their own citizens. Of these, a preponderance belonged to what has been traditionally considered to be America’s finest institutions of higher education.

For example, within the first 24 hours of the attack, one of Harvard’s student groups produced a letter with an opening line placing all blame for murdered Jews squarely on Israel. The moral rot infecting pockets of higher education has apparently reached the point at which issuing a statement of empathy for families whose babies were executed in their cribs is little more than afterthought. Donors from several of these institutions are withdrawing support, board members are quitting, and the backlash has not only been real, but deserved.

There was a time when getting a progressive liberal education meant learning the value of great moral thinkers and change agents, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Jesus, the Dali Lama, Nelson Mandela, or the prophet Isaiah – all of whom taught nonviolent resistance, and nearly all of whom were either jailed or killed for their positions on love and non-violence.

This basic moral staple of a liberal education is apparently now too old-fashioned for the modern classroom, which is awash with nihilism and postmodern deconstruction. Western criticism, anti-colonialism, and agnostic ethics are the new norm in moral education, bypassing centuries of learning from history’s greatest thinkers, all of which is producing a subset of students apparently incapable of empathy in any form. Every year a new “-ism” is created in higher education by professors and teachers looking to push the power envelope and advance their careers as progressives.

Ironically, I had myself never experienced anti-Semitism until I entered college. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was a literature teacher who first espoused it while teaching Ezra Pound and claiming the Holocaust was inevitable and that Pound’s participation in Nazism was not unfounded. The world’s oldest hate, hatred of the Jewish people, was alive and well at our own University of Tennessee in the 1980s.

Higher education has a great deal of soul-searching to do, and that’s going to be difficult for them as the past three decades have basically unleashed a wholesale effort to minimize and even trivialize human spirituality. For the first time in its history, Harvard Divinity School, the subset of Harvard’s educational system meant to educate students in spirituality, appointed an atheist as its head chaplain. And now we’re seeing the first fruits of how lost indeed a generation can quickly become without spiritual guidance. We now run the risk of releasing an entire generation of students from these “prestigious” universities who have been educated beyond their intelligence and who lack any real moral clarity or empathic ethic on which to stand.

If there’s any good to be found here it is that the cancer is finally diagnosed. What remains to be seen is if the good doctors of traditional progressive education are still welcome in the classrooms to help the healing. Time will tell, and seemingly if it happens, it will be with a lot less funding than it had before.

My deepest condolences and heartfelt angst go to all those suffering from Hamas’ brutality, especially to my Jewish brothers and sisters for whom hatred and violence have been given a free pass for far too many centuries. We can, and we will do better for you.

Dave Allred is lead pastor at High Places Community Church in Oak Ridge.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Going on Faith: The sinking morality of higher education