Exciting times

Date: 5/15/2012

May 16, 2012

Many young, excitement-loving individuals enter a four year college mainly to satisfy those deep, youthful impulses to bond with others and to be accepted and liked. Once on campus, students learn that their social cravings can be satisfied simply by surrendering their mind and individual uniqueness in exchange for the prevailing "campus group-think."

It matters not where this group-think is taking them, the excitement and euphoria of "being on the way" and involved (for the first time) in some noble, social cause together with so many other likeminded individuals, masks all reasoning.

Decades ago it was a thirst for knowledge that attracted students to colleges. The "Great Books" approach to education introduced students to the thoughts and world view of great thinkers such as Aristotle, Cicero, CS Lewis and Chesterton. Slowly over the years, this once traditional approach to education was bullied out of existence and replaced with the current godless, materialist world view approach to "education" which provides miles of knowledge with little depth and no wisdom.

Each year many discerning students who readily detect the worthlessness of attending the intellectual dictatorship of their liberal college leave without fanfare. College administrators seem to take special care to quiet this continuous departure of astute, emotionally secure students from campus out of fear that those students left behind will ask themselves questions like: "What motivates these students to leave our college?" and "What do they know that I don't know?"

Professors and students who find themselves entangled in the cloistered, Marxist habitat of their college campus and refuse to embrace the prevailing group-think are routinely marginalized and bullied into silence. It is depressing for discerning students to see fellow students so desperately in need of affirmation and acceptance that they abandon their own ideals and values and allow professors and college administrators to live out their ideals and values through them.

Empty students who enter the cloistered environment of their liberal college and are initially charmed into filling themselves to the brim with the prevailing campus group-think, rarely come to their senses and decide to swim against the tide of popular opinion. One of the most inspiring and stunning instances of a student suddenly "coming to" and embracing reality occurred in the mid 1970s when a student stood up in class and challenged the professor with: "But what if Karl Marx is wrong? What if God is not dead?"

We live in difficult, but exciting times.

William Santy

Chicopee