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‘Spiritual Catastrophe’: Cornel West Slams Loss of Classics Department at Top Black University

Progressive activist Cornel West, a Harvard professor, calls it a “spiritual catastrophe”. Incredibly, all of the panelists on MSNBC’s Morning Joe agree with Dr. West.

'Spiritual Catastrophe': Cornel West Slams Loss of Classics Department at Top Black University

Howard University dissolves its Western classics department, as have many universities. Progressive activist Cornel West, a Harvard professor, calls it a “spiritual catastrophe“. Incredibly, all of the panelists on MSNBC’s Morning Joe agree with Dr. West.

If Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) follow the path of hard-left academics in rejecting the Western canon as white European oppressive tripe, West says education will become mere schooling to “get a better job”, rather than a process of becoming a better person.

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52 replies on “‘Spiritual Catastrophe’: Cornel West Slams Loss of Classics Department at Top Black University”

Howard University’s disbanding of its Classics department is simply the last step: removing the vestigal appendage. The real problem occurred when classics were whittled away from the core curriculum, whether in favor of “other voices” or more “practical” subjects like business or STEM.

There was a time when everyone who had a university education (and in many places, a high school education) shared a common foundation in the classics. That is what created our civilization. That common foundation is gone. We have been completely splintered into individual identities instead of a common culture.

The leftists of the 60s accelerated this trend when they took over academia, but it had been slowly eroding for at least seventy-five years before that.

As for West himself, he was educated as a classical liberal but promoted all the leftist nonsense and now they are coming for him and he is starting to realize that he might personally be responsible for teaching the next generation to reject that classical liberalism.

A conservative is the person who stands athwart “progress” and shouts, “stop!”

So West himself is turning into a conservative. Might be interesting to see how far he takes it.

I don’t like the trend, but really couldn’t care less what OO Howard’s university opts to do. Students who don’t want to learn what they don’t want to learn can go to Howard. As an employer, I would give a Howard degree all the value it is worth. Fail to teach classics, and you have little market value to me.

There are african civilizations but the BLM types can’t handle them because three of the greatest: Pre-Islamic Timbuktu, Ethiopia, and Alexandria were all Christian. Its hard for BLM to acknowledge Islamic Africa because that’s who sold their fore fathers and mothers into slavery. They dare not point to that history. Further south there is great Zimbabwe and the once golden trade ports of Kongowea (Mombasa) and Sofala in Mozambique. Islam has spent centuries erasing the history of Africa’s pre Islamic greatness. 

West is objecting because he finally realizes that the radicals, who he counts as friends and comrades . . . are starting to come for him….something he never believed would happen…. Liberals have been blind to the consequences that their own theories lead to; that all Intellectuals must be exterminated.

While one can criticize Howard University’s decision to eliminate its Classics department, I’m a firm believer that Howard University’s administration and faculty are free to chose to teach or not teach whatever they want. Maybe the Classics department at Howard was in decline. Maybe they were seeing fewer and fewer students majoring in the Classics every year, making it difficult to justify retaining the department. Would anyone be surprised if that was the underlying reason for the decision, but the university took the opportunity to virtue signal and put a “woke” spin on it? As long as every college doesn’t make the same decision, students that actually want to major in the Classics (rather than taking a few select courses in Roman and Greek literature) can do so by going to a school that still has a Classics department. Let the free market work its magic.

Kevin – this was my first thought as well. They determined they were going to RIF the “Classics” department since no one was taking those classes. This was the PR/Woke method of their telling people.
I know I am a cynical, old fart; but that sure is what it looked like.

I should have read a little further before writing a shorter version of the same thing.

West sounds like a BLMantifa rioter looking around xir’s city a year or two from now and saying, “Damn, this used to be a nice place to live. What happened?”

Thank you so much for today’s video. Scott, i attended Moberly Jr. College in Moberly Missouri, you may be familiar with it. It’s a very small college but the class I enjoyed the most was the literature class, we did study some of the classics and was the most enriching class I attended. It saddens me to see that it may not be available at some colleges in the future.

ACTS (Active Commercial Tech Systems)
“In contrast, as a Conservative my “people” are Americans of every color and ethnicity. This is why an intellectual powerhouse like Thomas Sowell, a Statesman like Tim Scott and a stalwart patriot like Alan West can be among “my people” and in return I one of “their people” … Despite our racial and ethnic differences.”
^^^
This is what sets us apart from them

Congratulations to Professor Cornel West. He’s harvesting the fruits of his own labor and getting exactly what he’s been working towards. He’s been a champion of the Left, of deconstruction, of “woke-ism” and all the rest. He’s been a role model for BLACK activism and a wholly outspoken representative of the people who want to tear America apart …

This is where him calling every Black person he speaks to in public “My brother” or “My sister” — to the total exclusion of every non-Black — has brought “his people”. It is exactly his sort of identity politics that has caused the situation he now decries so woefully. The is the natural progression of his ideology and he is leading “his people” down the path to ruin while taking America with them as much as possible.

This is what identity politics leads to. Of course if you narrow your identity down to nothing more than your skin color you’re going to cast aside the monumental achievements of all others. Of course you will step down from the shoulders of giants when you do that. Of course a professor of long tenure at Harvard University should know this is what will happen.

Cornel West’s “people” are the Black minority, whether they all want to be or not, unless they’re Conservative in which case he calls them “Uncle Tom”. In contrast, as a Conservative my “people” are Americans of every color and ethnicity. This is why an intellectual powerhouse like Thomas Sowell, a Statesman like Tim Scott and a stalwart patriot like Alan West can be among “my people” and in return I one of “their people” … Despite our racial and ethnic differences.

Identity politics of the sort Cornel West has long advocated claim to crave diversity but do everything possible to deny diversity. It’s not enough “diversity” for Identity politics to take the best from humankind and build from there.

Conservatism encompasses the good and productive and emphasizes solid progress. Leftism is the evil mirror image of that ideology that withers every root it touches.

Cornel West is appalled at the dissolution of foundational components in higher education? HA! He’s responsible for that and has done “his people” no favors. There’s more and worse to come and he bears responsibility for that too. It’s long past time for the “woke” to wake up to what the end results of their ideology really leads to.

Well said. Humanity sure seems incapable of learning that having the power to unleash evil doesn’t give one the power to rein evil back in.

ICYMI, here’s an except from a great piece by Richard Fernandez at PJ Media that’s well worth your time:

“…The inability of experts to consider possibilities marked off-limits by ideology creates the equivalent of a sonar shadow zone, an area which due to the refraction of beams away from it, the probing rays of intellect can never reach. These shadow zones can be used by enemies to approach undetected. And they do, given it is axiomatic that the quality of the intelligence is determined by the questions asked of it and nothing is more useful than a list of questions that can never be asked.“

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2021/04/19/western-civilizations-growing-intellectual-dead-zones-n1440872

Thanks for the article, it was very informative. Like so much Conservative political punditry, it describes things I already know but puts them in language and images that are clear and easy to grasp. I would encourage others to read that article too whether they’re aware of this kind of thing or not. This resources Conservatives and give us ammunition in cultural battles.

I see disturbing parallels to what is happening in America today to what drove the Nazis into power in pre-war Germany. The body politic tried to engage its immune system to counter the threat of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. Hitler was convicted and slapped with a significant sentence to prison on criminal charges. The Nazi Party was a very small percentage of the German Population and purposely kept exclusive. The Nazis didn’t come to power by popular vote of the German people, etc.

The Nazis were concealed in that “sonar shadow” until the panic incurred by the Burning of the Reichstadt. Which burning is widely believed to have been perpetrated by the newly formed Nazi government itself to turn public opinion against it’s enemies. Then at precisely the right moment the Nazis gave themselves dictatorial powers and the rest is as they say, history.

Of course if you point this out to a Leftist and say “you’re doing exactly what the Nazis did” their response is “You’re the Nazi. The is an “established fact”. Which in their minds is true because it’s a “fact” that they have established in order to allow them to behave like Nazis.

That is the goal of “woke-ism” and the rest of the manipulations of the Left. To shut up opposition by painting them as the very thing the Left is.

Richard Fernandez is very good. His work always get High Praise form Bill, Scott and Steve.

“The bitter truth of Pascal’s maxim: man is neither angel nor devil, and his tragedy is that he who tries too hard to play the first too often ends up as the second.”

I have that quote in my notes, but neglected to name the author. Maybe it was ACTS who said it. I snip from his comments fairly often.

I … Don’t know who Dennis Miller is so I don’t know if I’ve been complimented or insulted 🙂

Definitely intended as a compliment. Dennis was a standup who was on SNL when it was last funny. He was the Weekend Update guy. He parlayed that into an HBO talk show. He was one of the first Hollywood types to abandon the D’s and was a frequent guest on O’Reilly.
At the beginning of each HBO show, he did a monologue; 6-8 minutes. At the end of which he would go into something current and topical. The background would go dark and he would say “Now I don’t want to go off on a rant here. . .” And then he would. Check out a few on YT, I am sure that they are there.
I thought your “rant” on Dr. West was particularly epic.

Ah, OK. I didn’t recognize him from the pic (I did look him up and do recognize the much older guy he is now).

I think I missed out by not knowing about his talk show when it was on. I really don’t watch a lot of TV and I also miss things like that because I haven’t watched a commercial on TV for 20+ years … So while I get information I’m interested by other means in I miss out on things I might have had interest for had I seen their ads.

My best buddy has to call me up and say things like “Have you seen the trailer for XYZ movie?” And he knows I’m going to say “no” because … See above. Then he says “Wanna go see it in the theater or wait for it to come out where you can get your dirty, filthy, grubby little Pirate hooks into it?” 😉

So I miss out on things like Dennis Miller’s talk show unless someone I know really makes a point of them and I have interest and time to investigate further. After I saw the pic and checked him out I recognized him because I had seen him on Fox News a few times.

I was out of the US for most of the ’85 to ’91 time period (and when home in America otherwise occupied with more weighty matters) he was on SNL so I didn’t see him there either. There are gaps like that in my cultural/social knowledge. I came back home once and music videos were all the rage. I had no idea what they were and when I asked people looked at me like I had two heads. Same thing happened with AIDS/HIV.

Still, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard “Undercover Angel”* sung in Hebrew, Tagalog or Afrikaans so it wasn’t all loss on my part.

I was just joking about “compliment or insult”, you’re always very decent to me and I knew you meant it as a compliment. Thanks for that.

*A god-awful song if ever there was one, played to death until it was a stinking carcass then played more, translated and sung by regional no-talents on almost every pop radio station on the globe. Said stations usually being around 5 years behind the U.S. to avoid paying royalties. It nearly drove me insane but even that isn’t as bad as Arab music. Those people sound like several cats, tails tied together with twine and flung over a barbed wire electric fence. In a hail storm.

Then you missed a particularly dark period in American Music. That was around the time I switched to mostly country music since I really couldn’t stand “pop” or “rock” from the time.
Since you stream, there is a pretty good documentary on Muscle Shoals (of Lynyrd Skynyrd lyrics fame) recording studio on Amazon or Netflix right now. Well done and tells a story that should be broadcast now. All these Motown artist flocking to Alabama to record with a bunch of swampers. Well done doc.

I just watched the trailer for that Muscle Shoals documentary a couple nights ago. It looked interesting but not high on my list of priorities. You put it a lot higher on the list with this comment, I’ll check it out in the next day or two.

I missed a lot, both dark and not, while I’ve been gone. Thanks for the pointer on how to fill in one of those gaps a bit. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it because I do.

If…if..if I just may interject here please?
“*A god-awful song if ever there was one, played to death until it was a stinking carcass then played more,”
ACT..did you write this? Because if you did, this is genius. How many neurons in the brain?…how many memory cells? …and as soon as I saw the title, I knew the lyrics and heard the music. The human brain should not be able to do this. There are many many more important things to keep stored in our ‘directory structure’ in our heads. Undercover Angel, midnight fantasy…Ugh. Your comment triggered the most heinous ear worm since Rita Moreno’s America in West Side Story.

Oh no you don’t. I don’t know what that is but I’m not clicking on it. I just went through days of having an ear worm from “Estimated Prophet” by The Grateful Dead bouncing around the inside of my skull. The last thing I need is another one, no thank you very much anyway.

Lynda, I’m telling Scott that there is a thumbs up and down button, but we need a “how dare you” button. An emogi with a RBF.

Lol, yes I wrote that and as far as I know it’s original but … I have the kind of memory that could have contained that phraseology and forgotten it’s source.

Either way, I’m sorry for the ear worm.

Tim – I am just starting my day and have to start it with that? Though, I did have a bit of a crush on Rita when I was younger so there’s that.

I’d like to comment on the human once known as Rita Moreno, however I don’t know if she’s (oops) declared her (dang!) preferred pronouns, so I’ll hold any comment on what a fine singer/actress zhe was.

Not sure what pronouns Ms. Moreno prefers, but there was no hiding her obvious femininity. Between Rita and Suzanne Pleshette, it is no wonder that Mrs. Ron is a petite, dark haired beauty with mesmerizing eyes.

Mr. Green, unexpected for the Chinese to throw out their cultural canon? That would be news to Mao Zedong, the countless lost artifacts, the millions killed, and the hundreds of millions persecuted during the Cultural Revolution:
“The Chinese morals and values, their traditions and beliefs were like a thorn in the eye of people like Mao Zedong and his advocates during the Cultural Revolution. With the destruction of ‘the Four Olds,’ the Communist Party hoped to abolish all ties to Chinas traditional past — this included the destruction of old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. The reasoning behind this was that these ‘Four Olds’ ‘were responsible for the holding back of China’s development.’”

https://www.nspirement.com/2018/08/26/chinas-destruction-of-cultural-sites-during-the-cultural-revolution2.html

As you rightly point out, people are conservative regarding what the know best. Perhaps Professor West recognizes the parallels and wishes to avoid the fate of his 1960s Chinese counterparts.

So very on point and perfect.
The issue is that Americans do not know what modern China is actually like today. Most Americans think of classic China due to movies and Chinese American culture that is based on the classic Chinese culture. That was destroyed in the 1960’s as you pointed out.
Modern China is not steeped in tradition nor is it a communist/socialist paradise of equality. It is a society devoid of individual opportunities and freedom. The capitalism base black market is what keeps most of masses going. Remember the basic needs shortages of toilet paper and food stuffs on shelves during the COVID-19 lock down in US? Well that type of issue and much worse is the everyday life of the Chinese people.
China is run by an elitest party call the CCP who live in gated communities of mansions just like in America. These gate communities look just like America’s upper class neighborhoods. Giant lawns, multi-story single family homes, nice streets and security personnel. The stark contrast between the social classes standards is astounding.
China also coined the censoring of the media model by not allowing any negative or disparaging comments, discussion, photos, or videos to be viewed. Violations are met with very harsh penalties often including prison or re-educating camps for as long as the party decides.
China controls all the internet providers and networks, so good luck actually seeing reality or knowing how opposing views or ideas.
Staring to sound a lot like modern America isn’t it?

Mao was a communist, just like the people in this country trying to reset us to Year One. It’s what they do.
(Xi is not a communist, merely a nationalist thug, promoting Han superiority to lord it over the neighbors while eliminating ethnic minorities.)

And we’d better get wise to both how and how well they’re accomplishing it here.

Paul – Have you watched or listened to Bill’s “What We Saw” series? Either Apollo or The Cold War?
I recently listened to both for the second time. Just finished The Cold War. I put them on while cutting the grass and doing other outside work and even just walking the dog. So spring was great for listening.
If you want to hear Bill with passion, those are them. I can’t wait for the next series to be released.

Both of those were incredibly interesting, and narrated by Bill in a wonderfully listenable way. I’m excited for his next work to be made available.

Lynda, I agree. This entire ‘election’ on the back of the Wuhan Virus put a pause I’m sure on Bill’s next installment. Can’t wait for that to come out.
I’ve watched Apollo What we Saw, and I have to tell you, I’ve watched the last minute of the last eposide at least 10 times. Epic challenge he threw down.

You can’t miss his passion for his subjects – palpable without a shred of pathos. I really admire him.

I second all of this by all of you. Especially being as I saw myself first hand so much that he covered in those programs.

Bill’s “What We Saw” series are a great introduction to Bill Whittle for your friends too, if they’re not familiar with Bill and his work. I’ve been following Bill for a long time, maybe not as long as some in here have but a significant duration of years even so. For anyone who doesn’t know who and what Bill Whittle is, “What We Saw” is an excellent place to start.

I heartily agree. I sent links to both to a jr. HS history teacher who used them for his classes. He is actually a conservative (named his daughter Reagan) and now follows Bill on YT.

It follows logically, if you are going to abandon the ultimate expression of western civilization, you know, the United States of America, you have to support this cancelling. Oligarchs don’t want you to have free speech, liberty, or the right to own weapons. The natural state of man throughout all time has been under the boot of rulers against whom they are nearly powerless. Howard University apparently longs for the slavery of the past, because that is exactly what western civilization managed to outlaw.

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