Jay Schalin of The Pope Center writes that objectivity is being replaced by subjectivity in higher education. Even fields like science are not immune to infections of politics.

The War Against Truth

In 1651, Englishman Thomas Hobbes described the lives of men as ”solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

That’s hardly the case today. The average lifespan in England has risen from 35 years to 77; in some countries most people live past 80. The average real income has risen 40 or 50 times since Hobbes was alive, and for many people in the industrialized world, life is a series of pleasures interspersed by relatively brief periods of enjoyable, meaningful work. The poor in the U.S. today often live better than the nobility of old.

To what magic do we owe this bountiful transformation of material existence? To no magic at all, but to a way of thinking that prizes the objective inquiry of the truth—supported by a verifiable methodology, science—above all else, save God (and for many, not even God).

Yet, today, after reaching remarkable affluence and technical proficiency, we are faced with a severe degradation of science and the fundamental principles of objective inquiry.

While the idea that science itself is being threatened might be scoffed at as a paranoid fantasy by some, such doubters have likely not been paying attention to intellectual trends in the Ivory Tower. The humanities and social sciences are already in much more advanced states of degradation than the physical sciences. Many academic departments have given themselves over to such nonsensical schools of thought as post-modernism, critical theory, and deconstruction.