In the Western World, Universities have been held in high regard as institutes of higher learning where complex and at times highly controversial ideas could be openly critiqued and studied from the vantage point of neutrality. Yet, proud traditions of open discourse are slowly being eroded by those who do not desire open inquiry and who insist that academia bow to a narrow, pseudoscientific and flawed view of the world, all without the ability to even dare question its validity. Even once proud Universities have begun to succumb to this intellectual rot, the giants of education, the University of Oxford which dates to at least 1167 (Oxford, 2018), and University of Cambridge have discarded their traditions of open inquiry and lay prostrate before destructive ideologies that pit men and women against each other, and drive a wedge deeper between already unstable race relations (Cambridge Equality & Diversity, 2020). Across the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK, universities have slowly but surely begun to bow to the intellectually immature rather than uphold freedom of speech, open inquiry and freedom of thought. The history of open inquiry and free speech in academia has been a centuries long battle, a battle between those who desire to think and those who desire to tell others what to think. For centuries those who would censor academic inquiry have recycled the same methodologies to intimidate and de-platform those who would not follow the narrative. Today, large swathes of academia have already succumbed to the relentless tide of Philistinism. Academia has become the proverbial canary in the coal mine and what happens in universities is of great importance as they are a microcosm of what wider society will inevitably become

Recently universities have found themselves torn between upholding academic values of freedom of speech and expression, and pandering to the new orthodoxy that defines students as vulnerable adults and likely to be 'damaged' by contrary opinions. This has been most marked when it comes to issues of faith and students' religious identity and beliefs. This chapter will look at the contradictory position universities find themselves in, on one hand seeking to protect students' religious sensibilities by sanctioning illiberal practices and restricting criticism, and on the other seeking to limit freedom of expression by banning certain faith speakers in the fear they will 'radicalise' vulnerable students. This chapter will also argue that it is time for the academy to rediscover its faith in its own mission and purpose, and the values of intellectual freedom and expression.

If universities sought to help promote human welfare rationally, they would give intellectual priority to the tasks of articulating problems of living, and proposing and critically assessing possible solutions, possible actions. Priority would be given to public education about what our problems are, and what we need to do about them. Universities do not remotely proceed in this way. Why not? Because they are dominated by the idea that knowledge must first be acquired; once acquired, it then can be applied to help solve social problems. But this idea violates the most elementary rules of rational problem solving. Judged from the standpoint of helping to promote human welfare, universities today, devoted in the first instance to the pursuit of knowledge, are profoundly and damagingly irrational in a structural way, and it is this structural irrationality of universities that in part accounts for the genesis of global problems that threaten our future, and for our current incapacity to solve them. We urgently need to bring about a revolution in our universities so that they come to pursue the welfare of humanity in a genuinely rational, and active, way, and thus help save humanity from impending disaster.

This article is about religious life and its relationship to public higher education in America. As a way of addressing the fraught relations among religion, the state, moral values, and the university, the article takes a reading of Immanuel Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties and the writings of contemporary social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. It uses the synthesis of Kant’s and Haidt’s ideas as the foundation for a partial historical reassessment, the ultimate goal of which is the re-enfranchisement of religious Americans into the nation’s public higher education system.

This article is about evil and its function in educational discourse. The research posits, using work in postsecularism and particularly through an historical, legal, and theological read of prophetic indictment and the function of the jeremiad in educational policy, that the terms of educational debate are rendered in a legal rather than a deliberative discursive framework. This lends itself, then, to the creation of evil others opposed to one’s own preferred policy prescriptions and renders much of the discussion about and around the need for conversation and comity moot. The authors propose attending to the function of evil in education as well as positing an historical approach to thinking about why we often can’t think differently about educational arguments.