Some Insight As To Why Universities Are Increasingly Losing Its Founding Purpose
In the same way a knife's purpose is to cut, the university's purpose is to always strive for the search of truth through knowledge and discourse. For over 400 years it has been this way, but recently the tides have started to change.
University's are being hijacked with increased call-out culture and identity politics.
NYU Professor Jonathan Haidt - author of "The Coddling of the American Mind" and "The Happiness Hypothesis" - set out to study this recent emerging phenomenon in college campuses.
Never before had he (or anyone else) seen:
Professors being forced to give trigger warnings to students when exposing them to a "conflicting" idea
Psychological (not physical) Safe Spaces being created
Riots, protests and cancellations against Professors because of their viewpoints
In essence, some ideas were starting to being viewed as hostile, so carriers and broadcasters of them were being labelled as culprits of the hostility.
It's hard to arrive at any truth when ideas are being targeted and censored though.
Haidt attributes this strange, backpedalling trend to:
The decline of free range play in kids (helicopter parenting)
Social media induced anxiety and depression arriving in college campuses
Nietzsche's "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" quote (or Nassim Taleb's Antifragile) implies that humans thrive when exposed to struggle. Because of it, really. In the same way our immune system needs exposure to viruses early-on to develop immunity against them, humans need to fail, be bullied and get lost so they come stronger out the other side.
Given increased helicopter parenting (starting in the 1990's), kids fragility ensued. Add a smartphone to that equation and you get this phenomenon that we're seeing today.
"Prepare your child for the road, not the road for your child" sums it up well.
To be frank, I don't know what happens with universities from here on out. Since they are large, legacy, well-funded institutions I doubt their relevance and power will abruptly collapse. However, I do sense a trend of knowledge and information-sharing shifting more towards Internet-native environments that transcend locality and are thus more robust to this phenomenon.