The Higher Purpose of Higher Education, God, is Mostly Gone

When one encounters, as I do often here, strongly held views about philosophers of ancient times it is refreshing to follow the chain of thinking that brought most of us to where we are now. I hope I can more or less accurately trace the thread.

It starts with the question, "Who started institutions of higher education in the West and why?" The very earliest were religious ones. They were started to ponder ancient philosophers of Western societies. It is claimed Plato established Christianity, even though he lived and wrote some 400 years before the alleged time of religious character, Jesus. Attending early universities meant studying religious philosophers. In the U.S. the earliest universities were established to train preachers. 

In the mid 1880's, the German philosopher Nietzsche published a book in which he declared God to be dead. That phrase was on the cover of a prominent news magazine a few decades ago. That God is dead threw into disarray the prevailing intellectual view of an independent and sovereign God and human minds dependent upon it. 

The link insists Nietzsche set in motion an intellectual movement that kept gaining strength in universities until now when he sees prevailing thought as God being dependent on the human mind instead of the other way around. The death of God, independent and ruling over man, meant the death of the University:

human beings could flourish only if their lives conformed to that reality. To act justly was to act in a way that corresponded to a reality “outside” of the self, a reality that existed prior to human will. The intellect and the will, therefore, were subordinate to (or obliged by) a divine reality that humans did not create.

When when the faculty of universities learned and taught students, the link says, their own intellect could discover and find truth, a truth superior to that taught be religion, it sent generations down the wrong path. Universities cannot return to their task of teaching the "truth" until they acknowledge the God that guides minds and events of man, according to the link.

While the original purpose of universities has changed, there are still plenty of professors who believe there is a God and let it be known. But thank goodness only a few universities still claim their purpose is to indoctrinate students in the foolishness of Christian myths.