"North America’s great universities should be ashamed of their pusillanimity. War is no more likely to quit our planet than are pandemics. The academics who spurn its study are playing ostriches. Their heads look no more elegant, buried in the sand."

How true! I'm damn glad that I'm past the age of being a university student - especially at an American university - or for that matter any university in the Anglophone world.

These days, universities are such contentious places, you can't even hint at let alone say anything outside the current narrow-minded orthodoxy without being ostracized, ridiculed, blackballed, shuned or expelled. Today, if it wasn't for their historical/physical presence, I reckon I'd have difficulty in even recognizing one.

For me, attending university was fun and exciting but if I had to repeat the exercise in the current hyper-politically correct climate then I'd have to gag myself from talking in case I'd accidentally put my foot in it, I'd reckon then it'd be more like a jail sentence.

Universities were places where discussion and argument were paramount - a way of life, and they've been that way for centuries, at least it was so up until the 1970s.

Today, it would be impossible to debate any controversial subject as in the past. That's where debaters would buy or start an argument to get a debate going. For instance, it would be impossible to debate the subject of racism and have one team take the pro-racist stance for the
purposes of the debate, for even if the university allowed such a contentious subject to be debated then the debaters would be too terrified to speak for fear of being ostracized, etc. - and even if they did then the spontaneity and excitement once so charactistic of formal debating would be missing.

Once, such debates were commonplace in universities. If nothing else, debating fostered logical thinking, formal argument and public speaking (and more).

It's a terrible state of affairs, and sooner or later something will have to give and universities will have to return to normal or we'll find ourselves in a new dark ages.

The other alternative is to bypass the current university structure altogether and leave it to its own devices and then we start new informal universities and run them like they were at their very beginning - where informal groups would gather in the town commons to discuss and debate important and controversial matters. One proviso however, if you want to join then you must leave the old varsity cultural baggage where it originated.

The fact that many universities are effectively nuking humanities and especially history, military history and philosophy is sheer madness - and I say that as a longstanding hardened techie technocrat! Military history is vitally important for the very reason that learning about war is the second best way of preventing it - of course, the first is to have had actual firsthand battlefield experience - knowledge of war and to have survived long enough to debunk the macho war-is-fun myth.

Moreover, if I were setting the curriculum for military history, then I ensure that both the great war strategists Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz were compulsory reading. It's not just students of military history who should read them, everyone should.

BTW, you can download their works from the Internet Archive for free.