"The Purpose Of A University Isn't Truth, It's Inquiry"

facepalm

Inquiry is a means to truth. So Inquiry isn't the ultimate purpose of the university. 

The execrable Dewey makes a prominent appearance.

And you'd have to be pretty dim to accept the suggestion that "critical" inquiry should be conceived of as the aim of a university--they put it that way, rather obviously, in order to slip the word 'critical' into mission statements and the like. 

Needless to say they suggest, absurdly, that the right and the left are equally threatening to the university. 

And they sound like relativists sometimes while denying that they are at others.

For example, despite protestations that they aren't, they claim that history has basically given up on truth:

In our discipline, history, the idea that historians can capture history as it really happened has been rejected as a fool’s errand by most of its practitioners for more than a century.

Big if true.

They probably should have told us that they'd transformed history into creative writing--or, more likely, propaganda. Then we'd have known not to pay any attention to them.

They also have something against something they call "positivist truth," whatever that might be. Does she mean the logical positivists? And if so, which ones?

Anyway.

It's not a completely ridiculous post.

But it's pretty bad.