Put more simply, one central belief in postmodern political thought is that powerful forces in society essentially order society into categories and hierarchies that are organized to serve their own interests. They effect this by dictating how society and its features can be spoken about and what can be accepted as true. For example, a demand that

This kind of claim is more familiar from religious ideology—if you don’t believe, you haven’t read the holy text properly or you just want to sin—but applied to what is supposed to be rigorous academic scholarship.

INTRODUCTION

Rauch expresses the fundamental difference between liberal science and the two postmodern principles, especially as seen in applied and reified postmodernism, concisely: “liberal science insists absolutely on freedom of belief and speech, but freedom of knowledge it rejects absolutely” (emphasis in original).27 People in liberal systems are free to

Which discourses one can use is largely dependent on one’s position within the system, therefore critiques can be accepted or dismissed depending on a political assessment of the status of the critic’s position.

The better methods—reason and evidence—are cultural artifacts too, but they are undeniably effective at winnowing out statements that accurately describe and predict what is occurring out there, both physically and socially. We need to reject the postmodern knowledge principle by seeing it for what it is—a language game—and reinstate the general

is therefore no exaggeration to observe that Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation, and disagreement of any kind. Indeed, the whole postmodernist project now seems, in retrospect, like an unwitting attempt to have deconstructed the old

Postmodern Theory and liberalism do not merely exist in tension: they are almost directly at odds with one another. Liberalism sees knowledge as something we can learn about reality, more or less objectively; Theory sees knowledges as completely created by humans—stories we tell ourselves, largely in the unwitting service of maintaining our own

Done right, universities are invaluable. Done wrong, they are a means of harmful cultural indoctrination without equal.