As is well-known, politics is the art of influencing behavior. As is also well-known, America’s institutions of higher education uniformly behave with a political orientation that renders them exponents of leftism, socialism, communism, and antisemitism.
President-Elect Donald Trump is determined to extinguish that behavior. He’s identified a vehicle for doing so, too: The role played by educational accreditation agencies for colleges and universities under the Higher Education Act of 1965 (Public Law 89-329).
Under the HEA, the Department of Education approves accrediting agencies that the Secretary of Education determines to be reliable authorities regarding the quality of education or training institutions of higher education provide. The Department then publishes a list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies.
Trump has clearly stated his plans for Higher Ed accreditation:
When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.
We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.
[snip]
These standards will include defending the American tradition and Western civilization, protecting free speech, and eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly.
When the new accreditors take office, their mission will be two-fold: political and academic. Their political component will be to eliminate the Critical Race Theory, Diversity Equity & Inclusion, and antisemitism that have lately run riot on our college campuses.
The academic component of the accreditors’ mission has, so far, received relatively less attention than the political component, but that oversight should be corrected. American Higher Ed is greatly in need of academic upgrades focused on five specific areas of coursework: English, Civics, Law, Logic, and Mathematics.
Now, to be sure, all colleges have these courses in their catalogs and may offer them occasionally, but few, if any, make these courses mandatory. But they should be mandatory classes that are required of all students to earn a sheepskin.
English language competency is the bottom-line foundation of academic achievement. Just as education is the bridge to the world, so English is the bridge to education. For a college to be accredited, English grammar, comprehension, and writing must be mandatory for all students. Of course, these classes would need to be stripped of the reading material that advances the alphabet soup of leftist beliefs (LGBTQ+, anti-Americanism, DEI, socialism, etc.).
Making civics mandatory is obviously necessary. But the Accreditors need to review the instructors, syllabi, and textbooks, as in the wrong hands a civics course can become propaganda for socialism.
The law requirement is not satisfied by the business department’s business law course. What is needed here is a complete exploration of the American legal system taught by an experienced attorney.
As for logic, every college has in its catalog a course entitled “Introduction To Logic,” but no college mandates it. That situation should be reversed. Every college should mandate logic for every student—real logic, not fuzzy or racially tinged logic.
Mathematics might be misunderstood as a vocational course, but it is not. Basic mathematics—algebra up to calculus—is fundamental to a student’s academic maturity.
To gain some perspective on the above remarks, let us consider the intimate relationship between English, logic, math, and science.
As a point of departure, consider the dicta from the polymath Galileo Galilei, commonly known as the “father of modern science.” Around the year 1600, Galileo intoned, “mathematics is the language of science” and “Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe.”
These dicta are fully accepted today without dispute and have spawned numerous books such as Mario Livio’s Is God a Mathematician? and Sabine Hossendelder’s Lost in Math.
Notably, these Galilean dicta immediately raise two follow-on questions:
(1) If math is the language of science, then what is the language of mathematics?
(2) Exactly what is mathematics?
Each of these two questions has a simple but perhaps surprising answer.
The surprising answer to the first question (What is the language of mathematics?) is at once both pedestrian and profound. The language of mathematics is English, German, Spanish, Chinese, etc.—that is to say, natural human language.
Every expression or equation in mathematics is symbolism for natural language. All mathematical gobbledygook is a compact rendition of natural human language.
One simple example is the sentence “Five plus three times some real number x is twenty-three,” which is rendered as the equation “3x+5=23”. The symbolic form is a great convenience and can be manipulated per the rules of algebra—and it is understood across all spoken languages.
As for the second question (Exactly what is mathematics?), the answer is also pedestrian and profound: Mathematics is logic applied to an axiom system. As mathematics is logic, mathematics serves as a conduit for applying logic to problems, and approaching a problem mathematically brings logic to bear upon the problem. Therefore, the disciplined study of mathematics is training in the employment of logic.
This point is subtle and not always understood even by those one might expect to know it intuitively. In an essay entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Nobel prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner wrote, “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.”
There is no rational explanation for the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences?! Might a rational explanation be formulated from the fact that mathematics is applied logic?
We are now at last in a position to understand the unique and intimate relation among language, logic, mathematics, and natural science. Natural science is applied mathematics; mathematics is applied logic; and logic is applied English. These four disciplines fit together like hand in glove. Upgrading Higher Ed requires upgrading these four disciplines. In that way, we will have taken a huge step toward Making America Great Again.
American Thinker
