As those who have had the opportunity to read Plato know, Socrates' archenemies were the group of professional teachers and rhetoricians known as Sophists. Socrates disliked the Sophists because they were highly educated and articulate individuals who, instead of using their skills to pursue truth and goodness, denied that such things existed. Amoral and valueless themselves, they taught their students to defend any position and argue any point, changing their views as it suited their interests. Instead of using their erudition responsibly and virtuously, they sold it to the highest bidder. Carneades, perhaps the paragon of Sophistry, is a helpful illustration of their principles; one day he gave a speech praising justice, and on the very next he refuted all his previous arguments and attacked the same.
Why is a dispute between Socrates and some ancient Greeks relevant to us today? Because Sophistry has in large part become the effective philosophy of the academy. Plato wrote a good deal on education because he and Socrates recognized that it is during, and due to, the process of education that a person either chooses to commit him or herself to the virtuous pursuit of truth or to turn his or her back on it, embracing a valueless world where he or she can use cleverness to advance whatever causes serve his or her self-interest and/or amuse him or her.
Education either instills value and desire for truth, or it teaches that those things don't matter or don't exist. The educational system that we have been brought up in teaches us the later. I recognize the seeds of practical Sophistry in myself when, for instance, I successfully reargue my professors' interpretations on exams or in papers, caring more about getting good grades than discovering what I believe to be the truth. I also see a more advanced stage of sophistry at Dartmouth when I meet people, as I have, who genuinely profess to disbelieve in such a thing as absolute truth or morality.
This is a disaster. Nihilism, relativism and Sophistry have been around in various forms since the Greeks, but not until modern times have they become so acceptable or pervasive. Of course, most such people don't seem to truly believe what they profess, because their denial of truth and morality isn't consistent with many of their other views or their own behavior. But profess a thing long enough and pass it along to your children (for parents also consciously or unconsciously teach their beliefs to their children), and people will actually being believing in these ideologies and ordering their lives accordingly.
Of course, there is a certain reasonable sense in which Dartmouth and other institutions want to remain neutral on questions of value, since these questions are so hotly debated. But what people fail to realize is that neutrality on these questions is not really neutrality; it is a specific stance regarding truth and virtue that is effectively relativistic, and it is one that is as contested as any other stance. In other words, there is no escaping the necessity of taking a position on normatively and virtue, and whatever position you take has dramatic consequences. It's a legal maxim that silence is consent. By saying nothing about virtue and value, Dartmouth, as well as all institutions not engaged in teaching virtue, is officially consenting to the trend towards Sophistry.
But the College has a responsibility to our society and culture to do its best to eradicate Sophistry, to produce members of society that care deeply about truth and posses a high level of civic and personal virtue. If educational institutions, who are charged with molding the next generation and passing on the patrimony they have received, fail in this duty, relativism and nihilism will cease being mere academic playthings. This doesn't necessarily mean society will collapse tomorrow; the damaging effects are realized slowly, more like corrosive rust than a sudden explosion. But we are currently in the midst of the gradual process of corruption, and as that process unfolds it will become clearer that, the cost of academic relativism is too high.
As C.S. Lewis said, "education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil." But how can the College inculcate values in a pluralistic world? Whose virtues and values should we teach? I don't know; I don't have the answer. But I know there's a problem, and unless we as an educational community apply our collective wisdom to arriving at a solution, we are failing in our duty to fully educate tomorrow's leaders.
