Keeney, Patrick. Liberal Learning and the Modern University: Reclaiming the Intellectual and Moral Foundations of Higher Education. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2026. xxiii + 188 pp. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-032-31350-8.A Critical Review by David MacKinnonAny discussion of Liberal Learning and the Modern University has to be first placed within the socio-political-philosophical environment that both precedes and explains the pressing need for Patrick Keeney’s latest work.Keeney is Canadian, and in many ways exemplifies what is best of Canada — old and new — with a bias towards the old. His work is steeped in history and the origins of what in the past was the source of our wealth, our glory, and our sense of who we are. In limine, a brief digression is in order on the current iteration of what is known as Canada, and what some of the world’s thinkers are saying about our land and its inhabitants.In an October 2023 guest opinion published in the National Post, British conservative gadfly and Spectator contributor Douglas Murray wrote the following words: “My suspicion is that very few Canadians are aware of how bizarre the rest of the world now finds the country. When it thinks of it at all, it sees a country that used to be renowned for its liberalism now is noted for its proto-authoritarianism.”Murray identified Canada’s problems as coming from one deep well-spring: “Canadian society is filled with opinion yet utterly lacking in wisdom. This includes any knowledge of the world’s history — but most crucially an increasing ignorance of your own country’s history.”The state of Canada, and particularly in the Western quest of the “discipline formation of the human person in relation to truth,” is parlous. We adhere to beliefs uncritically previously associated with voodoo cults, even to the point that, if we aren’t doing it already, we’ll be replacing in our armed forces mock wooden airplanes in lieu of F-35s, clearing fake dirt runways, and marching with bamboo sticks painted like rifles. And of course, prosecuting anyone who questions this under “Combatting hate” legislation..Already, in the three years since Douglas Murray’s Cassandra warning was sounded, we have witnessed the unchallenged rise of anti-Semitism, pogroms against Canadian citizens of the Jewish faith, the illegal prorogation of our Parliament to suit a covert agenda to escape liability for the Green Slush Fund, a past prime minister who threw himself and Parliament into an international gangster war, even to the point of taking sides and accusing the leader of a major power of a sinister plot involving assassinations on Canadian soil, and the arrest, asset seizures and indictment of honest citizens and a new generation of government prokurers indicting unwary citizens for social crimes, imagined and real, committed half a century earlier.Voices raised against this lunacy are excluded, ostracized, gaslit, banned from public gatherings, stigmatized, assaulted, even arrested, while gangs of bourgeois university-educated and foreign agents form an anonymous rabble carrying out razzias in our places of learning. All of this has triggered references to Orwell, Deep State, Hannah Arendt, and metaphors evoking either Hitler’s Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union.But the madness we are witnessing today is not born of totalitarianism, but inexplicably of democratic societies. What we are experiencing is more properly the stuff of Père Ubu, the mad creation of the great French writer, Alfred Jarry, equally present in the mad ramblings of Donald Trump as Papa Turd and the absurdist mumblings of the escape artist, Mark Carney, playing the role of Mama Turd. And the currency of this new Post-National State of Nowhere is “trauma.”Of course the bit actors, script-writers, and backstage hands producing this commedia dell'arte are ironically being produced, marketed and distributed by the bearers of the standard Dr. Keeney is defending — the Liberal Party of Canada, and for that matter, the entire liberal governing class of the country, who are no more liberal than the Borgian Popes were Catholic.No one seems able or willing to identify the reasons for this viral encroachment into our lives, or the inner minds of the Liberals who devised it down at the PMO. Only that this crypto-philosophy attracts morons much in the way shit attracts flies. The nomenklatura of our times is composed not so much of sentient citizens, but of technocrats wielding stores of dead and alive bacteria, fats, proteins, indigestible carbohydrates, minerals, etc etc. And, much in the way shit attracts flies and provides them safe haven pending the hatching of whatever flies hatch, the mutation being presented as the “Liberal Brand” attracts leeches, vermin, beetles, lice, chinch bugs, weevils, and other shite-worshipping life forms who feed on substances not palatable to ordinary humans. We know only that Donald Trump and Mark Carney are two polar corpuscles that form an integral and vital part of the City of “Zygote,” in the country of “Nowhere,” equal adepts of the Art of eternal imbecility, eternal lust, and the vileness of instinct magnified into tyranny. Pere Ubu, the play, takes place in Poland, which, as the author says in the opening act, “that is to say, nowhere.”.In our state of ignorance, we embrace the dicta of our harlequin princess Mama Turd — not seeing that Mama Turd is propping up the man with orange hair as a mirror reflecting upon ourselves. And naturally, of our depravity.This I believe is the world that Patrick Keeney is trying to address in his work, and I , for one, cannot explain how he worked up the nerve and the testosterone to undertake the task. It’s analogous to declaring the advent of the Renaissance while Al Mansur is still busy ransacking the Basilica of Compostela. I feel compelled to warn Dr. Keeney publicly that the Moors have returned in numbers and Church burnings are once again the rage. But he doesn’t stop, like Jarry, with the recognition that sometimes it’s necessary to fire off pistols in your bedroom. Keeney’s reflection is on the original mission of the university, and its raison d’être — “…cultivate the intellect so that it might reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.”Where Patrick Keeney’s book differs from others is that he wastes no time vilifying these anonymous nobodies from Nowhere.The education of which Keeney speaks “liberates students from the contingencies of their birth by providing them with the mental capacities that make self-governance possible.”There is a rather broad swathe of my mind that wants to reject all of this outright, and abdicate alongside my fellow slaves. Can such an enterprise be feasible in our times, when the decaying of our collective mind is akin to the velocity of a runaway train, hurtling towards the abyss?.On the one hand, imagine if you will Hades, the River Styx overflowing with effluents, diarrhetic offal, otherwise known as popular culture. Imagine that sewage being replaced by the calm conversation of trollers and boaters along the Henley on Thames in earlier times and a conversation with Dr. Keeney about the conditions for freeing up our minds and acquiring the art of self-governance.If you follow this mental trajectory, you are in fact imagining your own version of what Patrick Keeney speaks of — the art of self-governance.On the other hand, I am even less inclined to do the reader’s work for him. If people want to stick pronouns up each other’s sphincters until the cows come home, let them perform their colo-rectal rituals in the privacy of their corrals and stables.If you desire this, I am advising you to find a quiet spot and to sit down with Dr. Keeney’s volume and to read Liberal Learning and the Modern University, a volume that richly deserves to sit on your bookshelf.
