By Joy Pullmann
Thursday, April 07, 2016
Until now, this year’s stampede of American campus
barbarians has met little direct resistance. At “leading” campuses such as
Yale, Harvard, the University of Missouri, Claremont McKenna, Ithaca, Wesleyan,
and others, campus administrators have cravenly caved to packs of authoritarian
rabble-rousers essentially demanding bribe money.
Two-thirds of Americans do not have a college degree yet
are forced to subsidize such shameful antics as governments shovel
unprecedented billions into “higher” “education” under the laughable pretense
of stimulating the economy. They and parents expecting to send their children
into this mayhem have looked on these campus hijinks in horror. In videos,
fellow students mostly pass by the aggressive protestors or sit mute, in
apparent ignorance, terror, or both. Meanwhile, young people tear down statues
of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, and lose their minds when someone writes
pedestrian political messages on campus sidewalks.
Yet, thankfully, a small coalition of young folks has
found the courage their cowed elders and peers lack. In February, a small
coterie of Stanford students arranged a successful petition drive (what a
quaint, representative-government kind of idea!), placing their proposal on a
campus ballot the student body considers April 7 and 8. It is a simple, elegant
idea that directly addresses the roots of campus unrest: restoring a
centuries’-old collegiate requirement that students learn something about their
cultural heritage.
“Even if you oppose Western values, the only way to
critique them meaningfully is to understand them in the first place,” says
Harry Elliott, a Stanford sophomore majoring in economics who, as editor of the
independent campus paper Stanford Review,
has been leading the effort to restore Western civ.
“This year especially Stanford has woken up to the fact
that the way people oppose things they dislike has become straight-up absurd,”
he notes, in discussing opponents of the measure, who have, like their national
fellows in arms, responded with boilerplate demands such as race-based faculty
hiring (they want a transgender or minority woman university president),
recording and monitoring professors’ speech, and that all students take classes
promoting Marxist grievance-mongering. “That a group that calls for diversity
in education would call to ban Wells Fargo on campus—I just think it’s
absolutely ridiculous and I think the vast majority of students think it’s
ludicrous.”
To Be Elite, You
Have to Know Something
For their efforts, Elliott and his fellow Western civ
defenders have been shut out of “open” events held to foster “constructive
dialogue.” Students who signed the petition to put the Western civ question on
the ballot have been harassed and notified that their names have been collected
in the event they ever “want to run for political office.” The campus elections
commissioner (yes, they have one of those) temporarily suspended the petition
after a barrage of accusations.
On the phone, Elliott talks fast, almost exuberantly. In
fact, it sounds like he’s having fun. He and his little band have been called
all sorts of disgusting names and publicly smeared and harassed, but their
opponents’ demands are so silly that responding is sport. This comment on a
topical Stanford Review article
displays an almost humorous directness during our days of political
correctness-coated public discourse:
I am shocked that students in
grossly irrational groups like this made it into Stanford in the first place!
This is one of the worst advertisements for grade inflation and ever-changing
institutional admission algorithms that I can think of! As a Japanese American
and recent Stanford graduate, I am fed up with these small yet whiny group of
prima donnas who have apparently been educated by the coercive art of propaganda
directed at those highly susceptible to it. Facts mean little in the way of the
agenda or ‘victim’ status.
Hey [Who’s Teaching Us, the
anti-Western civ group]: GROW UP! You are wasting your enormous educational
opportunity by chasing all of those ‘evil’ ground squirrel holes on the Farm
[slang for Stanford]. If you want to make a difference in the world, then go
and organize some communities that really need it. Once the rates of crime,
violence, teen pregnancy, high school dropouts, illicit drug use and single
parent homes decreases from your efforts, you might have a little more
credibility behind your whining.
One does wonder how young people who confuse
tantrum-throwing with argument managed to get admitted to Stanford in the first
place. Apparently it’s easier than one might think. The Stanford Review’s case for the Western civ proposal quotes
Stanford Law professor Michael McConnell: “I have taught law students for more
than thirty years. In recent years I have noticed that many students have
little or no familiarity with the political, intellectual and cultural history
that shaped the American legal tradition. I’ve encountered students who have
never heard of Hobbes and Locke, do not know the causes of the American
Revolution, are unfamiliar with the Lincoln-Douglas debates, haven’t a clue
about Progressivism or the New Deal, don’t know what separates Protestants and
Catholics, and have only the vaguest sense what race relations were like before
the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
Western Civ Against
the Moral and Mental Vacuum
This is a familiar refrain from college professors and
K-12 teachers the country over. The truth is, even today’s “best and brightest”
are often the degraded best of an emptyheaded, morally vacuous lot. Recall the
2012 cheating scandal at Harvard University, in which the transgressing
students blamed difficulty of coursework for their moral failures. The year
after, Harvard surveyed its freshmen and found that 42 percent still admitted
to cheating on homework.
Besides the moral vacuum among the nation’s youngsters,
public knowledge has steadily deteriorated. Over the course of Western
civilization, grammar schools have taken their cues from universities. Yet
progressives have systematically gutted American curriculum for now
approximately a century, prominently with late nineteenth and early twentieth
century calls to remove content from public school curriculum. Progressives
argued immigrant and working-class children should study more practical,
career-oriented subjects. Young folk “of their sort” weren’t suited to the
cultural integration of learning how to govern themselves as an American
citizen, you see.
The poor were the ones first deprived of a coherent,
knowledge-based curriculum, but by now just about everyone is. Like the
working-class masses of last century, Stanford students now study not the high
arts of cultural leadership or self-government, those pursuits worthy of the
phrase “higher education,” but have instead been reduced to highly paid
technicians, with 58 percent of Stanford students studying engineering.
“Our alumni innovating in Silicon Valley, making policy
in Washington, and investing on Wall Street lack the historical knowledge
necessary to grasp their actions’ implications and responsibly shape the
future,” the students’ case for Western civ states. Elliott noted that even
cog-in-the-machine technicians are human beings part of a society that requires
broadly educated citizens for self-government to work. They, too, have souls
that need feeding and will in their adult lives make decisions that affect
other people, not least of which is voting.
The Lost Arts of
Leadership
The inventions of Silicon Valley, where many of these
Stanford engineers end up, now greatly affect American society, often just as
much as do government regulations that will emanate from the graduates who
climb the ranks of bureaucracy. Just consider Apple’s stand for user privacy
against the federal government and Twitter’s recent decision to create a speech
policing panel.
“Technology is going to have immense political and social
ramifications,” Elliott said. “Do any Stanford students have any conception of
these ramifications? Probably not. What concerns me is that people will come to
a place [in life] where this knowledge is relevant and not be equipped.”
Essentially as long as universities have existed—since
medieval days—the few students privileged enough to study at an advanced level
have been required to exhaustively digest their cultural inheritance, to temper
their growing powers with the ageless wisdom required to wield such power well.
Studying history teaches students by example so they can correct rather than
repeat old mistakes. Winston Churchill encapsulated the eternal need to study
it and all the humanities, the arts that make us human:
Projects undreamed of by past
generations will absorb our immediate descendants; forces terrific and
devastating will be in their hands; comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures
will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if
they have not a vision above material things. And with the hopes and powers
will come dangers out of all proportion to the growth of man’s intellect, to
the strength of his character or to the efficacy of his institutions.
Only in recent history, since approximately the last
season of campus unrest in the 1960s, have universities so disbanded the
humanities that form a core justification for their existence. In 1964, all of
the nation’s top 50 colleges and universities had a Western civilization course,
and in most of them it was required. In 2010, not a single one of those same
universities required the class, and two-thirds of them did not even offer it,
according to a 2011 study by the National Association of Scholars.
Rachelle Peterson, NAS’s director of research projects,
lists a few of Western civilization’s achievements: “Western civilization was
the first to question and to end slavery. Western civilization was the first to
liberate women. Western civilization for 2,500 years has made intellectual
liberty a fundamental value. Modern science is a Western achievement. Without
it, we would have no computers, automobiles, or modern medicine. Western values
unshackled millions from oppression.” Hard to shake a stick at that—unless you
know nothing about it.
Most Americans, who are part of Western civilization,
know nothing of its achievements, making them prey to precisely the sort of
grievance-mongering now infecting not just American campuses but our politics
and culture. At leading universities, the effects of this mental rot are
magnified. How can Stanford and other name-brand graduates go on to lead our
society if they dislike it so much they do not want to learn its history? How
can they hope to correct Western civilization if they do not know what it is?
The Descent from
Reason to Will
In erasing cultural knowledge universities pled racism,
classism, and all the boring Marxist rest, but this author suspects a good
portion of the real reason for not requiring the society’s future leaders to
study the arts that lead to the wise exercise of freedom was, to put it
bluntly, laziness. Self-government is hard work. It’s far, far harder than
letting others do your thinking and planning for you. And the harder, the more
legitimate higher education is, the more limited its reach.
People wanted the fruits of this labor without the labor
itself. Americans, as always, were impatient. They wanted the powers of mind,
and the growing income associated with these mental powers, without having to
put in the years, even generations, of work required to legitimately develop
them. So began the long societal march towards substituting credentials for the
substance those credentials are supposed to certify, but which has recently
quite visibly evaporated. This is a major source of today’s college bubble,
which is about to pop.
Thanks in part to our degraded collective intellect, our
society is about to pop, too. People who don’t know their history are not
inclined to defend it. So we see people in high positions of power, the
cultural equivalent of Stanfords, rejecting fundamental Western ideals that
took centuries to recognize and protect: freedom of speech, freedom of
religion, separation of powers. Hobbes and Locke, the Declaration of
Independence, the Magna Carta. The Bill of Rights, the French Revolution, the
Lincoln-Douglas debates.
To know these terms is to know the ideas for which they
stand. And now even Stanford students
do not know these terms. Small wonder, then, that some of them, with
counterparts everywhere, seeks to silence opposition through thinly veiled
violence and other barbarian-like behavior such as literal iconoclasm. Reviving
Western civilization starts with restoring knowledge about its great ideas,
achievements, and, yes, failures. The study of Western civilization needs to
return to Stanford, absolutely—but also to every village, hamlet, school
neighborhood, and home still standing inside it.
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