Victor Davis Hanson On The Fate Of The West[colleges]

Victor Davis Hanson discussed the decline of the American academy, threats to Western civilization from within and without, “The Resistance” and its assault on the Trump presidency, and a great deal more with Encounter Books’ Ben Weingarten. Watch their interview here or read the full transcript of their discussion below, slightly modified for clarity.

Ben Weingarten: As a classicist, you’ve lamented both the corruption of the academy within your own discipline and on the modern campus more broadly — in particular on its repudiation of the Western canon, its lack of adherence to principles of free inquiry and the overall triumph of progressivism. Is there any way to take back this institution, in the sense of restoring classical liberal arts education and the conditions it needs to flourish?

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, my criticism in the last 30 years of the institution, obviously a lot of us who voiced those concerns, it fell on deaf ears. So progressive thinkers and institutional administrators within the university got their way. And now we’re sort of at the end of that experiment, and the question we have to ask is what did they give us? Well, they gave us $1 trillion in student debt. They created a very bizarre system in which the federal government — subsidized through student loans, constantly increasing tuition beyond the rate of inflation — the result of which is that we’ve had about a 200 percent growth in administrative costs, and administrators and non-teaching staff within the university. We’ve politicized the education.

So when I started there were … I think I looked in the catalog in 1984. There were things, maybe like the Recreation Department’s “Leisure Studies” course. Maybe one environmental class, “Environmental Studies.” But you take the word “studies” with a hyphen, and now that can represent about 25 percent of the curriculum. And that’s usually a rough, not always a reliable guide, to show that that class is not — it’s not disinterested. Its aim is to be deductive. We start with this premise that men are sexist, or capitalism destroys the environment, or America’s racist. Then you find the examples to fit that preconceived idea.

And the result of it is that we’ve turned out students that are highly partisan and highly mobilized, and even sort of arrogant, but they’re also ignorant … that came at a cost. They did not learn to write well. If you ask them who’s General Sherman, or what’s a Corinthian column, or who was Dante, all of the building blocks that they could refer to later in life to enrich their experience, they have no reference. And then they don’t know how to think inductively. So if you point out the contradictions in free speech the way they shout down some speakers and not others, or the way that they hate capitalism, but they love Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, they’re not able … they haven’t been trained philosophically to account for that, because they’re indoctrinated. And it’s quite sad to see the combination of ignorance and arrogance in young people, but that’s what we’ve turned out. A lot of people who are indebted and they’re arrogant, and they’re ignorant and they’re not up to the task of moving the United States forward as a leading country in the world.

And you can see the reaction to it. We have tech schools now that grow up around these campuses, where they just say to people, “If they’re gonna cut out Western civ and they’re gonna cut out the core and politicize it, then let’s be honest. Just pay us a cheaper tuition and we’ll train you to be a nurse, or we’ll train you to be a computer encoder,” or whatever. And so, we have alternates, for-profit online alternatives, podcasts.

And so, the university failed in its mission. And it will be replaced by open free society. People are trying to find alternatives to it. And they kind of committed suicide. And they’re in decline. And the alumni … the final shoe to fall is whether the alumni of these prestigious universities will still engage in unrestricted gifting. “I want my name on this particular department or this particular plaza, here’s $10 million, I trust you to further my shared view,” and they don’t do it. And so then they read in the paper that a professor said Barbara Bush should die, or was glad that she’s dead, or another professor said Trump should be hanged. Or another professor jumped out and hit a reporter. And they think, what is all this about? It’s not liberal. It’s not tolerant. And so, I think there’s a reckoning going on as we speak.

Ben Weingarten: Lincoln talked about the greatest threat to America coming from within, not without. And perhaps we could point to the academy and the erosion of the academy as being one of the challenges from within. In your view, what is the greatest threat to Western civilization today?

Victor Davis Hanson: It’s not original. It’s what, I guess you’d call them the pessimists, starting with people like Thucydides or Tacitus, and then the extreme pessimists, people like Suetonius or Petronius, have said about the West. And I guess I’d sum it up as: In a free society that’s consensual and capitalist, the combination of enormous material bounty and personal freedom can take away a sense of strife, a sense of challenge, a sense of sacrifice. And that we all, sort of, end up like lotus-eaters, because the economy is so [strong] … especially in the post-industrial society.

So I think right now, we’ve got this situation where we have large numbers of our youth who graduate. They have debt. They go back and live at home. But their material appurtenances are very … cell phones, iPads, internet. Culturally they get anything they want. They don’t have to date. They don’t have to get married. They can hook up and enjoy sex in any manner they want. And we don’t ask anything of that individual, and that individual is basically a slave to his appetites. He gets up in the morning and he says, “I want more electronics. I want more appurtenances. I want more physical pleasure.” And we never say to them, “Well, what was the status of your community? Are we better educated this year than last year? Are we making buildings that are beautiful, functional buildings? Do we have good roads? Are we leaving our children a dam and an aqueduct system better than what we inherited?” We never ask those questions.

And so the world looks at us and they sort of think, “Wow, this generation was given a great inheritance. And I think this may be the one that doesn’t pass on something as well to its children.” And it’s not rare in history that that happened.

When we see FBI agents acting dishonorably, for example, we want to think it’s an aberration; but then we realize these people are a microcosm of our “educated” society, and it’s chilling. It’s the blind, being put at the head of the line, to lead the rest of us. LORD have mercy on us.

There needs to be SJW funding conditions placed on 50 state public university systems and on hundreds of private colleges. No one seems willing to do this, at all.

Absolutely. If an institution takes taxpayer money, it should be regulated. If such institutions impose racial admissions quotas to promote some people and delegitimize others for political reasons, they must also suffer the imposition of content restrictitions and requirements by their funding community. There should not be actively anti-American, anti-capitalist courses or indoctriinations required of the students that call for the destruction of the very taxpayers footing the bill.

Universites see no problem with taking teenagers from religious or heterosexual or fact-based backgrounds and REQUIRING their conversion to amoral pansexualist fantasists in order to be deserving of a degree. It is discrimination and the opposite of intellectual freedom.

For example I was part of a group that got legislation through the Utah legislature that severely curtailed the ability of the DCFS to steal and drug children.

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