Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
It took the widely reported, repellent, and exempt wave of anti-Semitism and violent pro-Hamas protestors harassing Jews, finally to convince Americans that their own hallmark universities are illiberal centers of mediocrity and intolerance—and increasingly unsafe.
Of course, Americans had long known that something had gone wrong at their colleges. They had increasingly encountered college graduates who were poorly educated in basic skills and lacked general knowledge—and yet highly politicized, and intolerant of different views and opinions. Ignorant but arrogant is a sad way to start an adult life.
College, the public knew, has certainly eroded from our cherished idea of a four-year idealized respite from adult employment. It once was intended to be a place where youth learned to be open-minded, tolerant, skilled, and eager to learn the nature and traditions of Western civilization, art, literature, languages, philosophy, and history.
Instead, all too often “college” has now descended into a six-to-seven-year misadventure that nationwide often results in only half those enrolled ever receiving degrees. Nearly all sink deeply in student debt. And yet for all the borrowed tuition money, few prove capable of writing analytically, speaking articulately, or knowing the general referents, past and present, of their very civilization.
Students, especially at the elite campuses, learn to mouth monotonously accusations of “genocide.” “apartheid,” “colonialism,” or “imperialism.” But they lack the ability to define these nouns. As a result, they so often name drop empty slogans in the context of supposed Western sins.
Again, October 7 brought these sorry facts to national attention. Adolescent screamers on video showed no awareness that dropping leaflets and sending texts to avoid collateral deaths is not “genocide.” Most chant the “river to the sea” with no clue that it resonates the very ethos of mass murdering, mutilation, and dehumanization of Jewish elderly, women, children, and infants in the most savage fashion on October 7.
Accusatory students who scream “apartheid” seemed to have no clue that a fifth of Israel’s population is Arab, with citizenship rights that vastly exceed those in all other Middle East nations.
They have no notion of the ancient and long connections of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, or how in the world the revered Al-Aqsa Mosque found itself atop the far more ancient Herod’s Jewish Second Temple sanctuary.
As far as “colonialism” and “occupation” goes, they are clueless that the longest, non-Arab colonial rule of Palestine was the more than 300-years of often brutal Ottoman/Turkish imperialistic control. Nor do they have much knowledge of the repeated and combined efforts of far larger and richer Arab nations to wipe tiny Israel out, especially during the full-scale wars of 1947-48, 1967, and 1973.
Instead, politically correct orthodoxies, not the knowledge or logic, of a student, became the hallmark of an “educated” American graduate. Students and faculty were considered “moral” for proclaiming their devotion to diversity, equity, and inclusion, without a clue that historically unity, equality, and fairness were the better aspirations. Without formal study in civics and ethics, students learned that any means were justified to advance political aims merely asserted as morally superior to others.
After October 7, it proved a small campus step from years of institutionalized racially separated graduations, dorms, and campus centers to singling out and often segregating Jewish students from campus spaces.
At Arizona State, Jewish students had to be escorted by police from a campus debate event. Even 20 years ago administrators would likely have expelled those threatening violence—or been forced to resign themselves. Today, they are terrified of mostly foreign students who abuse their visas and seem to despise the host they dare not leave to return home.
Administrators at prestigious MIT admit that some of their foreign students are openly harassing Jews. But the university will not expel such anti-Semites in fear they might lose their student visas and thus have to return to their Middle-East homes and stew about their own miscreant behavior and ingratitude to their hosts. Instead, for college administrators, entitled, and full-tuition paying children of Middle East’s elites are seen as cash cows whose money masks their bigotry.
As a result, cynical MIT grandees now simply warn Jewish students where and where not it is safe to walk on their own campuses. And thus, they confirm the embarrassing reality that the university is either unable or does not wish to stop the systematic anti-Jewish hatred on their own turf.
Yet since when did such student guests in the United States feel empowered to shut down bridges during commute hours, tear down American flags on Veterans Day, and scout out and hunt-down Jewish-Americans on campus?
If universities canonize critical race theorist Ibram Kendi, who insists that “anti-racism” requires good racism to combat bad racism, then is it any wonder that professors of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and various studies courses at UC Davis or Stanford prominently harassed and threatened Jewish students, or at Cornell cheered on news of Hamas’s murder spree?
If campuses drop the SAT requirement, and no longer rank comparative high-school grade point averages, but instead rely on racial and ethnic quotas and “diversity statements” for university admissions, is it any surprise that insecure and passive-aggressive students feel entitled and exempt from any ramifications for their venom?
And if campuses are fixated on race and superficial appearances, and reward those who are supposedly not guilty of “white privilege,” it is easy to understand why anti-Semites believe they can justify their hatred by assuming Jews are guilty for being white, and they themselves exempt for being nonwhite bigots.
If the endowments of our top universities have reached record-setting multibillion-dollar levels, and if the billion-dollar annual income on those massive sums are non-taxable on the pretense campuses are apolitical and teach inductively rather than indoctrinate, then is it such a shock that exempted huge budgets lead to more staffers than students?
At Stanford, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that there were 16,938 graduate and undergraduate students, but they were out-numbered by the combined total of 15,750 administrators and their staffers, and 2,288 faculty. Would it not be easier and perhaps even cheaper just to hire one tutor for each student and forgo the administrators?
If anti-Semitic and racist professors enjoy life-long tenure, and if such guaranteed lifetime employment has de facto eliminated conservative voices among the faculty, why would any bigot mouthing genocidal chants ever worry about his job security?
So again, ignorant and arrogant describes what the public has concluded of campuses in the last few weeks.
In contrast, there is little such anti-Semitic violence at community colleges or trade schools, where the majority of students attends, and must work to pay for their education, and learn skills in a world apart from therapeutic gut courses. In truth, a multiple-choice American history test at a junior college now demands more knowledge from a student than the weaponized essay requirement of an Ivy-League -studies class.
Taxpayers soon will no longer wish to subsidize elite education, especially when campuses no longer can guarantee their graduates are broadly educated and their professional and graduate programs can no longer turn out top-flight experts and specialists.
So, what happened to America’s once monopoly on global excellence in higher education?
In a word, there was too much money—and too little accountability. Tuition soared faster than the rate of annual inflation. The federal government subsidizes almost $2 trillion in student loans, regardless of the quality of education the student receives, and often with the expectation there will be few if any consequences when indebted but poorly educated students’ default on their repayment obligations.
The professors who harass students, and rant endlessly off topic about current politics, are often not audited or reviewed on the quality of their scholarship and teaching as much as their political views, and their racial, gender, and ethnic status. Most have little knowledge of the reality outside the academic world—having spent their entire lives as students and then faculty confined to campus. Tenure is seen as a birthright rather than an ossified privilege only accorded to a tiny fraction of the workforce on the pretense that faculty should be heterodox, independent thinkers, without ideological blinders.
So, to save us from the monsters we created, Americans must get the government out of the student loan business. We must demand that universities’ endowments back their own student loans.
The government should tax endowment income and end lifelong tenure. Universities must expel and deport foreign students who violate campus laws as they violently act out their various hatreds.
Reinstate the SAT for admissions, and end racial quotas. And require a national SAT-like exit exam to reassure the public that graduates at least know more when they leave college than when they enrolled—an increasingly dubious assumption.
But most important of all: the public should stop giving money to elite institutions. To continue such philanthropy is akin to supplying heroin to an addict, gas to a fire, or fireworks to children.
Do not consider our prestigious schools any longer necessarily prestigious. Many are not. Do not hire a graduate simply because she graduated from Yale, or he attended Stanford—unless one prefers to risk dealing with an employee poorly schooled but likely to act out a pampered victim status and to disrupt a workplace.
Tails do not wag dogs. It’s not the culture of higher education. It’s the culture that created higher education. Oh, did I mention that Joe Biden got 81 million + votes, Donald Trump is facing 700 years in prison, Hillary Clinton & Hunter are free to do what they do and of course Jeffery Epstein killed himself. Unless & until Democrats can no longer “ win” elections by locking the door & turning out most of the lights in the tabulation rooms nothing changes. IMO, if you are not talking about election integrity you are being distracted.
VDH should also write on how higher education centers are highly influenced by those on their campuses representing foreign governments hostile to US. He has written about the stealing of intellectual property that aids opponents in war and cold war. Researching and publishing what is happening on our Universities that is of unwelcomed foreign risk to national security is grossly under exposed.
No, it was the academics who cultivated the poison that their students then carried into society. It started there in the 1880s, incubated till the early 60s when the first Boomers hit college, and from there, metastasized like a cancer in the broader society.
Agree. We were still in the past when we had trust in elections, in the Nov.2020 election. Were taken by surprise when so many election protocols were violated. That our representatives have not made a more strenuous effort to guarantee the honesty of the process that is the basis of our Republic, leaves me with troubling doubts as to their integrity.
In my opinion, people who believe nothing else influenced the election than “election integrity”, need to try working above sophomoric level thinking and analysis.
It appears to be a desperate attempt to ready the excuse for the possibility of losing again in 2024: “The only reason Trump lost again is they stole the election again”.
You can realize that fraud was a factor, as was Trump doing little or nothing as they watched Democrat lawyers preparing the ground in stats prior to the election and then simply giving up on Georgia. Ditto the FBI Head Shed ensuring the contents of the Biden laptop never saw the light of day.
Being simple minded and tunnel vision is far worse than being “distracted”. “Distracted” meaning you don’t agree with the simplistic view that says you must be obsessively focused on “election integrity” to the point of ignoring everything else.
It would be nice if we still had an objective, fact based media that would not actively ignore the truth and instead pursue a progressive leftist narrative that is literally destroying the country. They could start with identifying and reporting all the actions former President Obama took that has lead us to where we are today. To do this they need to look backwards and rectify their reporting errors that enabled Obama to succeed on this path. They could start with how Obama made the government in charge of the student loan program which resulted in the ridiculous amounts of debt kids took out for a questionable education. All this did was green light universities to continue raising the cost of education well above the inflation rate. Between Obama and Biden I’ve never seen the future of this country so bleak.
Great article. Clear words to untangle tribalized mass confusion.
Amen
Many of us have known this and took the step to send our children to community college instead. It is the parents responsibility to know what their children are learning. My granddaughter started saying things like it’s not fair that some people have a lot of money and others don’t. I knew she was an “A” student so I asked her if anyone was failing, she pointed out a couple of students who were barely passing. I asked her to tell the teacher that she would take a “C” and give a “C” to those 2 students and they would all pass. The look on her face said it all; so then I let her know that it is how communism works, you take from those who worked hard and/or were blessed with know how’s and became rich, and the government takes it so everyone can be poor!
Stop giving. Stop attending sporting events. Stop supporting institutions that bite the hand that feeds them. Stop watching their sporting events on TV. As a lifelong sports fan and fairly active alumni of a university to remain nameless, those were some tough decisions I have made for myself. Three generations of my family have attended the same university, but no more. Oh, by the way, I stopped buying their branded apparel and other items and no longer take their fundraising calls. It is ashamed that this must be the response. I have found other things that bring just as much joy and help more suffering people without supporting arrogant ignorance! When stadiums that normally are full on Saturday with more than 100,000 fans stop filling up, it won’t take long for the message to be received. If every alum would take a 1-year sabbatical, there is no telling what could and would change! This is just what I am choosing to do. I freely tell the university that when I have the opportunity. They do not even want to consider that possibility. Bud Light got AB’s attention whether they liked it or not!
Excellent
The first steps down this path started with a concept: “we need to provide a uniform education for all, so the government will establish the curriculum.” Ok, seems innocuous.
The next step: “everybody has a right to a college degree, so the government should take over student loans.” This morphed into forgiveness of that debt, which means transferring the debt to everyone else, and it provided vast sums of money to universities and professors who toed the line.
Students were taught to react as social justice warriors, and not to think. Instead of bringing out the best in these young minds, the education system created a generation of automatons, ants whose mantra is: “all things not expressly commanded are forbidden.” Israel bad, Palestine good.
The consequences of relying on our government, as noted in the Unseen Man (that which is not seen), led to the disgusting protests in the elite universities against Israel, and not against the actual evil perpetrated by Hamas.
This generation of emotion-robots can be overcome through school choice, getting the government out of education, and teaching your own children to think rationally.
Rational thinking starts with considering cause and effect: if this then that. Rational thought strongly advises against taking the first, almost always emotional, impulse to a stimulant, and giving consideration to your core principle before reacting. It’s the same lesson your parents, grandparents and all books on history, both relig
Victor, another fine presentation for your readers! Your very last sentence, for me, is the warning all employers should take to heart. Why would any self-made successful business person hire someone who will absolutely destroy the business that took hard work and personal sacrifice to build? The arrogant, self-absorbed marxists believe it is their duty to totally contaminate anything beyond repair.
A short poem based on this piece:
In ivy halls where wisdom sleeps,
Dark shadows o’er the campus creeps.
A wave of hate, unseen, unwept,
In cloistered minds, silently kept.
Long known, the rot within these walls,
Where ignorance in arrogance calls.
Skills unlearned, views intolerant,
Youth adrift, their path not gallant.
Once a haven for eager minds,
Now a maze where truth unwinds.
Art and history’s lessons untaught,
In the snare of dogma, students caught.
Degrees half-earned, debt amassed,
In this misadventure, shadows cast.
Voices parrot, empty, loud,
In halls of learning, ignorance proud.
Ideas of old, twisted, skewed,
Injustice cried where none is viewed.
Empty slogans, hollow chants,
In pursuit of ignorance, reason pants.
So stands the campus, truth forlorn,
In halls of prejudice, futures torn.
A sad decline from grace so stark,
In ivy halls, now dim and dark.
Well Done, Jim
This is an awesome post. Mind if I put some of your words into music?
‘Song Of Durin’ by Eurielle
David, please take what you wish.
However, those that follow my posts here already know that I interject chatGPT generated verses at times to keep everybody abreast of the advances of AI.
With this one, I had the robot examine VDH’s article and asked it, specifically, to create a quatrain-based poem about it. It does a better job, and is much quicker, than 99.9% of humans. This is one thing that the new language-based AI platforms do well. It will only improve over time.
As a song writer myself, I would take this input and craft it into something that is more “human”.
By the way, you can also ask it to create a song, complete with multiple verses and a repeating bridge.
Give it a try. It is fascinating, though imperfect. For now.
The people who are in trouble – in my view – are the CW song writers. We already know that most of their stuff is indistinguishable from everything else in that space. They are playing in a limited sandbox. Three chords, verse and chorus, about five different themes and styles, All enjoyable, but not particularly “original” and certainly not innovative.
AI understands how to recognize patterns and apply them, with variations, optimally.
By the way, the one thing that AI does not know how to do is humor.
That may be accomplished at some point, but is beyond the reach of the robots at this point.
It does a fine job with the visual arts. But comedy is still the domain of mostly conservative Americans. The left is mostly unfunny. That’s part of their problem in understanding the world around them.
I think this is excellent, Jim. Thank you for it.
Yes. I recall sensing that clueless ignorance and dangerous, self-righteous arrogance—and, strangely, a sad nihilism—even back in the Spring of 1969. As a first-year graduate student, I felt not quite right as I joined a raucous anti-war rally at Harvard Stadium. Marijuana scented the air. A loudspeaker blared. A hand vote condemned the trustees. Janis Joplin sang with raspy passion: Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose . . . Soon thereafter she died from a heroin overdose.
“As a result, cynical MIT grandees now simply warn Jewish students where and where not it is safe to walk on their own campuses.”
I believe this is called Apartheid.
The world is simply back to normal, and the US is becoming part of classic Western Civilization. (Islamic civilization is a junior partner.) Has it not been thus since the Hasmonean rebellion over two millennia ago?
Student mobs attacking Jews – check (the HEP-HEP riots, Polish university students leading pogroms – you can go back to the Padua medical school centuries ago).
False charges (blood libels) leading to attacks on Jews – check.
Jewish children (and adults) burned alive – check (Valentine’s Day in Stroudsburg, the Rindfleisch massacres – check.
People ascribing to Jews what they themselves are doing – check.
Mass tortures and murder of Jews being conceded to and justified – check.
Jews not allowed to fight back – check.
The world has gone back to normal. And that is the problem.
BTW, thank you for being one of the voices of reason and decency out there.
(There was a time, when even traditional Jews who knew their history, and had no blinders on, really thought the world had changed, and that people were not murdering Jews anymore (even if they were discriminated against). For example, in my youth we all read the works of Rabbi Dr. Marcus Lehman, a combination of serious historical research and young adult novel. An Orthodox rabbi fighting the anti-traditional tide, he had no illusions but really thought things had changed. I should mention that we read them in translation – from the German. Fool me once…)
The world is simply back to normal, and the US is becoming part of classic Western Civilization. (Islamic civilization is a junior partner.) Has it not been thus since the Hasmonean rebellion over two millennia ago?
Student mobs attacking Jews – check (the HEP-HEP riots, Polish university students leading pogroms – you can go back to the Padua medical school centuries ago).
False charges (blood libels) leading to attacks on Jews – check.
Jewish children (and adults) burned alive – check (Valentine’s Day in Stroudsburg, the Rindfleisch massacres – check.
People ascribing to Jews what they themselves are doing – check.
Mass tortures and murder of Jews being conceded to and justified – check.
Jews not allowed to fight back – check.
Yes, this is how it was and is.
The universities should be shamed in various ways. A friend of mine, Jewish and a very generous donor to our alma mater, sent the university president a letter asking for a clear statement on the university’s stance with regard to Israel and the disgusting demonstrations held on campus by types described in Professor Hanson’s article. When the usual mealy-mouthed reply came, in the pathetic dialect of English these people use, my friend replied that henceforth his annual contribution would be $1.00 a year. The rest of us have followed suit with the proviso that our dollar be precisely accounted for and a receipt issued. Very happy to put them to the trouble.
Lol. I like it.
Beautifully written. Thank you, Victor. My employer is HQ’d in WI (UWMadison), and they had a Nazi march downtown this weekend. It was embarrassing, to say the least, with a corporate comms from our new CEO this morning that used all the “correct” buzzwords. What saddens me is how I cannot get away from DEI, ESG, Inclusivity, Equity, LBGT+ every….single….day at work. A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a contract for training employees on being sensitive about pronouns. Although DEI and the Pronoun usage are not mandatory, the new CEO often mentions his skin color and DEI. These are warning signs to me. When I think about leaving, I say to myself, “How do I ask if a company is Woke without asking?” On a bookshelf behind me, I’ve placed The Dying Citizen, The Founder’s Key, The Federalist, and The US Constitution: A Reader as my backdrop for MS Teams meetings. I have Imprimis propped up so all can see the title. It’s a silent message that I’m a Patriot with conservative-leaning values. I’ve also spoken out in our Employee Engagement Survey against DEI when they asked what we can do to improve it. I said to remove it. I don’t subscribe to it nor do I support it. The one DEI event I attended was 100% anti-white. As a second-year GenX, it’s tragic to see how far we’ve moved way from the vision of our Founding Fathers. I’m really hoping God Blesses America in these very sad and troubling times. Take care and thank you for giving us hope and a way to process what’s happening.
Knowledge puffs up…love builds up.
At Stanford, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that there were 16,938 graduate and undergraduate students, but they were out-numbered by the combined total of 15,750 administrators and their staffers, and 2,288 faculty.
Wait…..hold on……There are 15,750 administrators? What in God’s name do they do all day? That is a huge number of people to oversee the 2,288 faculty and 16,938 students. That is about 0.8 administrators per student. When I was in school, there were three administrators for about 3,300 students.
Regarding: “Administrators at prestigious MIT admit that some of their foreign students are openly harassing Jews. But the university will not expel such anti-Semites in fear they might lose their student visas and thus have to return to their Middle-East homes and stew about their own miscreant behavior and ingratitude to their hosts. Instead, for college administrators, entitled, and full-tuition paying children of Middle East’s elites are seen as cash cows whose money masks their bigotry.
As a result, cynical MIT grandees now simply warn Jewish students where and where not it is safe to walk on their own campuses. And thus, they confirm the embarrassing reality that the university is either unable or does not wish to stop the systematic anti-Jewish hatred on their own turf.”
And thus, they confirm the embarrassing reality that the university is no longer an American university in practice, but a foreign university illegally occupying American soil.
“Instead, all too often “college” has now descended into a six-to-seven-year misadventure that nationwide often results in only half those enrolled ever receiving degrees. Nearly all sink deeply in student debt. And yet for all the borrowed tuition money, few prove capable of writing analytically, speaking articulately, or knowing the general referents, past and present, of their very civilization.”
No truer words can be spoken. Most seem to have missed even the grade school grammar lessons in entirety. I love the e- mails I receive with the offensive their , there, they’re errors from those with 12 years of higher education.
The low grades from K through 12, have lowered expectations in every area. Math, science, writing, history all. It begins right there. Teacher unions? It is largely THEIR fault and it appears there will be no getting that genie back into the bottle. So THERE! : )
Lowering standards has consequences, it’s everywhere not just educational institutions.
Victor, Victor, Victor…This is one of your Sistine Chapel masterpieces…The fact that you’re still associated with Stanford has to be evidence they don’t read you…If they did, change would be in the air…
I’d like to wish Dr.Hanson and his wife and family a happy Thanksgiving. May it bring you reasons to be grateful, as I am grateful for your writings and the intelligent and civilized forum you have provided.
Anna Willhide
Nope. All the colleges in America need to be demolished. Raise them to the ground and start over. They are not worth saving.