America’s successful melting pot should not be replaced with discredited salad-bowl separatism. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Emphasizing diversity has been the pitfall, not the strength, of nations throughout history. The Roman Empire worked as long as Iberians, Greeks, Jews, Gauls, and myriad other African, Asian, and European communities spoke Latin, cherished […]
Today, it seems that Orwell’s 1984 would better have been titled 2016. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Technical progress is often associated with moral and political regress, a theme as ancient as Hesiod’s seventh-century b.c. poem Works and Days. In 200 b.c., not a male could vote freely in Hellenistic Greece, but
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online ‘Jump the shark” is an American pop-culture expression that derives from a 1977 Happy Days sitcom episode; it describes a moment of decline. At a certain point, a TV show becomes so predictable, empty of ideas, and gimmicky that in desperation its writers will try anything —
By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services University students across the country — at Amherst, Georgetown, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, UC Berkeley and dozens of other campuses — are caught up in yet another new fad. This time, the latest college craze is a frenzied attempt to rename campus buildings and streets. Apparently some of
By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services The public is steadily losing confidence in undergraduate education, given that we hear constantly about how poorly educated are today’s graduates and how few well-paying jobs await them. The cost of college is a national scandal. Collective student loan debt in America is about $1.2 trillion. Campus
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media 2016 is a pivotal year in which accustomed referents of a stable West are now disappearing. We seem to be living in a chaotic age, akin to the mid-1930s, of cynicism and skepticism. Government, religion, and popular culture are corrupt and irrelevant—and the
White liberals and black careerists vigorously reject the MLK ideal of a color-blind society. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The racial spoils industry survives on several requisites. One, Americans must be readily identifiable as being non-white or white. Two, once non-white claimants pass the racial litmus test, they must think and speak
By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services What do campus microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, speech codes and censorship have to do with higher learning? American universities want it both ways. They expect unquestioned subsidized support from the public, but also to operate in a way impossible for anyone else. Colleges still wear the
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online How is one to address the ethical implosion on campus, from pampered student bullies to timid professors to invertebrate presidents? We forget that the campus is a contradiction in terms. American higher education fears the consequences of its own ideology—from its exploitation of part-time Ph.D. faculty to
From cost to employment prospects, the state of American higher education is dismal for students. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Modern American universities used to assume four goals. First, their general education core taught students how to reason inductively and imparted an aesthetic sense through acquiring knowledge of Michelangelo, the Battle of Gettysburg,