I’ve been writing about the rot in higher education for a while now. In Half of Social Science Falls Apart Under Scrutiny, I covered how a massive seven-year DARPA-funded study found only half of social science papers hold up when tested, a consequence of the ideological monoculture I documented in Academia Is Exactly as Biased as You Think. In We Stopped Teaching the Story of Prosperity, I argued universities have quietly abandoned the intellectual tradition that built the modern world. And in The End of America’s Marxist Era, I traced how postmodern Marxist ideology, dressed up in corporate-approved buzzwords, embedded itself in American institutions. We’ve debated and discussed these previous topics, but taken together there’s a clear story our universities are ideologically captured. And if you still want to debate it’s not a big deal, at the very least you can acknowledge universities have failed to provide a bulwark in the broader culture against things we’re seeing play out now.
In our latest piece of evidence, Stanford goes and votes, nearly unanimously, to expand a mandatory freshman curriculum that perfectly illustrates everything I’ve been describing. Today I want to go into that briefly and hope people will read with an open mind, because I think it’s important we get everyone on the same page with this problem so it can be clarified and discussed.
A courageous Stanford accounting professor, Iván Marinovic, brought actual diversity of thought to his school by voting no to a new curriculum and wrote about it in the Stanford Daily. His piece is worth reading in full, but we’ll go through just a bit of it. The mandatory course Why College? is meant to introduce students to liberal education and the good life. It assigns roughly 45 pages of canonical Western philosophical writing across an entire quarter, against more than 500 pages of contemporary work organized around identity, oppression, and “indigenous ways of knowing.” That’s an 11-to-1 ratio of, I would argue, ideas meant to undermine Western values and ideas that you and I would find honorable.
And it’s not like the canonical 45 pages are a greatest hits collection. Students get 8 pages of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a short Epicurus and Seneca selection, and a single Nietzsche aphorism. As Marinovic puts it: “There is no Aristotle, no Augustine, no Aquinas, no Montaigne, no Locke, no Mill, no Newman, no Steiner, no Bloom, none of the writers who built the case for liberal education that the course claims to defend. A course advertised as a defense of liberal education has been built without the thinkers who defined it.”