How Universities Teach Students to Hate the West
Colleges are teaching generations of students to distrust America’s history and institutions without first understanding what made them worth defending.
Great nations have always told their children great stories. From Homer and Virgil to the Bible, inherited narratives teach courage, duty, sacrifice, faith, and belonging. But this inheritance is predicated on an understanding of the world rooted in truth. History, in particular, must educate with facts—not reduce America and the West to caricatures of corruption and oppression. When subverted by corrosive indoctrination, history education becomes a tool of civilizational suicide.
That, unfortunately, is what we often now see in our universities.
Let’s begin with Harvard, where historical studyhas given way to activist indoctrination. The Harvard Guide to American History (1954) was an excellent work of traditional scholarship. It was broad, learned, and serious about evidence. It treated American history as a complex field. Students had to understand political institutions, diplomacy, economics, religion, war, biography, ideas, and social change.
Harvard course offerings over the past decade show how far the center has moved. Rather than survey American history in its institutional and civilizational breadth, many courses adopt axiomatic anti-Western assumptions as their governing framework.
One example is the recent course Harvard and Native Lands, cross-listed by the English and History departments. Its description declares that “Harvard’s endowment included Native lands expropriated through war, theft, and coercion” and presents the course as an inquiry into “Indigenous dispossession and resistance.” That framing is not academic but accusatory: before students have weighed evidence or historical context, the institution is condemned through the vocabulary of criminal appropriation and colonial oppression.
