Is Higher Education Redeemable?

Is Higher Education Redeemable?

In his incisive analysis of the three dominant ideologies in the world today, Dennis Prager remarks:

There are three ideologies competing for the allegiance of mankind. This competition shapes much of the present world, and the outcome will shape humanity’s future.

They are Islamist, Leftist, and American.

“Islamist” does not refer to [all] the … people around the world who identify as Muslims. I am referring to those within the Muslim world who wish to see as much of the world as possible governed by Sharia, Islamic law. The word Islam means “submission” (to Allah) and that submission is manifested by adherence to Islamic law in a state that is governed by Sharia and whose leaders are Muslim clerics (though there are no clergy in Islam).

“Left” refers to the values associated with the Western welfare state, secularism, and the vast array of attitudes and positions identified as Left from Karl Marx to contemporary socialist democrat parties and today’s Democratic Party in the United States. Identifying Leftist values and explaining why people adopt them is far more difficult than identifying and explaining American values or Islam and its values….

American values, or Americanism, refers to what I call the “American Trinity”: “Liberty,” “In God We Trust,” and “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of Many, One”), the three values that appear on all American coins.

Most of our universities today favor two of these ideologies—leftism and Islamism. These two ideologies are philosophically incompatible; yet they are engaged in a nefarious collusion in order to destroy Western, and in particular, American, values.

This was a shock to me when I first arrived in the United States, after being fortunate to win a prestigious scholarship that allowed me to complete a Doctorate at an Ivy League school. I had grown up in a family of academics and felt immense admiration for the knowledge and wisdom that so many great scholars possessed.

As a Classicist, I was also somewhat sheltered from experiencing the aggressive Marxist takeover of the humanities and social sciences that currently plagues Western universities. Until recently at least, the field of Classics was dedicated to the good old traditions that shaped Western societies. It was largely spared from the pervasive leftist dogmatism that had become the norm elsewhere in higher education.

While the Classicists I was surrounded with had preserved a true academic spirit of free thought and dialogue, once I ventured into conversing with other scholars and scientists, I was astonished by their unquestioning support for anti-Americanism and Marxism—they considered such positions a matter of being enlightened and morally superior.

I debated many of them to the point of exhaustion—passionately, yet civilly, but to no avail. I couldn’t fathom how such highly intelligent and knowledgeable people could be so blind about the evil nature of socialism, leftism, and anti-Americanism. Then it dawned on me that this was the result of the confluence of several unfortunate factors.

One was undoubtedly the unrelenting communist and neo-communist propaganda that had infected our universities in a major way since at least the 1960s. The proponents of this propaganda were consciously, or unwittingly, doing the bidding of the Soviet Union and more recently China. Communists have termed this “the long march through the institutions,” which has advanced with slow, yet scary strides.

This propaganda cherry-picks and exaggerates isolated historical facts and preys on the naïve decency of many people in Western societies, who are eager to engage in a civilizational self-flagellation without realizing that the alternatives are infinitely worse.

Another factor is the narrow specialization of modern knowledge that has produced astounding expertise in extremely limited fields at the expense of general erudition and commonsense wisdom. This phenomenon has been compounded by the worshipping of technology and secular “experts” that characterizes progressivism.

The result is the proliferation of compartmentalized specialists who may know everything, for instance, about the human pinky toe, but are woefully ignorant of why America embodies the greatest principles of liberty and human governance. While the humanities and social sciences have largely replaced liberal arts education with leftist dogma and anti-American platitudes, even the STEM fields are not impervious to this ideology, reflected in blind acceptance of DEI propaganda or the cult of net zero emissions.

Another reason for the lack of wisdom and common sense that leftist intellectuals display is that many of them can afford to inhabit the ivory towers of academia and have never lived through socialist oppression, indigence, and tyranny. A number of French intellectuals who sympathized with the Soviet Union and had the foolishness to relocate there could not abandon their ideology swiftly enough after getting a sobering first-hand experience of communist reality.

The incurable leftism of Western intellectuals who enjoy all the benefits of economic and political freedom yet dream about destroying it has been labeled “left caviar,” “champagne socialism,” or “useful idiocy.”

The only viable way to cure this condition is to win the long-term cultural war—to keep educating our children, with facts and reason, to appreciate America’s ideals, to avoid the pitfalls of socialist utopias, and to understand what makes Western civilization, historically and philosophically, the best bet to ensure human flourishing.

This can be done by fostering school choice and alternatives to public schooling such as home schools, micro-schools, private, and charter schools as well as working with red states to implement a time-honored curriculum that educates children how to think independently, write well, and read the greatest works of our civilization.

At the university level, this could be achieved, as the process has partly begun, by defunding institutions that enable anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism and by encouraging students to attend traditional liberal arts colleges, which impart not only knowledge but also wisdom and virtue.

Most importantly, it is up to families and local communities to teach future generations why they should honor and preserve the great American experiment. Often simple people with good values and solid work ethic have more common sense and wisdom than sophisticated elites. As Einstein famously noted, “Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”

Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son. 

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