The nature of a liberal education is something on which all educated Westerners used to agree, regardless of which party they supported. This ideal was once part of the great American consensus, which allowed for civic cooperation across the political spectrum. However, this common ground on the meaning and purpose of education was largely abandoned in the 1960s and 70s, with the radicalization first of college campuses, then of the faculty, and finally of the classroom. The very notions of abstract truth, disinterested scholarship, and even pluralism have come under attack by professors infused with esoteric ideologies—making reasoned debate difficult, and threatening to turn the seminar hall into a political battlefield, rather than a meeting place of minds. The preservation of the fragile ideal of humane education has fallen to intellectual conservatives, religious believers, and a collection of honorable “old-fashioned liberals” (in the tradition of John F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and George McGovern) who share an esteem for the ideals of liberal education—and who partake in the egalitarian dream of offering such an education not just to an elite, but to the many. Most of America’s founders received just such an education. For instance, Thomas Jefferson, educated in the Classics, looked to the ancient republics in Greece and Rome as models for America—and in turn, laid out his own principles of liberal education when he founded the University of Virginia. Other Founding Fathers with classical educations include John Marshall, John Adams—and Benjamin Franklin, who helped organize both the Philadelphia public library and the school which would become the University of Pennsylvania.
Indeed, among the first things European settlers undertook when they landed on American shores was to found colleges and universities—the first being the University of Mexico, begun in 1551. Harvard College, founded in 1636, began as a seminary, staffed by broadly learned theologians, who’d inherited the Renaissance respect for classical education, and infused it with a profound spirituality. As European settlers expanded across the continent, schools and colleges served as anchors in the new communities they founded, marking their commitment to building a Republic on the shoulders of educated citizens.
It is for this reason that we called our new guide, to 50 schools which we think offer such an education,
All-American Colleges. We can only keep going as a free society if we commit to educating ourselves so that we can worthy of freedom. Freedom isn’t free—sometimes you have to fight for it. More often, you simply have to work for it. That means reading skeptically, looking at both sides of every issue, seeking out views that differ from your own and taking them seriously, trying to learn from the other side of the debate… sometimes it means changing your mind, when the facts or arguments build up to a point that you can’t continue believing what you used to think was true. It is only societies where citizens are willing to do that, are willing to speak to each other respectfully and listen thoughtfully, to argue with civility and a sense that their political opponents are fellow citizens (and even children of the same God) that can afford the luxury of democracy. It is NOT the natural system by which humanity governs itself, but the fragile product of 2,000 years of Christianity and Classical reason. It’s like a vineyard that has to be weeded, watered, pruned and protected—or else it will die.
And what’s happening at too many colleges and universities threatens to kill it. It’s widely argued, especially among conservatives, that American higher education is being held hostage by tenured radicals, professors blinded by unexamined, unchallenged ideologies of the left, who transform their courses into catechism sessions propounding politics, and impart a corrosive, anti-Western view of the world which treats with reverence every civilization but our own. This view travels under the name of “multiculturalism,” and the buzzword used to promote is “diversity.” These words are cleverly chosen, since for most well-meaning people they suggest a broad range of views, imparted in a tolerant spirit, to students from a wide variety of ethnic and social backgrounds. If that were what these terms signified in practice, only bigots would oppose the agenda of the academic left. But in practice, as you will see if you read further, these terms too often refer to something quite different—to a systematic training in prejudice against the achievements of the West, and a romanticized, neo-Marxist embrace of favored “victim” groups, whose cultures are rarely viewed with critical respect and objectivity. Instead, they are picked up as cudgels with which to abuse a teacher’s least favorite aspect of our intellectual, political, or religious heritage. One great writer spoke of the past as a “far country.” If that is true, then the professors who view it with moralistic condescension, and students who never bother to learn about it, are xenophobes and chauvinists. They desperately need the broadening experience of travel—but they believe, with the father depicted by Nancy Mitford, that “abroad is bloody, and foreigners are fiends.” We disagree.
