-
Centennial Institute has asked me to explore the topic, Must the
left dominate academia? Certainly they dominate it now, no
question. But with what degree of seriousness? With what kind of
intellectual capital?
When one group is in charge for too long, unchallenged, whether
on
the left or on the right, you get groupthink. Ask the average
professor about their political beliefs and the answer is mush,
kind of a tapioca leftism. Its not based on theory, but simply on
conformity. That I find extremely dangerous.
Growing up in Kansas in the 1970s, I had some great teachers,
but I resented those former leftists from the 60s who wanted to
mold me in their image. Thats one reason I became a libertarian and
a conservative. I resented these people telling me how to think,
and not even because they had a hard-core belief. They just liked
having the authority.
Liberal Education
We believe at Hillsdale, as you do at Colorado Christian
University, that in order to have a conservative education you need
to have a liberal education first. Thats based on the idea of being
liberated from the things of this world going back to Plato and
Aristotle and asking:
What are the most essential questions that we can consider? How
do those questions allow us to have relations with one another? Do
we have to make everything political, or can we transcend left and
right?
The asking of those questions in an educational setting was a
concern of the late Russell Kirk, one of the founders of modern
conservatism, a great man whose biography Ive recently written.
After bringing out his seminal book The Conservative Mind in 1953,
Kirk published another book in 1955 that is one of my favorites,
Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition.
Editor, John Andrews
Principled Ideas from the Centennial Institute
Volume 7, Number 4 April 2015
Publisher, William L. Armstrong
What sustainsthe dominantacademic left?
Bradley J. Birzer (Ph.D., History, Indiana University) is
professor of history and American studies at Hillsdale College and
the 2014-2015 visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy
at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He is the author of five
books, including the forthcoming Russell Kirk: American
Conservative. This essay is adapted from his lecture at Colorado
Christian University on Jan. 12, 2015.
Centennial Institute sponsors research, events, and publications
to enhance public understanding of the most important issues facing
our state and nation. By proclaiming Truth, we aim to foster faith,
family, and freedom, teach citizenship, and renew the spirit of
1776.
ISSUE MONDAY * CCU 4/8
Go to Centennialccu.org
Hear from Four
Ukraine Eyewitnesses
THEY STOOD FOR TRUTHBy Bradley J. Birzer
His opening argument can be paraphrased this way: Whereas
intellectual freedom is chiefly an aspiration, sought by the
solitary man of contemplation, academic freedom is a historical
reality. It has true limits and true prerogatives. It must be
preserved and extended.
Kirk is suggesting that there is a very long tradition of this
in Western civilization. Its the idea that we as free women and men
have the right to challenge even our god king. There in ancient
Greece, unlike in ancient Persia under Xerxes or Darius, you had
the right to challenge those who would tell you what to think on
the level of your conscience.
Three Heroes
This actually came up in class today at CU-Boulder. For my
students in an honors course on Western civilization, I held up
three heroes who represent the best of our liberal, liberating
tradition: Socrates of Athens, Cicero of Rome, and the early
Christian martyr Perpetua.
Socrates, I reminded them, taught adamantly that you never have
the right to do harm to another person, no matter the
circumstances. You can never do evil in the name of good. You can
never do wrong calculated in the name of right. It will always end
in an evil. It will never end in a good. Thats one hero, one
lesson.
Next we looked at Cicero, the great Roman republican, who said,
Our allegiance must always be to humanity, not to the soil in which
we live. Hes saying that the material substance by which we
survive, though important, is only a means to an end. The end must
be something higher.
You can apply that to the American founding and think about
George Washington saying in his first inaugural address, Any nation
that ignores the eternal rights of order has no prerogative to
live. It deserves its fate to die.
-
Hes making the same point as Cicero. The ultimate moral soil of
Americas survival is not geography. Its humanity itself. The good
is good no matter where you find it. The true is true everywhere,
whether its on the Tiber or the Thames, the Potomac or the
Arkansas.
Nor can the true be destroyed. It can be forgotten or ignored
or
mocked, but it remains true. This is the Ciceronian idea. Nearly
every one of our Founding Fathers, remember, was fluent in Greek
and Latin by the time they were fourteen, the age at which they
went off to college. And in that context, who was the person they
looked to most when they founded the American Republic? Cicero.
The third person I brought up to my students today was someone
who is less well known, but truly a heroine of mine. She is a young
Roman noblewoman, just 19 years old and pregnant, who accepts
martyrdom in the Roman arena rather than give up her Christian
faith. This is Perpetua.
Martyrs All
So think about these three figures in the Western tradition.
Socrates, telling us never to do harm. Cicero, telling us always to
put humanity and the good above your immediate expediency.
Perpetua, symbolizing that its worth dying for the right things.
And all of them, as I told my class at Boulder, paid with their
lives.
The Athenians killed Socrates. Mark Antony didnt just kill
Cicero. He had his head brought into the Roman Senate and placed on
the podium while Antony gave a speech declaring the old republic
dead. And Perpetua, this brave girl massacred for her beliefs, for
the crowds entertainment.
What amazing people, martyrs all. People who taught us
dramatically what it means to live the good life, and to die the
good death. To be happy at the moment of our death, even in blood
and agony, because we did the right thing. To know that our soul
was intact even though our body wasnt.
Centennial Review April 2015 2
Scan this code with your smartphone to read this and previous
issues online.
CENTENNIAL REVIEW is published monthly by the Centennial
Institute at Colorado Christian University. The authors views are
not necessarily those of CCU. Designer, Bethany Bender.
Illustrator, Benjamin Hummel. Subscriptions free upon request.
Write to: Centennial Institute, 8787 W. Alameda Ave., Lakewood, CO
80226. Call 800.44.FAITH. Or visit us online at
www.CentennialCCU.org.
Please join the Centennial Institute today. As a Centennial
donor, you can help us restore Americas moral core and prepare
tomorrows leaders. Your gift is tax-deductible. Please use the
envelope provided. Thank you for your support.- John Andrews,
Director
Conformitythreatens
conscience.
This is what Russell Kirk is giving us when he defines academic
freedom as the sacred right to question, to look at the good and
true on our own terms, and take our stand for conscience, albeit at
great cost.
Questions of Life and Death
We must not lose touch with these incredible examples, these
people who have energized not just their own societies but the
bigger scheme of history. Where would the church be without the
martyrs? Where would any of us be, Christian or not?
Look at the last hundred years. According to recent scholarship,
when you count up everybody who was killed in the gulags, the
Holocaust, the killing fields, something like 205 million people
were executed by their own governments. The U.S. population right
now is about 315 million. Imagine if two of every three people you
know were gone. Thats the death rate of the 20th century.
In a century when warfare took 50 million lives, governments
killed four times that many. The state did that. So these questions
of left and right are not merely
academic questions. They are literally questions of life and
death. These matter.
What about us, then? What about you and me? Do we fall into a
pattern of conformity when conscience is threatened, or do we
resist? How
do we resist wisely, in a manner that is effective, that is just
and right?
Grave Responsibilities
These are the kinds of things that a young Kirk had to ask
himself when he walked away from a tenured professorship at
Michigan State over a disagreement with the administration and went
out on his own as a writer and lecturer, refusing on principle to
be part of academia any more.
Out of that crucible of conscience came the book on academic
freedom, which Kirk defines as the pursuit of Truth, capital T. The
pursuit of Truth puts upon us, as those who claim to be its
followers, he writes, the gravest of responsibilities.
Now let me take us back to America and back to George Washington
again. He said in one of his beautiful speeches, America now
carries the responsibility of republican government entirely upon
her shoulders for the next thousand years.
Russell A. Kirk, 1918-1994
-
Was that meant to breed arrogance, to say how great we are? No.
It was Washington saying that he and his countrymen, including you
and me, have the responsibility of carrying this thing and making
it work. If we mess it up, its over. Its going to be another
thousand years. This is what the father of our country is saying to
Americans down through the generations.
Its also what Kirk is saying about those of us who go into the
classroom. Honestly, sometimes I lose sleep over this. The worst
thing I could do as a professor, right, left, or center, would be
to expect my students to be little clones of Brad Birzer at the end
of the semester. That would be diabolic.
Little Clones
Think about this from a theological perspective. What does God
do when he creates us? He creates every single one of us in his
infinite image. We are never to be repeated, ever. We are the one
reflection of that aspect of God.
We have that core of humanity in common, and yet we are
radically diverse from one another, and its for a reason. So those
of us who go into the classroom have this responsibility
never to try and conform those who trust us. Never. We teach
them what we believe to be true, but the most important thing is
teaching them to question and to think.
Then when a situation arises and you have to make a
decisionwhether youre in business
or in the military, in politics or in academiaits not just
repeat back to the professor and pass the exam. That spark of
conscience has to arise and prompt you to ask: Is this a just
order? Is this the right thing to do?
This is why Russell Kirk says every philosopher in the academy
must dedicate himself completely to the Truth, capital T. This is
what we pursue. This is what we worship. We dont worship the crowd.
If philosophers are treated as servants of a faceless community,
they will acquire the vices of servants with few redeeming
virtues.
Seven Virtues
What are the virtues anyway? On opening day at Hillsdale, I ask
my students to tell me the seven virtues. Someone will say
happiness. I tell them no, happiness may be a goal in your life,
but its not a virtue.
Then one of the students from a religious background will say
faith, hope, and love. Good, those are the highest ones. But
remember that before those emerged in Christianity, the pagans had
already identified prudence, justice, temperance, and
fortitude.
Our Western tradition, starting with the great Greek
philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, teaches us to think
about our knowledge of such things as follows: Can I accept that
there is an ideal form of justice? Yes, absolutely.
Centennial Review April 2015 3
Students are not fooled.
Can I know it fully? No, because Im not God. But do I have a
hint of it, an inkling? Of course, because Im made in the image of
the divine; even the pagans understood that.
Any two of us, as people of good will, dedicated to pursuing
truth, may each have very different visions of what justice is. We
can debate those. But in the end, we recognize that its probably
greater than either of us can decide. Thats the idea of
objectivity.
We dont claim to know everything. We do know there is an
everything to know, even though we dont know it yetand maybe we
never will, because were not God. We have pieces of the puzzle, but
not the whole.
This what we see stressed in Russell Kirks book. He points out
that down through history, in the classical world and the medieval
world, the academy always possessed a freedom unknown to other
corporate bodies. That was because the actors there, whether
philosopher, scholar, or student, were looked upon as persons who
had been consecrated to the service of truth in the way that a
soldier is consecrated to the service of protection.
Tired of Platitudes
But when I tell my students there is an absolute truth, whether
at Hillsdale or at CU-Boulder, their immediate reaction is, Oh no,
theres not. Ive got my opinion, youve got yours. When I tell them,
though, that Socrates believed in truth and he died for his
beliefs, its amazing how interested they are.
They are tired of platitudes. They want to search for something
deeper. They long to hear stories of greatness. No matter how
cynical this generation of college students may seem, at the core
they want truth.
Socrates Cicero
Perpetua Washington
-
They Stood for TruthBy Bradley J. BirzerMust the left dominate
academia? They do now, but with waning intellectual capital.
Academic dominance by any ideology is dangerous. Education should
not in-doctrinate but liberate. Pro-
fessors and students must pursue Truth, emulating classical
heroes from Socrates to Cicero to St. Perpetua, and great Americans
from George Washington to Russell Kirk.
Centennial InstituteColorado Christian University8787 W. Alameda
Ave.Lakewood, CO 80226
Return Service Requested
Centennial Review April 2015 4
Power without morality? Thats
not the West.
So we come full circle to Kirk, to academic freedom, and to the
question we started with: How much does the left control? They
control a lot, and when we look specifically at academia, their
grip seems ironclad.
The good news, though, is that they dont know why they believe
what they believe any more. They dont understand it. They havent
thought about it. They dont know the principles of it. They are not
based on anything, and students are not fooled.
Give students the chance and they jump at intellectual
discussion. They jump at ideas that are older than yesterday.
Real Education
They care about things that really matter. Theres a huge change
between an 18-year-old and a 22-year-old, for good or ill, and
there are a few places, places like this one, that are working to
turn it to the good.
A shakeout is coming. The economics of college are almost
untenable at this point. Too much debt, too much reliance
on public money. When the bubble ends, the implosion will make
the housing bubble look small. Our very cultural capital is at
stake. But places like Colorado Christian University and Hillsdale
College and a handful of others
will emerge stronger because they believe in truth. They do real
education.
What happens if you train all the technicians in the world, you
foster all the scientific curiosity, but theres no morality any
more?
You can do whatever you want. Theres only power. Thats where the
Nazis and the Stalinists were. Thats not America. Thats not the
West.
Does the left have control now? They do. Will they 20 years from
now? Im not so sure. I think theyre in their last days. They have
no imagination and no intellectual capital. They only have power
and at some point power no longer works. Weve seen that over and
over again.
Remember Perpetua, Cicero, Socrates. They knew the right thing
to do, and they did it. They stood for truth. So must we.
WESTERN CONSERVATIVE SUMMIT 2015
JUNE 26-28, 2015Colorado Convention Center
PRESIDENTIAL CONTENDERS ARE SIGNING UPSO SHOULD YOU!
WESTERNCONSERVATIVE
SUMMIT
*Past Speaker | Confirmed 2015
Scott Walker * Ben Carson*
Ted Cruz* Rand Paul
Carly Fiorina Rick Santorum*
Marco Rubio Bobby Jindal*
YOUR STORY: FREEDOM ALIVE
City on a Hill for Students Age
16-20www.westernconservativesummit.com
844.685.4376