The left’s long march through our institutions has been extraordinarily successful, particularly with our colleges and universities. With the intention of making our future leaders zealots for big government and enemies of private property and capitalism, many schools subject students to a stream of propaganda telling them that America is a terrible country that must be torn down.
In today’s Martin Center article, Nora Clinton shows what is going on. She begins with Harvard:
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.
Harvard students are unlikely ever to hear anything beneficial about the many peaceful interactions between whites and natives. Everything must be negative and accusatory.
Clinton also points to the distorted presentation of the results of communism in Eastern Europe. While many people risked their lives to leave communist dictatorships, American academics portray communism as an ideal that good people should strive for.
Clinton continues:
History should teach that the West’s failures were not uniquely Western. Slavery, conquest, religious persecution, and unequal rights afflicted other civilizations in much harsher and longer-lasting forms. What distinguishes the West is not freedom from such evils but the development of principles and institutions capable of exposing, condemning, and overcoming them: individual liberty, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, representative government, scientific inquiry, and peaceful reform.
Why do so many young Americans favor socialism? Our colleges have played a large role in this development.