I’d like to take issue with Christopher Scalia’s March 27, 2015, Wall Street Journal article in which he accuses politicians of trashing the liberal arts. (Jesse Saffron discusses it more favorably here.)

Scalia’s paean to the humanities would be justified if colleges and universities were teaching anything like what he describes. Scalia quotes Thomas Jefferson’s expectation that professors will give students “knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that, possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purpose.”

In other words, Jefferson says that history will teach students to learn that ambition is an error. But, really, how many college historians value the past enough to see it as providing positive models? Scalia says that “Jefferson encouraged a general education for ‘the people at large’ to protect themselves from politicians,” but today’s universities are all about the glory of politics, and how many professors pay serious attention to Jefferson anymore, anyway?