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| Victor Davis Hanson On The Fate Of The West, Trump, And The Resistance |
| 2018-06-23 |
| [The Federalist] Victor Davis Hanson discussed the decline of the American academy, threats to Western civilization from within and without, "The Resistance" and its assault on the Trump presidency, and a great deal more with Encounter Books’ Ben Weingarten. Watch their interview here or read the full transcript of their discussion below, slightly modified for clarity. Ben Weingarten: As a classicist, you’ve lamented both the corruption of the academy within your own discipline and on the modern campus more broadly ‐ in particular on its repudiation of the Western canon, its lack of adherence to principles of free inquiry and the overall triumph of progressivism. Is there any way to take back this institution, in the sense of restoring classical liberal arts education and the conditions it needs to flourish? Victor Davis Hanson: Well, my criticism in the last 30 years of the institution, obviously a lot of us who voiced those concerns, it fell on deaf ears. So progressive thinkers and institutional administrators within the university got their way. And now we’re sort of at the end of that experiment, and the question we have to ask is what did they give us? Well, they gave us $1 trillion in student debt. They created a very bizarre system in which the federal government ‐ subsidized through student loans, constantly increasing tuition beyond the rate of inflation ‐ the result of which is that we’ve had about a 200 percent growth in administrative costs, and administrators and non-teaching staff within the university. We’ve politicized the education. So when I started there were ... I think I looked in the catalog in 1984. There were things, maybe like the Recreation Department’s "Leisure Studies" course. Maybe one environmental class, "Environmental Studies." But you take the word "studies" with a hyphen, and now that can represent about 25 percent of the curriculum. And that’s usually a rough, not always a reliable guide, to show that that class is not ‐ it’s not disinterested. Its aim is to be deductive. We start with this premise that men are sexist, or capitalism destroys the environment, or America’s racist. Then you find the examples to fit that preconceived idea. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #2 "The Resistance?" "Baiser la résistance;" lying, criminal bastids. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2018-06-23 10:49 |
| #1 Interesting article with many good observations and points. I'm going to focus on the very last VDH comment about how Trump should respond to the left. VDH speaks like Trump can do something about the derangement of the left. I don't think there is anything he can do to appease or satisfy them. That shouldn't be the goal. The goal should be to neuter them politically and achieve the policies which he promised his constituency, the promises which got him elected. The left got butt-hurt because their candidate did not get elected--no matter that she was probably the most vile, unAmerican, criminal candidate in our history. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2018-06-23 10:42 |