The Battle Against Western Civ: Higher Education & Anti-American Indoctrination

What is at issue here is how Americans define their place in the world.

by Ian Morris
March 30, 2016

There is a saying, regularly but probably wrongly attributed to Henry Kissinger, that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small. Political scientist Dwight Waldo summed things up much better when he observed in 1970 that academics "can no longer use our little joke that campus politics are so nasty because the stakes are so small. They are now so nasty because the stakes are so large."

Rarely is this truer than when the stakes concern history, as my own institution—Stanford University—is currently rediscovering.

The story goes back to 1987, when Rev. Jesse Jackson came to campus to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Stanford was hardly a hotbed of student radicalism, but Jackson's arrival proved a catalyst for discontent. Some 500 undergraduates, angry at being required to take a freshman course on Western Culture that focused on the writings of white men from Plato and the Bible to More and Marx, joined him in chants of "H…