The Moral Collapse on Campus Is a Result of the Hollowing Out of the Humanities
Mending a civic and intellectual catastrophe.
Who needs any more proof of the awful decay of higher education in America than the unveiling of its effectual truth, would-be pogroms in Morningside Heights and on campuses from coast to coast? More common, though perhaps not less unsettling, is the characteristic boredom and confusion of the recipients of the great privilege of the baccalaureate in America. This boredom is as important to explaining the successful revival of violent anti-Semitism as is the ideological indoctrination that more directly causes it.
The moral decay of education has two conjoined parts: the elimination of higher civic education and the total subversion of liberal education. Young men and women trained, at best, for productivity have not been prepared for freedom and cannot distinguish between the politics of the gutter and the fortitude required of the highest duties. They enter their careers with technical skill but without memory, judgment, reverence, or real wonder.
A generation of students emerges from our most prestigious institutions able to code or to critique, but not to speak coherently about justice, law, liberty, or the human good. The result is a civic catastrophe. Fewer than one in five Americans can name the three branches of government. Even fewer can explain the principles of the Declaration of Independence or the architecture of the Constitution. This is not merely a civic failure. It is a failure of education at its very core.
Pursuit of Happiness
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The Civitas Institute Poll, conducted from March 11-20, 2025, asked 1,200 Americans an array of questions about how things are going in the country.
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Paris’s drastic transformation, often termed “Haussmannization,” was unprecedented in scope and set the stage for future traumatic episodes of urban renewal in other countries, including America.
Diversity, Real and Imposed
Diversity imposed drowns human spontaneity and the shades and gradations of man’s mysterious existence into heartless uniformity, bearing no pulses or imaginations.
