Justice Clarence Thomas, currently the longest serving member of the Supreme Court of the United States, took to the University of Texas at Austin stage this week to hail the principles that founded the U.S. and provide a stark warning about what must be done “if this nation is to endure.”
“I think if we don’t stand up and take ownership of our country and take responsibility for it, we are slowly letting others control how we think and what we think,” Thomas asserted.
With the Declaration of Independence as his sword and the Constitution as his shield, Thomas waged a war of words to defend Western civilization and the American constitutional tradition against the progressives who would “undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights — both of which they denied were self-evident.”
The speech was presented both as a warning and a plea — setting the stage for what is an existential crisis of higher education.
Warnings of a waning enthusiasm for the principles of liberty among students are not new. It was William F. Buckley Jr., at just 25-years-of-age, writing in 1951, who railed against socialism and atheism in his book “God and Man at Yale.”
Now, more than 70 years later, Buckley’s diagnosis of an “absence of demonstrable truth” on the college campus has matured into something even more urgent.
The “Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education” published last week tells the story of a distrust, self-censorship, ideological imbalance, and the complete erosion of institutional legitimacy being felt by students at one of the nation’s most heralded universities.
Recognizing that there is an issue with the opaque, inflated, fragmented, and misaligned values by Yale is a good start. But when the report shows that universities, whose aim is to “preserve, create, and share knowledge” ultimately miss the mark.
Yale says it should “protect free speech,” “support academic freedom,” “make higher education affordable,” “reform undergraduate admissions,” “re-center the classroom,” landing on the recommendation that the university “lead by example” with “the common goal of building trust in higher education.”
But to what end?
If Yale is to take on the responsibility of cultivating the minds and souls of the next generation it should be, as 20th century political philosopher Leo Strauss articulates, “in culture or toward culture.” However, if we are to understand the necessity of cultivating a renewed culture in higher education, it must be presupposed that it has “been forgotten.”
Our students were sold the dream that college was the sure path to middle-class security, only to emerge into debt, underemployment, and shrinking white-collar opportunity. That betrayal has produced more than mere disappointment. America is facing a growing body of young people who are careening toward a radical political and moral reorientation — one in which is animated by anger, resentment, and deeply felt frustration.
The existential crisis of higher education, then, is not simply one of trust, cost, or speech, though it includes all three. Our universities can no longer just recite empty platitudes about what education is for, which will inevitably drift toward managerial slogans, therapeutic abstractions, and procedural reforms that leave the center hollow.
It must lead young people towards purpose — a purpose rooted in the values of our Western tradition.
Just as Thomas told the crowd this week, our “intellectuals” sold our students the false idea that “our founding principles are matters of esoteric philosophy or sophisticated debate,” to resolve the crisis on college campuses is to remind ourselves that, as Thomas states, “the principles of the Declaration of Independence… are a way of life.”