Ken Burns became famous for his magisterial PBS film series, “The Civil War.” My family loved this series, which featured, naturally enough, Lincoln’s arguments and tactics during the war. But Burns’s latest pronouncement makes one wonder whether he really learned anything about Lincoln at all.
In a recent podcast discussing the impending closure of his alma mater, Hampshire College, Mr. Burns identified the “greatest danger” facing higher education as its “transactional tendency”—the reduction of learning to an economic exchange of credentials for jobs and income. He lamented the loss of “transformational” education, the kind that “rearranged all of my molecules,” as he put it, and praised Hampshire’s experimental, student-centered model free of traditional majors or rigid structures. He decried “reprehensible culture wars” and external political pressures while defending the First Amendment.
To be sure, his sentiments are heartfelt and, in part, unobjectionable. But they reveal a profound misunderstanding of what ails the American academy and what alone can renew it—which Burns, despite his familiarity with Lincoln, seems studiously to ignore.
Burns rightly senses that something essential has been lost. Education worthy of the name must indeed transform the soul, lifting the young from what Plato called the “cave” of opinion into the sunlight of truth.
But transformation without direction is nothing but mere motion.
Lincoln, as Burns should know, understood this. The Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural rest on the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. These truths are not transactional commodities or subjective preferences. They are permanent principles, grounded in nature and accessible to reason. Higher education’s crisis is not primarily financial or “cultural” in the superficial sense Mr. Burns suggests. It is philosophical: The long triumph of relativism, historicism (meaning, “what we deem to be truth is only a product of our historical epoch”), and value-neutrality have severed the university from the moral and intellectual foundations of the democratic republic it claims to serve.
In point of fact, Hampshire College’s experimental ethos—innovative, passionate, unconstrained—embodies the very spirit that has contributed to the decay. Without a core curriculum anchored in foundational texts and the permanent questions of moral and political philosophy, “student-designed” learning too easily becomes self-indulgence. Aristotle teaches us that genuine education forms character for the good life and for citizenship in a self-governing republic. The Founders established schools and colleges precisely because “religion, morality, and knowledge” are necessary to good government, as they made clear in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance.
A university that treats the curriculum as a marketplace of personal passions, untethered from disciplined inquiry into natural-rights doctrine, prepares neither workers of high competence nor citizens capable of sustaining a constitutional republic. It produces, at best, slick sophists. And at worst, it creates ideologues who mistake their preferences for justice.
Burns complains of forces “from without” exerting political control and of culture wars corrupting the academy. He’s got it backwards. Deeper corruption has come from within. For decades, the humanities and social sciences have been dominated by doctrines—postmodern, deconstructionist, historicist—that deny the very possibility of objective truth. When everything is a social construct or a mask for power, the pursuit of wisdom collapses into mere advocacy. Administrators, fearing disruption or seeking favor, have too often capitulated. The “transactional” mindset Mr. Burns decries is itself a symptom of this deeper nihilism: If there is no truth about the good, then only utility—jobs, status, credentials—remains. The university becomes a credentialing mill or, worse, an engine of ideological formation hostile to the principles of the American Founding.
Lincoln did not become the Great Emancipator through unstructured experimentation or by treating opinions as equally valid. He immersed himself in the Bible, Shakespeare, Euclid, and the political thought of the Founders. He reasoned rigorously from first principles to meet the crisis of his time. Genuine liberal education recovers this tradition. It demands breadth and depth: mastery of language, logic, history, the sciences of nature, and above all, moral and political philosophy. A genuine education refuses to coddle or to abandon. It pursues true intellectual diversity—grounded not in the “inclusion” of every fashionable ideology, but in the honest confrontation with “the best that has been thought and said.” Such education serves the public good, especially at public and regional institutions that must justify taxpayer support by forming capable citizens rather than signaling elite status.
Therefore, the closure of Hampshire College should occasion not Burns’s nostalgia for lost “experimentation,” but sober reflection on America’s first principles. Public trust in higher education has eroded because universities have drifted from their civic mission. They have chased enrollment and prestige, inflated costs, diluted grading standards (an A is now the most common college grade nationwide), and substituted therapy and ideology for rigorous formation. The remedy is not more innovation for its own sake, nor complaints about “external critics,” but a return to the moral seriousness that animated Lincoln and the American experiment.
If Burns had remembered his Lincoln, he would have argued that our country must reclaim the university as a public trust dedicated to truth, virtue, and the perpetuation of free government. This requires courage, clarity of mission, coherence between rhetoric and reality, accountability for results, and fidelity to the principles that make transformation meaningful. Without natural right as both foundation and compass, “transformation” becomes shapeless change—potentially for the worse. With it, education can once again produce men and women fit for self-government.
Burns’s documentaries stirred millions by bringing Lincoln’s words and deeds to life. Perhaps Burns might yet reconsider whether the crisis of higher education is best met by defending unstructured experimentation or by recovering the philosophic and moral foundations that Lincoln himself embodied.
Only then can the American academy fulfill its highest calling: not merely “rearranging molecules,” but forming souls for the defense of liberty.