[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
In 2012 I published a book entitled The Victims’ Revolution, about the rise of identity studies at American colleges and universities. Traveling around the U.S., I sat in on classes, attended conferences, and talked with leading critics of identity studies like Alan Kors at the University of Pennsylvania and Shelby Steele at Stanford. The result was a profile in the institutionalization far-left ideology – an account of major centers of higher education where entire departments were dedicated to the propagation of propaganda that had nothing whatsoever to do with actual education, and that consequently were turning out students who, far from deepening their knowledge and understanding of the world, were being indoctrinated in a contempt for America and for Western values and a reflexive tendency to view their fellow human beings not as individuals but as members of certain groups that were strictly divided into the oppressed and the oppressors. Needless to say, this is a shallow, stupid way of looking at the world, and the thought of young people like this moving on after graduation, thanks to their Ivy diplomas, into positions of authority in business or government or the media or high culture is beyond alarming. In fact we’ve already seen the appalling ways in which these crackpot ideas have transformed American society for the worse.
As noted, my focus in The Victims’s Revolution (which was released in paperback two years ago with a foreword by Douglas Murray) was only on identity-studies departments. In the immensely useful new book Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation, Adam Kissel, Rachel Alexander Cambre, and Madison Marino Doen – all of whom are associated with the Heritage Foundation – take a broader look, examining the most and least impressive of the undergraduate courses at all eight Ivies that can be used to meet undergraduate requirements. The authors have checked out courses in a wide range of departments, and have encountered identity studies pretty much everywhere – but have also found, at almost every campus, ways for an intelligent student in the arts and humanities to acquire a strong education. It’s a matter of choosing wisely.
At Cornell, for example, there are inane offerings like “Queer Girlhood,” which teaches that “Archie [c]omics, Barbies, model horses, and girls’ organizations like the Camp Fire Girls were used to teach girls how to perform certain idealized forms of girlhood which centered heterosexuality, femininity and whiteness.” Students in the course are required to write fan fiction and watch the TV show Powerpuff Girls. In other courses you can discuss such topics as hip-hop, Harry Styles, Beyoncé, and Britney Spears. Other wastes of time include “Whiteness in Literature and Popular Culture,” which pushes the progressive narrative about the 2017 rally in Charlottesville and the January 6 “insurrection,” and “Black Holes: Races and the Cosmos,” which finds some way to communicate “astronomy concepts through readings in Black Studies.” (I’ll believe it when I see it.) Meanwhile, in other Cornell classrooms, students are actually reading the Odyssey, the Roman classics, and Dante.
On to Yale, where there are general requirements but “no mandated courses of study,” so that “the quality of a Yale education can vary wildly.” Yale’s professed goal is to prepare students for “lives of civic engagement,” but “most of the course options available suggest that by ‘civic engagement,’ Yale means political activism.” At the low end of Yale’s catalog are courses like “Managing Blackness in ‘White Space,’” which “explores the challenge black people face when managing their lives in…white space,” and “American Exceptionalism,” which “takes a critical look at the ideology of American exceptionalism” and regards “Mount Rushmore, Thanksgiving, and native-themed sports mascots” as “celebrations of genocide.” The course’s bottom line is provided by a quote from the poet Audre Lorde: “We are citizens of a country that stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on earth.” At Yale’s other extreme are “several solid economics courses,” plus substantial courses on Western philosophy, great thinkers from Herodotus to Arendt, and great literature from Homer to T.S. Eliot.
At the University of Pennsylvania, there are “about sixty writing seminars,” which “are often sites of activist resistance to traditional norms.” Among them: “Abolish the Family,” “Reality TV and Gender,” “Decolonizing French Food,” and “Love’s Labor: The Invention of Dating.” (“Are you worried about your dating prospects?” This course takes students “on a journey to understand how we have come to conceptualize and date the way we do.”) There’s also an abundance of courses on “queer” topics, including “Introduction to Queer Art” and “Introduction to Sexuality Studies and Queer Theory.” Then again, if you actually want to learn something valuable in exchange for the fortune your parents are shelling out on tuition, there’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” “Law and Society,” and “The American West.”
On to the granddaddy of them all, the purported crèmè de la crèmè of American – if not world – higher education. At Harvard, there’s no specific core curriculum – no particular set of materials that one must be exposed to in order to graduate. Instead, undergraduates “must complete four general education courses, one from each of the following four categories: Aesthetics and Culture; Ethics and Civics; Histories, Societies, Individuals; and Science and Technology in Society. Also, they “must complete the college’s language, expository writing, distribution, and “quantitative reasoning with data” requirements.” To satisfy the “Aesthetics and Culture” requirement, you can take junk like “Power to the People: Black Power, Radical Feminism, and Gay Liberation,” which answers the question: “How does understanding political activists and movements in the past help us radically change the world today?” Or you can actually gain some insight into antiquity by taking “The Ancient Greek Hero,” which asks “How did ancient Greek heroes, both male and female, learn about life by facing what all of us have to face, our human condition?”
For “Ethics and Civics,” you can go low with propaganda like “Ethics of Climate Change” or aim high with courses like “What is a Republic?” For the “Histories, Societies, Individuals” requirement you can fritter away your time on “Guns in the US: A Love Story,” which of course demonizes gun owners, or “Moctezuma’s Mexico Then and Now,” which celebrates pre-Columbian America while avoiding any mention of human sacrifice. On the positive side is a course about exploring human history through archeology. Finally, the courses that count toward the “Science and Technology” requirement tend not to offer substantial knowledge about the hard sciences; instead they’re about topics like “sleep, human nature, cooking, climate change, and so on.” According to the authors, the “best option” in this mess of offerings is “Great Experiments that Changed Our World.”
As for writing and reasoning, there are plenty of courses to choose from – one of them ponders how rejecting traditional institutions, such as marriage, can help you contribute to “radical change and the celebration of true difference” – but not a single one of them, the authors maintain, is worth recommending. In short, Harvard needs “a more intellectually serious writing program.” Since students are required to pick something out of a very long, very bad list, the authors suggest “Free Speech in a Digital World” – even though the course is opposed to free speech. That’s Harvard in the year 2025, folks.
Then there’s Princeton, where “broad distribution requirements risk leaving students with a fragmented and incomplete education,” so that students who want a good education must “choose their courses wisely,” whereas “those who want to slide through Princeton without friction” can do so easily. The writing courses include “Assigned at Birth,” which purports to investigate the way in which “gender is taught, embodied, resisted, redefined, and policed.” For the “Culture and Difference” requirement, you can take “Queer Becomings” (“What is the relationship between queerness and larger forces such as culture, coloniality, global capitalism, religion, and the state?”) – or, on the plus side, a course on the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and Gilgamesh. Under “Ethical Thought and Moral Values,” you can choose something like “Introduction to Feminist Political Philosophy” (“What is oppression? What is sexism? What is gender? How does intersectionality complicate our understanding of these questions?”) or, preferably, something like “Political Theory” (Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and the Founding Fathers). To fill the Literature requirement, you can take a course on Angela Davis or one on Shakespeare.
Dartmouth offers a two-semester Global Humanities course which takes you from Sophocles to Chekhov – good stuff – but other courses that can satisfy the same requirement (“Performing Gender,” “Climate Change,” “Theater for Social Change”) are a great deal less impressive. The required subject categories include Art, for which you can take something like “Music and Social Justice,” “Queer Cinema,” or “Art and Activism,” or, alternatively, “Art and Ancient Greece” or “Art and Aesthetics.” The authors conclude the chapter on each Ivy League college with two lists of courses that would fulfill all the basic requirements – one for slackers, one for serious students; in the case of Dartmouth, the former list includes “Racial Capitalism,” “Digital Gaming Studies,” and “Transnational Feminism,” while the latter includes courses on the Hebrew Bible, Alexander the Great, Dante, and Adam Smith.
What about Columbia? It’s famous for its impressive, century-old core curriculum, which has somehow managed to stand firm amid all the politically correct winds of the last half-century. Surely it stands head and shoulders above its fellow Ivies? Well, kind of. Undergraduates must take all six core courses, many of which are top-notch. The required writing courses, alas, are heavy on “progressive posturing”: instead of teaching “critical thinking” the worse of them (e.g., “Readings in Gender and Sexuality,” “Readings in Climate Humanities,” “Readings in Race and Ethnicity”) “take major premises for granted”; a considerably better choice would be “Readings in American Studies” (Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr.). Then there’s “Readings in Medical Humanities,” which looks good at first blush but turns out to include texts like “Born a Womyn?,” about “transgender exclusion.” Meanwhile, courses on global topics are heavy on postcolonial theory; science courses are mostly fine, but those who want agitprop rather than science can opt for “Global Warming for Global Leaders.”
Last, and perhaps (on the whole) least, there’s Brown, which “boasts an ‘Open Curriculum,’” dating to 1969, which means that the student, in the words of an official university document, is trusted to serve as the “architect of [his or her] own educational experience.” The one fixed requirement is two writing courses, which can be satisfied by courses on “Black science fiction,” “Critical Black Masculinities,” “Understanding the Palestinians,” and “How Can Activists Change the World?” More salutary options include courses on ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Shakespeare, and Kafka. Brown places a special emphasis on courses focusing on “Race, Power, and Privilege,” of which there are no fewer than eighty, from “Race and Gender in the Scientific Community” to “Teaching LGBTQIA History” (an absurd concept, since the identity label “LGBTQIA” was invented in living memory by radical activists who sought to piggyback the newly concocted monstrosity known as transgender ideology onto the history of homosexuality).
The conclusions that the authors reach after sharing their findings won’t be surprising to most readers who’ve paid attention to the long decline of elite higher education in the United States. “With the partial exception of Columbia,” they write, an Ivy League diploma says little about the quality of the education the bearer has received. Although the body of the book doesn’t take into account the antisemitic protests at these institutions, the faculty plagiarism scandals, the Ivies’ lack of ideological diversity, and their reprehensible records on free speech (when it comes to this matter, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression puts Harvard at the very bottom of its list of all colleges in the U.S.). But the conclusion does touch briefly on these matters. And the authors’ bottom line can hardly be argued with: “An undergraduate can build a great academic experience at any of the institutions, but most students don’t. Outside the hard sciences, the faculty in each case offers so many weak, fragmented, overspecialized, question-begging, frivolous, self-indulgent courses that serious students need serious advice separating the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff.”
Fair enough. But my main reaction is: why even bother? Why even consider attending one of these overpriced, self-important sheepskin mills? If you’re an earnest kid who wants to receive a proper education at one of these institutions, you’ll find yourself surrounded by spoiled, stuck-up brats who are brainwashed with left-wing nonsense, who are there to sail through their coursework as easily as possible while cheering on the world’s most noxious causes, and who will probably give you hell if your politics differs even slightly from theirs. Who needs it? Better to go to a much cheaper state school, where your fellow students will be nicer, more down-to-earth, and more appreciative of the opportunities they’re getting, and where the curriculum is far more likely to be free of the kind of frivolous bunk that only scions of wealth can afford to waste their time on.
Then there’s this. A lot of parents know how far the Ivy League has fallen, but are eager for their kid to have an Ivy League degree anyway, because of the prestige it supposedly carries and the doors it supposedly opens. Well, that won’t last for long. The authors of Slacking are far from the first people to have pointed out that the Ivies, in exchange for outrageous tuition fees, are serving up huge doses of frivolous claptrap while pretending that they’re still the ne plus ultra of higher education. Yet even as their reputations continue to slide, they refuse to clean up their act. On the contrary, it can sometimes seem as if the Ivies are intent on going ever lower, as if they’re in a race with one another to reach the bottom. Two cases in point: on October 1, the New York Post reported that Harvard had just hired as a Visiting Professor a drag queen named LaWhore Vagistan, who will teach a course called “Queer Ethnography” and another on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Three days later, the Post reported that a Harvard Law professor had “fir[ed] a pellet rifle outside a Brookline synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur,” saying that he was “hunting rats.” Honestly, what self-respecting undergraduate wants to be within miles of any of this? When places like Harvard are hiring such people, how long can it be before absolutely no one takes a Harvard degree seriously anymore?
Consider, too, the growing list of immensely accomplished people – among them Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates – who’ve argued that for at least a certain type of ambitious, motivated young person, any institution of higher education can be a waste of time. Remember: Charlie Kirk left college after one semester, educated himself by reading voluminously, and turned himself into a person who could argue rings around students at even the most expensive universities. Yes, as he demonstrated a few months ago on Bill Maher’s Club Random, he never heard of Eugene O’Neill, which is a failing in someone who aspires to encyclopedic knowledge about the American cultural heritage. But how many of the latest crop of Harvard graduates could identify the author of Long Day’s Journey into Night? Not many, I would wager.