In his Columbus Day proclamation, President Donald Trump declared Christopher Columbus “the original American hero” and heavily implied that there’s no more federal “Indigenous People’s Day.” But the mass hysteria that took down statues of the man who discovered America across American cities is not necessarily at bay for long. It is a warning that a significant part of our population has lost the intellectual faculty necessary for making balanced judgments about our history — and thus also about our present and future.
As of Columbus Day 2025, the statue of Christopher Columbus at Union Station in Washington, D.C., seems to have survived the now-receding tide of attacks on America’s monuments. The statue in the nation’s capital still stands, the memorial has been scrubbed of the graffiti that for so long gave it a derelict aspect, and the homeless encampment that sprang up around it in Covid days has been cleared out. (Unfortunately, the vibe shift has not extended to getting the fountains working again. But Sen. Ted Cruz is on the case.)
Meanwhile, the new principal of the Oliver Hazard Perry School in South Boston seems to have survived the reversal of the tide, which is now flowing in the opposite direction. According to the Boston Herald, it would appear that Principal Brendan McGrath has fended off his critics by apologizing for putting up a poster featuring Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. As he explained, his mistake was “more of just an oversight on my part in paying more attention to the quote than the historical significance of the author.”
The Mass Daily News had reported that 5-year-olds at Perry were being subjected to a display celebrating “men who silenced freedom with firing squads, censorship, and secret police — now presented as cultural icons” as part of the school’s celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month. Among quotations from other notable Hispanic figures, the poster included Castro’s assertion that “a revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past,” as well as Che’s (possibly contradictory) claim that “the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”
So are we doomed to forever whipsaw back and forth between patriotic heroes and revolutionary ones? From full-throttle celebrations of Columbus Day under every Republican administration to valorizing revolutionary change in Latin America every Hispanic Heritage Month whenever and wherever Democrats are in charge?
It’s easy to point to misdeeds committed by the other side’s heroes and to demonstrate bad results from their careers. It’s also easy to emphasize your own heroes’ good intentions and achievements. If only there were some faculty for weighing, comparing, and evaluating historical figures in light of the complicated mixture of their good and bad intentions, their larger objectives and their characters, the sins and crimes and also the acts of heroism and virtue that they committed along the way, the consequences both foreseeable and unintended of their actions, and their net effects on the world.
Come to think of it, this capacity — to compare things and judge their value in perspective — could be useful in other contexts too. In, for example, evaluating competing claims about the war in Gaza. Or the next time the authorities try to lock down our entire society and muzzle us all on the theory that “If it saves even one life…”
In fact, there is such a capacity for weighing and judging and putting things in perspective. It used to be called prudence, or wisdom, the philosophical habit of mind, or good judgment. And, astonishing though this claim may seem, it was once supposed to be the main point of a university education.
John Henry Newman, the 19th-century cardinal who will be made a “doctor of the church” by Pope Leo next month, was instrumental in the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland. In The Idea of a University, Newman explained that what the “liberal arts” give students is a “habit of mind” whose “attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom,” a “master view of things” that allows them to compare and “estimate precisely the value of every truth which is anywhere to be found.”
Or that was what the liberal arts did for students, once upon a time. When, for example, the founders of the American republic drew on their elaborate educations in the classics of western civilization to invent a new form of government that balanced the flaws and strengths of human nature to ensure self-government, guarantee God-given rights, and maximize human freedom.
Sadly, the “liberal arts” education currently being offered by American universities has effects that are precisely the opposite of moderation and wisdom. Rather than estimating and comparing “the value of every truth,” college students learn to shut their eyes and ears to any truth that has the potential to challenge and rebalance their ideological commitments — driving dissident speakers off stage or out of their jobs, tearing down posters of victims whose plight reflects badly on the side they’re committed to.
That kind of “liberal arts” education is not intellectual formation but rather deformation. It can’t be shut down soon enough for the good of the students, not to mention the rest of us. But it can’t simply be replaced with practical STEM courses. It is incumbent on those of us who understand the value of wisdom and good judgment to teach them to our children and to cultivate institutions that foster them in our society. We will never be able to dispense with the intellectual faculty that enables us to distinguish hero from villain, civilization from revolutionary destruction, Columbus from Che.