Centennial Institute has asked me to explore the topic, Must the left dominate academia? Certainly they dominate it now, no question. But with what degree of seriousness? With what kind of intellectual capital?

When one group is in charge for too long, unchallenged, whether on

the left or on the right, you get groupthink. Ask the average professor about their political beliefs and the answer is mush, kind of a tapioca leftism. Its not based on theory, but simply on conformity. That I find extremely dangerous.

Growing up in Kansas in the 1970s, I had some great teachers, but I resented those former leftists from the 60s who wanted to mold me in their image. Thats one reason I became a libertarian and a conservative. I resented these people telling me how to think, and not even because they had a hard-core belief. They just liked having the authority.

Liberal Education

We believe at Hillsdale, as you do at Colorado Christian University, that in order to have a conservative education you need to have a liberal education first. Thats based on the idea of being liberated from the things of this world going back to Plato and Aristotle and asking:

What are the most essential questions that we can consider? How do those questions allow us to have relations with one another? Do we have to make everything political, or can we transcend left and right?

The asking of those questions in an educational setting was a concern of the late Russell Kirk, one of the founders of modern conservatism, a great man whose biography Ive recently written. After bringing out his seminal book The Conservative Mind in 1953, Kirk published another book in 1955 that is one of my favorites, Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition.

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Principled Ideas from the Centennial Institute

Volume 7, Number 4 April 2015

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What sustainsthe dominantacademic left?

Bradley J. Birzer (Ph.D., History, Indiana University) is professor of history and American studies at Hillsdale College and the 2014-2015 visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He is the author of five books, including the forthcoming Russell Kirk: American Conservative. This essay is adapted from his lecture at Colorado Christian University on Jan. 12, 2015.

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THEY STOOD FOR TRUTHBy Bradley J. Birzer

His opening argument can be paraphrased this way: Whereas intellectual freedom is chiefly an aspiration, sought by the solitary man of contemplation, academic freedom is a historical reality. It has true limits and true prerogatives. It must be preserved and extended.

Kirk is suggesting that there is a very long tradition of this in Western civilization. Its the idea that we as free women and men have the right to challenge even our god king. There in ancient Greece, unlike in ancient Persia under Xerxes or Darius, you had the right to challenge those who would tell you what to think on the level of your conscience.

Three Heroes

This actually came up in class today at CU-Boulder. For my students in an honors course on Western civilization, I held up three heroes who represent the best of our liberal, liberating tradition: Socrates of Athens, Cicero of Rome, and the early Christian martyr Perpetua.

Socrates, I reminded them, taught adamantly that you never have the right to do harm to another person, no matter the circumstances. You can never do evil in the name of good. You can never do wrong calculated in the name of right. It will always end in an evil. It will never end in a good. Thats one hero, one lesson.

Next we looked at Cicero, the great Roman republican, who said, Our allegiance must always be to humanity, not to the soil in which we live. Hes saying that the material substance by which we survive, though important, is only a means to an end. The end must be something higher.

You can apply that to the American founding and think about George Washington saying in his first inaugural address, Any nation that ignores the eternal rights of order has no prerogative to live. It deserves its fate to die.

Hes making the same point as Cicero. The ultimate moral soil of Americas survival is not geography. Its humanity itself. The good is good no matter where you find it. The true is true everywhere, whether its on the Tiber or the Thames, the Potomac or the Arkansas.

Nor can the true be destroyed. It can be forgotten or ignored or

mocked, but it remains true. This is the Ciceronian idea. Nearly every one of our Founding Fathers, remember, was fluent in Greek and Latin by the time they were fourteen, the age at which they went off to college. And in that context, who was the person they looked to most when they founded the American Republic? Cicero.

The third person I brought up to my students today was someone who is less well known, but truly a heroine of mine. She is a young Roman noblewoman, just 19 years old and pregnant, who accepts martyrdom in the Roman arena rather than give up her Christian faith. This is Perpetua.

Martyrs All

So think about these three figures in the Western tradition. Socrates, telling us never to do harm. Cicero, telling us always to put humanity and the good above your immediate expediency. Perpetua, symbolizing that its worth dying for the right things. And all of them, as I told my class at Boulder, paid with their lives.

The Athenians killed Socrates. Mark Antony didnt just kill Cicero. He had his head brought into the Roman Senate and placed on the podium while Antony gave a speech declaring the old republic dead. And Perpetua, this brave girl massacred for her beliefs, for the crowds entertainment.

What amazing people, martyrs all. People who taught us dramatically what it means to live the good life, and to die the good death. To be happy at the moment of our death, even in blood and agony, because we did the right thing. To know that our soul was intact even though our body wasnt.

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Conformitythreatens

conscience.

This is what Russell Kirk is giving us when he defines academic freedom as the sacred right to question, to look at the good and true on our own terms, and take our stand for conscience, albeit at great cost.

Questions of Life and Death

We must not lose touch with these incredible examples, these people who have energized not just their own societies but the bigger scheme of history. Where would the church be without the martyrs? Where would any of us be, Christian or not?

Look at the last hundred years. According to recent scholarship, when you count up everybody who was killed in the gulags, the Holocaust, the killing fields, something like 205 million people were executed by their own governments. The U.S. population right now is about 315 million. Imagine if two of every three people you know were gone. Thats the death rate of the 20th century.

In a century when warfare took 50 million lives, governments killed four times that many. The state did that. So these questions of left and right are not merely

academic questions. They are literally questions of life and death. These matter.

What about us, then? What about you and me? Do we fall into a pattern of conformity when conscience is threatened, or do we resist? How

do we resist wisely, in a manner that is effective, that is just and right?

Grave Responsibilities

These are the kinds of things that a young Kirk had to ask himself when he walked away from a tenured professorship at Michigan State over a disagreement with the administration and went out on his own as a writer and lecturer, refusing on principle to be part of academia any more.

Out of that crucible of conscience came the book on academic freedom, which Kirk defines as the pursuit of Truth, capital T. The pursuit of Truth puts upon us, as those who claim to be its followers, he writes, the gravest of responsibilities.

Now let me take us back to America and back to George Washington again. He said in one of his beautiful speeches, America now carries the responsibility of republican government entirely upon her shoulders for the next thousand years.

Russell A. Kirk, 1918-1994

Was that meant to breed arrogance, to say how great we are? No. It was Washington saying that he and his countrymen, including you and me, have the responsibility of carrying this thing and making it work. If we mess it up, its over. Its going to be another thousand years. This is what the father of our country is saying to Americans down through the generations.

Its also what Kirk is saying about those of us who go into the classroom. Honestly, sometimes I lose sleep over this. The worst thing I could do as a professor, right, left, or center, would be to expect my students to be little clones of Brad Birzer at the end of the semester. That would be diabolic.

Little Clones

Think about this from a theological perspective. What does God do when he creates us? He creates every single one of us in his infinite image. We are never to be repeated, ever. We are the one reflection of that aspect of God.

We have that core of humanity in common, and yet we are radically diverse from one another, and its for a reason. So those of us who go into the classroom have this responsibility

never to try and conform those who trust us. Never. We teach them what we believe to be true, but the most important thing is teaching them to question and to think.

Then when a situation arises and you have to make a decisionwhether youre in business

or in the military, in politics or in academiaits not just repeat back to the professor and pass the exam. That spark of conscience has to arise and prompt you to ask: Is this a just order? Is this the right thing to do?

This is why Russell Kirk says every philosopher in the academy must dedicate himself completely to the Truth, capital T. This is what we pursue. This is what we worship. We dont worship the crowd. If philosophers are treated as servants of a faceless community, they will acquire the vices of servants with few redeeming virtues.

Seven Virtues

What are the virtues anyway? On opening day at Hillsdale, I ask my students to tell me the seven virtues. Someone will say happiness. I tell them no, happiness may be a goal in your life, but its not a virtue.

Then one of the students from a religious background will say faith, hope, and love. Good, those are the highest ones. But remember that before those emerged in Christianity, the pagans had already identified prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude.

Our Western tradition, starting with the great Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, teaches us to think about our knowledge of such things as follows: Can I accept that there is an ideal form of justice? Yes, absolutely.

Centennial Review April 2015 3

Students are not fooled.

Can I know it fully? No, because Im not God. But do I have a hint of it, an inkling? Of course, because Im made in the image of the divine; even the pagans understood that.

Any two of us, as people of good will, dedicated to pursuing truth, may each have very different visions of what justice is. We can debate those. But in the end, we recognize that its probably greater than either of us can decide. Thats the idea of objectivity.

We dont claim to know everything. We do know there is an everything to know, even though we dont know it yetand maybe we never will, because were not God. We have pieces of the puzzle, but not the whole.

This what we see stressed in Russell Kirks book. He points out that down through history, in the classical world and the medieval world, the academy always possessed a freedom unknown to other corporate bodies. That was because the actors there, whether philosopher, scholar, or student, were looked upon as persons who had been consecrated to the service of truth in the way that a soldier is consecrated to the service of protection.

Tired of Platitudes

But when I tell my students there is an absolute truth, whether at Hillsdale or at CU-Boulder, their immediate reaction is, Oh no, theres not. Ive got my opinion, youve got yours. When I tell them, though, that Socrates believed in truth and he died for his beliefs, its amazing how interested they are.

They are tired of platitudes. They want to search for something deeper. They long to hear stories of greatness. No matter how cynical this generation of college students may seem, at the core they want truth.

Socrates Cicero

Perpetua Washington

They Stood for TruthBy Bradley J. BirzerMust the left dominate academia? They do now, but with waning intellectual capital. Academic dominance by any ideology is dangerous. Education should not in-doctrinate but liberate. Pro-

fessors and students must pursue Truth, emulating classical heroes from Socrates to Cicero to St. Perpetua, and great Americans from George Washington to Russell Kirk.

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Power without morality? Thats

not the West.

So we come full circle to Kirk, to academic freedom, and to the question we started with: How much does the left control? They control a lot, and when we look specifically at academia, their grip seems ironclad.

The good news, though, is that they dont know why they believe what they believe any more. They dont understand it. They havent thought about it. They dont know the principles of it. They are not based on anything, and students are not fooled.

Give students the chance and they jump at intellectual discussion. They jump at ideas that are older than yesterday.

Real Education

They care about things that really matter. Theres a huge change between an 18-year-old and a 22-year-old, for good or ill, and there are a few places, places like this one, that are working to turn it to the good.

A shakeout is coming. The economics of college are almost untenable at this point. Too much debt, too much reliance

on public money. When the bubble ends, the implosion will make the housing bubble look small. Our very cultural capital is at stake. But places like Colorado Christian University and Hillsdale College and a handful of others

will emerge stronger because they believe in truth. They do real education.

What happens if you train all the technicians in the world, you foster all the scientific curiosity, but theres no morality any more?

You can do whatever you want. Theres only power. Thats where the Nazis and the Stalinists were. Thats not America. Thats not the West.

Does the left have control now? They do. Will they 20 years from now? Im not so sure. I think theyre in their last days. They have no imagination and no intellectual capital. They only have power and at some point power no longer works. Weve seen that over and over again.

Remember Perpetua, Cicero, Socrates. They knew the right thing to do, and they did it. They stood for truth. So must we.

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