protester. so we do go to the board meetings and that we have. we do do organize and be strategic when we organize. we do campaigns on social media the say her name campaign and the say his name campaign. and we keep each other informed but most of all we vote. if you seen that this past march we got attorney anita out of office because she knew the cover above mcdonnell. we have to stay active. we have to keep spreading awareness in the millennial's we have to get involved in the political process. >> lots of finger snapping. i want to thank you all for joining us. remember we have said rebid repeal the dickey amendment. you have heard about the tolls of mass incarceration and our drug drug war in the united states that specifically incentivize,

perversely incentivize police departments to do a policing that is undignified and puts them in very compromise positions. you have also seen by the video that bob shows, the complicity of other officers in very violent activity against civilians. i encourage you to join us tonight at the national press club or watch us on life. i want to conclude with the urging of cami ella williams. i think she provides a profound voice for these issues particularly from a millennial perspective. one week for now will be our national election. a time when a time when we will be electing a president for our country and a time where local officials will be elected. i urge you to hold them accountable. with your vote. i thank you for joining us today. [applause]

[inaudible] >> tonight on c-span two, look at teaching western civilization and higher education. from chicago ideas week, the future policing in america. later a congressional briefing on the legal and social effects of gun violence. >> if james madison is the architect of the constitution then george washington is the general contractor. if you ever build a house or put an addition on you know the result looks more like what the general contractor had a mind that what the architect has in mind.

author edward lawson talks about president george washington's role in unifying the country and ratifying the first federal document in his new book, george washington, nationalists. what they wanted to do was put washington and is but hamilton a talk to washington before about this democracy stuff is never to work. and washington was a true republican. republican. he believed in republican government. >> sunday on c-span's q&a. the farm on teaching about western civilization in higher education, scholars discussed why they think the subject of western history, literature henry are neglected in favor of multiculturalism. it includes the head of national institution of scholars in the institute of western civilization. this. this discussion was hosted by the family research council in washington speemac's post to have them as a co- broadcaster here. with that said i want to say that we are here to consider an important educational topic that

seems appropriate after the mudslinging and the endless political campaign that focuses on things that seem somewhat micro. this is very important in the larger level of water institutions are. my name is chris am the senior fellow for regulatory policy. this is an opportunity for us to step back and reflect on what we teach in school about western civilization and the civilization that produced this great country. and that lies at the dick core of our republican values that we care deeply about. i think united states, the creation of the united states is a world event of such magnitude

's hard to imagine the effects it has had full of positive good. i imagined the minority opinion but it is actually the truth. with few exceptions very little about our western civilization is taught at any level of schooling. whether it's primary secondary school or colleges and universities. that's a problem our panelists will discuss today. let me introduce the. there are each individuals who are dedicated to teaching about western civilization and all of the men have doctorates in their fields and are distinguished scholars at theollege level and at the university level as well. rather than go through the full bios i will say that they are online on our website, once all

of this is posted it should be under the recently vector section. the mcgowan briefly laid know that. our moderator is a good good friend of family research council. we did an event and doc was here in may of 2011. his name is richard the gentleman here closest to me. he studied government and international relations and he will be our moderator on the panel. he's presently at the american academy distance learning. he is is a passionate advocate for teaching western civilization and infiltrating these ideas and studts in the young. is taught taught at universities and colleges across america and as i said he's a very distinguished scholar.

next over is doct stephen was been the director of institute for the study of western civilization at texas tech since 2012. for 25 years was was the founding president chairman of the national association of scholars and it's a great organization dedicated to these traditional principles and liberal arts education. he has a long history history of doing this. this institute at texas tech is probably one of the rare places of its kind in the united states. finally we have a distinguishe scholar doctor peter an anthropologist who holds a tenured faculty position and he also served as the provost of boston university. in addition to scholarly work is published hundreds of articles and publications like national review and the partisan review.

all of them have a great contributions to the literature in their fields. [applause] i invited my lot collects to come today they're worried about whether it'seing taught in our college's about that. you see there's extraordinary ignorance about anything related to american government and history in the free market system and needless to say, the west. in context the gentleman here published a long study of whether or not or how western civilization is taught in our colleges today. it's online online and you can read it. it is a striking evidence of the

move away from the basics of american civilization and participation in the west and are premier colleges and universities. when i was an undergraduate many years ago i had to take two semesters, required courses in western civilization. i bought a big textbook a big textbook and it was quite burdensome. but i learned something about my civilization that i never would've known. i don't know where you're going to get this kind of information and knowledge. our seminar today has been preceded by a couple before us, us, st. francis college in brooklyn held a conference in 2012 on what is the west best. and then st. vincent college in 2013 there's another one but that's it. except for for us. so not only are the seminars on western civilization vanishing

but the discussion in our colleges and universities. the .. is where shape by culture, it's deep in old it goes back to particularly theact that at the center of our civilization is a religion, christianity that is been critical for the shaping of the west. there's only a few colleges and i made an effort to come up with a few colleges engaged in doing something about it, most of the usual suspects are on the list including texas tech, viola, wyoming catholic another's, this is a country of 3000 or more colleges switch there may be 2976 which there's

no course on history of western civilization. there is a book you can read that we like to think is the one good source of the history of the west and that is russell kirk's american order. russell kirk was a historian and author of a groundbreaking book called the conservative mind. in the later years he focused on western civilization. this one book we discovered is a really good one book, one treatment of the history of the west. so good is good is it that we created a course called russell's kirks america part one which replaced in cooperation with luke three.com. if you go to that you'll be able to access that course for free. it was developed by myself from colorado university and glenwood set northwood university and

each of us has taken a part of the history of the west that we know i took on greece and christianity, and glenn gives us introduction to the effect of the reformation on the west. so with that said i would like to again encourage you to read that and go to the course for free. like to introduce doctor -- for his remarks. >> i want to thank everybody here, i want to to thank the online university in the family council it's an honor to have an opportunity to say something about this most urgent educational process. often times when you speak in defense of western civilization the comeback is that you're being ethnocentric, you're not

being inclusive, you're not taking in the whole global scene in which all of humanity is present. i think that actually reflects profound misunderstanding about western civilization. and what it has become in the misunderstding is us, to the the extent that one can talk about there being a global civilization about there being something that embraces and wins together all of humankind, that something is western civilization which has gone global because it is so powerful because it has brought such constructive and liberating change to the human condition. western civilization is as close as anything could possibly be to global civilization.

there really are two names at this stage of the game for the same thing. of course western civilization roots are in a very particular part of the world. in europe and the mediterranean, and eventually in those places that were settled by europeans. if you you looked at western civilization circa 1700 through to something that was still relatively confined geographically. but if you you looked at western civilization today it is very close to being human civilization if you want to know about the human condition and the human predicament challenge western civilization is the place to go. i may add to that that western civilization has developed this worldwide reach, a global inclusiveness because it is different in many ways from the other traditional civilizations.

western civilization has unique qualities, qualities that depart from what the long-standing norm has been in the affairs of mankind. most of those departures, not not quite all but most of them are very -- brought great benefit to those who have been touched by them. but they are anomalous. what this means from the point of view of education is that we cannot we have a default setting for human beings. they involve things that have to be cherished. they've all things we have to know about and understand. they involve things that come down to good stewardship. if we don't educationally engage in that stewardship if we don't impart to students what is

special about western civilization and why certainly unbalanced it has been so greatly beneficial that in fact we are not doing our roller meeting our responsibilities as educators. said to say say by and large we are not. so we face the possibility that default position will return in a variety of ways and that would be a disaster if it happened. so what is unique about western civilization? initially it is as close as one can come to global civilization, virtually all of its leading aspects have been globalized. and what are its leading aspects? i would say first of all individualism, the notion that individual has a certain a certain dignity that the individual has rights and that individual enterprise individual innovation, individual thought

is ultimately what makes a civilization move and what makes creativityccur. you can find certain aspects of this in all cultures but it has come to be in the west self-conscious as an ideal in many parts of the west and certainly a defining, distinctive quality of so much of what is happened in the western world in the last 2500 years. republicanism, the notion republicanism, the notion that government is not the property the people who run but rather a public thing. something respoible for the general public good even before we had representative government that was a belief. again, that notion particularly when it is harnessed to the idea of representativgovernment is almost entirely distinctively western.

christianity is the religion of the west. in fact before the term western civilization or western world was used the term christian was used to describe the same thing. christianity, part from theology has a public character. a character that has allowed it to contribute to the flourishing of the various beneficial characteristics of the west. i hope we'll have a chance to talk about some of that as we go through what is distinctive about the west. rationalism. everybody knows reason and reason is something everybody possess. but thinking of reason as an intellectual tool to be disciplined and to produce systematic understandings of

things, that is a characteristic western trait. you can find examples of it elsewhere but it's becoming institutionalized. great universities in the scientific project, and thought theology as well. christianity has a rational theology in a way few other religions do. this is a western trait. first. first global civilization i have mentored and i think too and i hope we can focus a bit on various ways in which this is happened western civilization has transformed the human condition in such a manner it's more desirable to be an ordinary individual in the western world today that i most respects it would've been to be a royal and western civilization several hundred years ago and anywhere else in the world. there is more to be had from life even for an ordinary

person. then there would a bed in the freely people at the top. here we can see a few transformations western civilization is private side over. tremendous increase in life expectancy, largely due to modern medicine, to public sanitation to having predictable and abundant food supply. all of these things have markedly approved the prospects for living the four score and ten that was traditionally the allotted time span but really wasn't for most people. now now it is. if not more. these various lines of my graphs are not only western civilization but non-western parts of the world coming under like south korea, japan coming under the influence of the west. we are told are told that influence was terribly exploited

but look what it did. it went up everywhere. george the second in the middle of the 18th century, the first english king to reach the age of 70. that is remarkable. is remarkable. especially for me. i have exceeded him. poor man was only a king in the 18th century so he struggled, i think you reach 74 but no one earlier than that had done so. again might remark about ordinary people in kings. this led to a great increase in world population but an increase that has not made people poor. in the the past and population went up there is a squeeze and thomas talked about this in his great tone of the early part of the 19th century. . . . .

energy and more welfare in general. and here we see very quickly how per capita income has grown. he was the foremost person and you can see this increase particularly between 181900. so, in the old days people would have thought the kind of life we have today was entirely at least here on earth a matter of fact

and the famous painter pictured that kind of scene in which these folks just lie about how it comes across when food drops into the mouth you see over there they have a fork stuck in it and there are those just ready to put off the plate. you know how this happened. you go to some fast food place and it's all ready for you in a the supermarket. so again that would have been fantasy but now we have it. [laughter] this is all the connections in the world and you can see how the civilization has come. the institutions that came from the west and around the world capitalism or free-market economics there was a question as to whether that would have

been nothing and since the end of the cold war to be much everyone in principle has accepted that its markets are. they even offered in the breachh in those countries that don't have it it is an oligarchical autocracy and yet it does have at least on the surface. it is the congress law and everybody has to give lip service and many countries indeed. around the world they would be hard-pressed to think of many

other games. it comes out of the west and worldwide and it's the ideology some of which are suspect in the extreme forms and also western nationalism, libertarianism, environmentalism, all these things originated in the last are reflections of the core traits spread throughout the world. individualism, looking at these things more closely. here it is based on the survey search and compared levels of individualism. it's a western trait very few other cultures are monogamous

but the west has been and it creates not only a family of a very special and powerful kind, but it's also an aspect of the quality. one man has one woman and one woman has one man. you don't have polygamy for one very powerful man that was in the western way. iwestern way. it suggests the individualism and economic enough the west. this makes women more powerful not just today but also the famous marks now and in the pa past. china onl only had one on this t there have been plenty of women who have rained and today i googled. googled. googled. in republicanism we see ancient greece, ancient realm, the

publics in italy in the middle ages reborn in the high middle ages and then eventually develops in the kind of representative governing of the kingdoms and there you see various examples of that. also in adversarial notion in the courts no now that we have parks that. they can have legal representation. this is the individual rights and rule of law. it grew out of the dramatic fall in europe and florist in the anglo-american tradition again replete with many safeguards for individual freedom and many pre-

strains in the power of the constitutionalism. in most places and times they lived off taxation and of course that hasn't entirely disappeared and it's something we do have to worry about. but the great anomaly in the west is that the wealthiest people have gotten rich off producing the useful goods not taking stuff from others who. then it gathers th a head of stm in the 19th century.

we saw the concentration with respect to the individualism. we have to fight for freedom and constitutional liberty and often that was physical. to this very day we have to fight for it and hopefully it will take place in a constitutional and peaceful matter tough the representative systems. but the price of liberty as someone once said that was true from the very start this year we see the battle from 1302 between the flooding was. when they defeated a letter the battlefield and the weapon used by the hardy makers.

they are fighting to reflect them in an oppressive state. it's a distinctive brand of thought and problem solving and rational theology of the famous raphael paintings. there were philosophers in other parts of the world of som some e famous muslim philosophers

didn't take. it flourished for a while but then it died out and probably this is quite the muslim position is a in a fatalistic way his commands but in the tradition he opens the door for thinking about those walls for charging one's own course. there was muslims buying into and very great scientists. there was the consensus of

religion and science and philosophy subdued to the great work but there were many who. it's nothing by word, look at everything explore and experiment and we at the notion of progress. so again individualism and the higher status

of course it's the west that abolished it and we have a form of commercial slavery it's true not just westerners. imperialism is here at the ottoma empire so the west did that, too it's more alive here nois not to say anything against the indians who have a kind of enlightened government. compare the chart and how suspicious are you. united states, canada, france

doesn't do too terribly well. not sure why that is true. genocide as old as the hills. a few of the things that are not so great we have a utopian thinking and that's kind of a rationalism gone haywire. if i were to explain in general it is allowed forrdinary people to freely do their thing. they were in a whole variety of ways and they distributed the ability to use power through reason and individualism and

through the family that creates a greater sense of individuality and not one person over the multitude. there's all sorts of things in the west all having to do the distribution and power and individualism that make it work but it hasn't always worked even in the west use all those examples we have to be and teach out it. it's why t stewardship is so essential not only for the west for the future of all humankind. let me end right there. thank you very much.

>> thank you. i am invited to talk about the fate of the western civilization in the universities and thank you for giving me such a small compact topic to deal with. to know what makes us distinct and why it's great but here we are talking about the western civilization and in my view that is close to the price of entry you get the opportunity to talk about a certain combination of traditions in which we are all participating in the way that we are participating us to as these questions and ink them through. the western civilization has

true favorite stories about itself as one stor with one stoo a golden age when people are free and prosperous and happy and that they have the wise rulers and good law, material abundance, loving families and spiritual security. and then something awful happe happens. then invent patriarchy and the barbarians swept out of asia where germany or someplace exhaust from the internal combustion engine melted the ice caps and they all died. something happened that made everything worse. the identity of the culprit. the path of western civilization is downward.

the babylonians, egyptians, they go west. that's a story that we tell ourselves a lot. the other contrasting story while there were catastrophes along the way, western civilization on the whole is searched forward. free and prosperous and at least in the aggregate they are happier. it may not always be wise but they are constrained by the rule of law and we have such material abundance now th we can have the genetically modified foods or outlawing the production. who could everything that was achievable but the extremely prosperous worldould entertain such ideas. we have achieved new levels of happiness according to this by liberating ourselves to enjoy

sex outside marriage and to welcome in same-sex couples and we enjoy medical events and conquer diseases and added decades of health to the average lifespan. you may not think that those are all progress but some people do. along the way we have acquired such a illumination on the fundamental principles of justice that we stand ready to bring about the golden age that other stuff for lost. like the stories of decline committee disagre,they disagrees a lot. are we to celebrate the enlightenment or condemn it with secularism as a step forward or stumble. was it the dawn of the new age of self-fulfillment or the twilight accompanying the new age of self-centered as? regardless all of these are versions of the same story. the story of the western civilization unfinished as the greeks surpassed the egyptians,

and the romans out of the greeks so the western civilization will help usher in the new age of global civilization. to say there are two favorite stories it tells about itself is not to say that they were the only stories there were others but also we prefer the great melancholy of believing that we are the remnants of th once great civilization of the great hope for the best is yet to come to the not so great on you are just muddling through making the best of the opportunities and hoping not to fall into the ditch by the front of the road. my attempt gives me a somewhat different perspective from the historian. the most impressive contrast i can think of between the west and the rest is precisely that we have these competing narratives of who we are in the decline in progress. both of them expressed a deep

sense that we are in the midst of the momentous historical change. the west from early on gained a sense of itself as a possibility, the place where the order is never so fixed it cannot give way to something else. writing in the fifth century bc they tell of the meeting with an egyptian prieswas anegyptian prc questions about history and the priest responded by pointing to an enormous line of statues representing the pharaohs of the age upon each past. the basic soci order was fixed and forever recapitulated the passage of the past foretold the future exactly. notwithstanding, nothing important ever changed. and everything could change and that meant everything has a beginning and a possible and. he wrote his book from which we get the word history that caused

the great war between the persians and the greek's. that led him deeper and deeper into the mystery of what made the greek's, what we would now call the western civilization so different from their neighbors. he was even willing to ask questions like where do the gods come from but they did it. if we wonder what happened in the western civilization today the institution that we set aside to perpetuate our civilization isn't doing such a great job of that anymore. not so long ago, anybody graduating from college would have been at least a portion. not so long before the outcome of the great majority would have read in greek and said not so long ago i mean about 100 years less than e blink of an eye

they haven't vanished from the curriculum but the explorer allows us to check over a million college syllabi in one search that appears in 1,347 college syllabus today. the communist manifesto appears in about three times that many but so does plato's republic so all is not lost just greatly diminished. but we no longer live in a civilization where the educated men and women are generally familiar. the question naturally occurs does that matter. the fate of the civilization doesn't appear with an ancient book that ha has no claim to the divine inspiration. on the other hand, if president obama had read the history and paid a reasonable attention it's hard to imagine he would have entered into the nuclear deal in

july, 2015. they would have warned him the culture of the last regime that was built from the deep principled aggression and deception negotiating the difficult under the best of circumstances and to negotiate from th a position of confidence and goodwill is blind folly. president obama appears to be on the right side of history but very much on the right side of the history. he sought a message before attacking the persians and they said if they attacked a mighty empire would fall. he didn'quite understand but it was his own. it seems like harsh criticism of president obama if they criticize this a bit. we couldn't blame anyone for learning what hasn't been taught by the time that barack obama enrolled in college as a freshman in 1979, the teacng

of the western civilization was already receiving from the american undergraduate curriculum, the national association of scholars a few years ago traced the recession from 1964 to 2010. in 1964, the truth semester required of the western civilization with a nearly universal requirement and american colleges have aspired to be something more than trade schools. by 1989, more than half the colleges they studied had eliminated altogether and the other half watered it down to a minor option. by 2010, we could find only one elite college in the country william and mary that required the western civilization and william and mary required only for history majors. as soon as the report came out, they abolished the requirement. there was one jor public university, the university of soutcarolina that still require years of all students.

now our study did not conclude some outlier institution such as hillsdale and moreover there are outliers to the outliers mentioned that have chosen to pursue that refers to a radical retreat from the mainstream. as it was put a few years ago, the collapse and staggering walls of trade from everyday know-how and he gathered people for a maintained both order and learning it at the benedict option was used for christians and catholics and evangelicals who want to retreat from modern life and do what they can to preserve the christian community from the new barbarism. there is a small collection o colleges that serve these out from the mainstream so there is a way in which western civilization continues as an important part of higher education in the subset of

institutions. now, western civilization may be so far gone that the benedict options are the best hope. but i'm not ready to rush to that conclusion. it came with the election of donald trump and the victories of republicans in th the house, senate and state legislatus and gubernatorial races so if there ever were a moment where the unbridled dominance of the campus left it might be bridled after all that this is the champion of the civilization that has risks. he does not in his character in the highest virtues. his thoughts were on unpredictable aspirations only intermittently. he came from the world of

entertainment that many of us would judge in the claims and that's what i voted for him and i hope for the best. i contrasted the views of higher education with hillary clinton as a matter of his confronting higher education in the establishment of it anyway while she flattered and reassured that establishment would have solidified the institutions and their disdain for western civilization, the sense of entitlement into the credentials of some. he confronts and undermines each of these partly as a matter of his robust contempt for the manners at the academy wound up in the scriptures on political correctness. the trademark unpredictability runs counter to higher education relentless campaign for ever more speech codes, diverse crowds, sensitivity and implicit

bias. so far, so good. how this will translate into any kind of public policy, we don't yet know so i will let that go. western civilization in any case doesn't stand or fall with a particular policy but does depend in some mysterious way on whether we see it as mostly good or mostly bad. changing the tone of higher education towards civil organization is a tone. at the moment our colleges and universities are saturated with an attitude that western civilization is mostly bad and we are eager to teach students to recognize this and foster to escape its wheels by becoming as it is often put global citizens or citizens of the world. now what if anything the president opresident is trying o settle this attitude i would say what he should do is deflate the ego of higher education that

thrives on the conceit of the professoriate believes it is better thaknowsbetter than anyb. wow, i view that as a midget casting a shadow in imagining it as a gnt. many graduate graduates apply he same disdain for their country and culture and they may be well-equipped to the social justice warriors and they have the full complement behind them in specialized courses that reflect the trendy ideological themes in the interest of the professors. i generalize perhaps recklessly but i think these generalizations are in the main truth colleges and universities have dispatched the core curriculum and they did that around 1968 and now having spent several decades in the wilderness, they are essentially intellectually coherent programs anin heavyand have a superficial scaffolding of requirements which the civilization course can fit in but rarely is and we

have a sense of students wandering through their education as though they were wandering it through a shopping mall picking up the equivalent of the neiman marcus sweater and emerging after four years ill dressed and with a bad diet. [laughter] wasting western civilization on them probably won't wo. they are not accustomed to that level of difficulty. let me refer back to my role as an anthropologist. the best way we can talk about the western civilization is talking about what is not western civilization. now, at the beginning of the second chapter of the 1934 book, the anthropologist ruth benedict patterns the culture she wrote. she tells an anecdote about the

chief of the serrano indians of the san bernardino mountains in california. ramon, the chief of the band disbanded tribe was filled with nostalgia for the great old days, the power of his people once had he lovingly described an addict the foods they gathered from the desert and before their eyes would turn to bears and then one day without transition he breaks and says in the beginning god gave to every people a cup and clay and from this they drink their life. in his mind, the figure of speech was full of meaning. they all dipped in the water, he continued, but their cups were different. now the poignancy of this image is undeniable and it's only deepened if you happen to know as he didn't that they

customarily took it and broke it and left fragments there. so for this image of cultural death, he probably never could have hit upon that image if the serrano were stil was still alid thriving as a cultural group. he gained the wisdom to see his people in the distinct cultural entity precisely because they were no longer there. it's when the cop was broken thacup was brokenthat it becameo then something has been lost. so the question is are we the serrano. let's hope not. i base my help on two things. first, unlike the serrano that had no perception of themselves in the larger world, western civilization is and has been from the beginning profoundly multicultural.

it is but into it a multiculturalism that leads the race class obsessed multiculturalism today as children playing with toys & blocks. when we speak of the civilization we are speaking first of the athens and jerusalem, philosophy and faith, reason. of these traditions and just mingle with one another, they refused the hard efforts of people. since we invoked this earlier let me invoke them again. the major theme is how they differed from their neighbors. they were so enclosed in the civilization that worshiped itself and saw a no need to welcome the foreign ideas. they were too eager but they did so indiscriminately. he offers assessments of dozens of other people in circles thats that they knew at the time and

he finds the unique strength of the selective openness to the outside world. they were curious, inventive, willing to barcode to incorporate the learning of other people that they were present in fifth century bc and perhaps long before that the world of homer for example brings us into contact with a kind of cosmopolitanism based on the traitor and the mediterranean cities, states and complex alliances with an appreciation for the arts. the first olympic games in the historicalecord from 776, they were multicultural and essentially secular. i prepared to say more than i have time for. sthis would be turned back to te stories about the decline.

western civilizations two stories are decline and progress. at the golden age gone or one of rebirth in the senate. the popular literature, the mass entertainment, the dominant ideologies of these days belong almost exclusively among the stories of decline where the stories of this utopia, the legions of the writers busy imagining all the ways we could destroy ourselves or be destroyed by others and it crawls with aliens that have nothing better to do than cost billions of miles to annoy us. every few years we learn of a new catastrophe. too many killer bees, too few bees, some frogs die off the north american best. asteroids have made it overrides us and wipe out modern communications, the list goes on and on but the great fear that rivets the attention of college students today is global warming

or climate change. president elect trump immunity to the fear struck some in the press as spelling out the absolute doom of the planet. the pages of "the new york times" for the past two weeks have read like an extended obituary page for humanity. they sincerely believe what they say and i know full well that many of college students were questioning the adherence and i bring it up at the instance how they decline still with us as a terminal indictment of the civilization. why is it in the industrial revolution we are bringing this on ourselves into paying the price of dissent therprice of dy out of it now. if we ask why the efforts to restore are stymied on campus, global warming fanaticism is a significant part of the answer. why study the west when the world is ending and why study

when it's the plane wreck happened from the fossil fuel industry it is doing us all. if we are to study the western civilization the key question however how and why we progress when the rest of the world did and how do we progress from the stone age hunters and gatherers that once wondered to the agricultural tribes and then the urban civilizations and how do o we develop the impersonal law and escape the channels it may be possible to conceptualize the developments as something other than progress it's awfully hard to do. bill mckibben now calls for the radical population in the production of accompanied to te return from the farming. i've met college graduates who take this seriously and are trying to live off their own produce but any serious attpt

to think that the history of the west requires us to wrestle with progress and i suspect even the most loyal followers have mckibben referred back to the 18th century version and progress is not an abstraction it is a condition of our lives. if we are going to tell that story we have to make the rules for all those follies that came with it. they gave us the mechanized warfare and slaughter on the unparalleled scale and we have the broad diseases to much of the world and we cannot still be stories without also telling the story of king leopold of the lasting infamy. if we are to reclaim the western civilization to anticipate these sorts of challenges, i think that we need to recognize we are

fighting against the intellectual dispositions that have been submitted into place by students from a young age. one of the pos best popular nown our high schools is the history of america. it is a book that is essentially anti-western. students grow up with this in the predisposition to read western history as a story of exploitation and destruction. the prejudices lie deep into the race class and gender of most of history and crowds out almost anything we might want to say about political history. after wrapped up. okay. i'm going to suggest one simple way. let's celebrate thanksgiving and i mean that seriously. the american thanksgiving story is now often times presented and it gets twisted in a lot of ways

but when george washington gave us the first it was to thank god. now in reforming the higher education let me speak at the end of. we now know we can deal with that disdain. in the history in progress, the

christian worldview that enters into the civilization is that history does have a destination, restoration and the divine order to. do you have a few words that you would like to say? >> i just want to thank all of you for coming here. we are about to wrap it up. i have been told we would have a question and answer session here. a new thing that we are doing is we have a facebook page where folks can watch some of that. with that i think that we will convolute. i want to think of three of you for these interesting

presentations people will watch over and over again because there's a lot of material to think about and i want to thank all of you for traveling here and tting us partake in your knowledge and years of experience i think it was a benefit to all of us. with that, -- [applause] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] i think it's important for the universities to understand is that the speed [inaudible] spec i present the view.

[laughter] the tradition in the anglo-american history as a small government tradition. it's a government that's very suspicious of concentrated power and political authority. obviously, hamilton had a strong view of it and jefferson did but compared to virtually everyone today, they both felt that the government had to be controlled. there is a lot of thought but also a long tradition of courage in standing up for that. i recently came across a story and i hope i have a fe they havw moments to relate this to you. in 1670 in england, william penn

was tried for preaching publicly without a license. he was arrested and brought before a ferociously biased court that wanted to convict him and a colleague arrested at the same time. after a ki of kangaroo trial, the jury was sent out to deliberate and came back and acquitted his friend but not of the serious charge and the tumultuous assembly. the judge was tremendously furious at this instant the jury back to liberate over night without food, water or the chamber. they came back the next morning with the same verdict in this time he swore at them and he looked at him and told him he was going to cut his throat.

so the jury was sent up for a second night without food, water or chamber and when they returned on the third day, they equip it both. nonetheless he wasn't released he was sent back to prison for contempt into the jury was locked up and was told they wouldn't be free until they paid a humongous fine. so they paid but he refused to and he sought the habeas corpus from a higher court and heitou le tt iwe remre inistoryhe case lea ry cannot be coerced into each n make an indendent decision. now looking around today is how a lot of public officials behave when they are afraid someone

might do something to them, people that are much more responsible, and looking at the courage that they s ts showwh is need ultimately to protect the hamiltonian at jeffersonian and they were prepared to fight the revolution and showed courage. what i most worry about in the future is not so much the loss of your knowledge that the loss of our coverage. we need that ability to speak truth to power and stand up when it's required and i worry greatly about that. i have a quick question. this is a question we're interested in at the state level for example. do the state legislatures that are now dominated by the more

conservative elements of government across the country as we have seen, could they tell public universities to have western civilization courses or would that work meanin word meae are creatures of -- >> back they were successful in the heart of the education act. it's underfunded as other programs are what w about we goe stature and language and i sometimes think the government could redress the balance and in this case the legislation to allow the funding expressly for programs having to do with the three institutions when hoping now -- [inaudible] >> i'm a little less optimistic.

why are they there, to be lobbied and brought to enjoy the game. most of these state legislators are in hock to the football teams at the public universities in the state and they are not willing to bring them upon themselves. this ca >> it is well understood if everybody that the left has a stranglehold on the education in the country and has for decades. how can that be solved it sounds like a huge problem. it's more than that. we know where they stand. how could that be reversed, that is the problem i think. >> first of all, patience is required because we have a system and a career is devoted to this and it has assured that

people who are now finishing phd's in history, some 85% of them have the race class and gender. they are not going to be teaching western civilization or they will do as we have been working on a project in colorado and wyoming where the state of wyoming requires every stunt in the public university to take a course in civics and the university lives up to that and offers a course that its path by people that openly deride the requirement. any time you use public universities to mandate teaching american history, physics, western vilization, it will be subverted by the current faculty. so the answer to this is surely that we need to create an alternative path to the profession of teaching both in public schools and in our

universities, whereby we can find people that know the subject and can teach it reasonably well. i was provost of the kings college and i did that by scouring the world outside of the united states for scholars to knew the subjects and if they are out there they can be found, that we are talking about a kind of deep structural reform in higher education that will take at least a generation or probably longer. >> piggybacking on that question i know there are a lot of schools starting with classical education and this is for middle school and secondary school. and also in colleges, there are obviously colleges that do focus on the classical curriculum but those are very few and far between. could you talk about is it effective to teach children that

young and then when they get to college it is sort of an environment that is liberal and against it, can they stand against it or does it help to start that early? >> i think it does. wherever you can reach the young people at any age to teach them about history to the west is a good thing. people in second grade can learn about the trojan war and have some idea about what's fair. does this stick with every student through the years of college when they will be subjected to the relentless prejudice against the west and against the united states, for some it sticks and for some it doesn't. the number of colleges that actually have some fairly well conceived program that is friendly to the west is not negligible. some of them are small religious

colleges and others are larger religious colleges. the orinoco, northeast catholic college, there are enough of these things ar things around ba student graduates from a classical academy and is willing to settle for something of a standee ivy league or the top-rated 100 or so liberal arts colleges, there are places to go and get an education that is not antagonistic to our basic traditions. >> in regards to the declining number of classes at the university's and also the changes in content i know you mentioned then in the united states is there a risk that even if we do start having the western civilization classes but they are based on things like

that, could that become more a problem or is it more important to make sure we have the closest part of the content matter? >> i don't think that there is much to be said for trying to teach american history through the lens. [laughter] but it's possible there will be some like you who get a sense of propaganda and turn it into another direction. many will just take it at face value. i would say to teach western civilization and related subjects well, we need good textbooks. there are problems i didn't get to because of the brevity of time that we have a shift in public education during the years of common core where

history itself was denoted and in addition to that, the creators have a lot to become a president of the college board with the promise that he would align the tests. so what we have now is a u.s. history exam which for those of you that don't know it's one of the most popular tests in the country about half a million students a year takes a history course and resulting exam for the grt majority of them that's the last time they will ever systematically study american history. so it's the kind of stuff that we are talking about a two

bardot a word we are not supposed to use anymore but it is. it prices race questioned her in its original version as he raced from history. there is no mention of the 120 page outline in the figures. and chief little turtle is fair and $10 if you can tell me who chief little turtle is. thisransformation of american higher education in the direction of deploring america for its basic sexism, racism, colonialism and salon is now so infused with k-12 education that by the time the students reach college, they are taken for granted america is a terrible, terrible place in our task is to find a path to become a citizen

of the world and objecting ourselves to whatever they say. >> all of this spark a memory with me when i was a graduate student i was there for a degree and the parade of western culture has to go and of course the faculty capitulated but i knew know a couple great faculty members who were quite mournful of that was the huge event in this whole process. >> stanford students last year formed a group to bring weern civilization back to the curriculum. we helped with that, but they lost a. maybe there's hope even for stanford. any other questions? i don't think you can look at the situation as static.

one of the things we have to fight against his despair and lost hope. it's the changing way that education can be delivered. the technologies such as c-span, the internet enable us and the area i work to offer two years of college for under a thousand dollars. the other thing to stop us from making that gulation i and the department of education and the standards these are the people that are driving the cost of the education to levels most americans cannot afford. how long will that g this go ont very long in fact i have a book coming out next month called becoming death of the higher education. i think it will be overturned by the education consumers that are concerned not only in the contenof thecontent being taugho the high cost. why would you subject yourself or your children to this type of

abuse? >> it is pretty chunky stuff why pay 40,000 a year to go into massive debt for something if you have any kind of common sense. a lot of people were going around this process and it may be a way to do this. >> the extent to which market forces are allowed to play in all levels the better off we will be in the product delivered. one of the things that we said was true and we talk about in 2011 you just can't continue this structure and one of the things we talk about is the redistribution of wealth from younger people to these academics glasshouses that have one or two classes. it's an enormous amount of money and if you think about how it is locked into the competitive

forces it really is we don't think of it this way but it's a so of monopoly chokehold in the gross economic sense. if you come in with an online course going for a thousand or $2,000 a semester as opposed to 20 or 30,000 this may be a vehicle for great change. there we go. >> quick question about the phrase looking into someone else's playbook, so in the sense that russia and china were not included in that illustration of the world map at shows as being part of the western civil society, wouldn't it make sense to look to our playbook and see how we do things and would they be just as likely to teach a course or allow people to be educated on western civilization to gain a better understanding of how americans operate as they going to do more adversarial

relationship with us a long the demilitarized zone that is becoming more militarized. .. it was originally harry lee and was mentioned and described somebody as the greatest englishman east of suez befo