BENSON BYTE: Peter Berkowitz - "Universities Have Lost The True Sight Of A Liberal Education."

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Now it's time for another Guy Benson Show, Benson Bite, where we bring you the day's most interesting interviews in a bite-sized package. For the full episode, visit guybensonshow.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Guy Benson (0:17)

Well, joining us now, since we are spending the week at the Hoover Institution here in Palo Alto, is Peter Berkowitz, who is a Senior Fellow here at the Hoover Institution and also a Professor at the University of Virginia. He's a columnist at RealClearPolitics. He served in the State Department under the first Trump administration.

And Peter, it's good to have you here. Welcome.

Peter Berkowitz (0:39)

It's good to be with you. Thanks.

Guy Benson (0:41)

So I want to start, since I'm on this beautiful college campus, Stanford University, here for the week. I want to talk about a column that you wrote, entitled, Higher Education Must Overcome Comforting Delusions. And I think a lot of people, maybe not even just conservatives, but especially conservatives, recognize that there is something deeply wrong and broken in American academia. There is very much this indoctrination factory mentality. We see it in faculty hiring. We see it in almost everything, syllabi, course selections, etc.

And it really does feel like a lot of the deck is stacked against liberty or even pro-American ideas. And it seems like part of figuring out what to do about that, in your estimation, requires stripping down. You call them comforting delusions. Tell us about this.

Peter Berkowitz (1:38)

Yes.

One of the comforting delusions is that we're dealing with some sort of relatively new problem, or we're dealing with issues that only arise on the periphery of higher education. But it was 30 years ago that Alan Sokol committed his hoax. He published in a journal called Social Text, an essay that was called Transgressing the Boundaries, Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Now, if that sounds like nonsense to you, that's because it is.

He revealed his hoax. He was actually a professor of physics a month later in another magazine called Lingua Franca, saying that his essay was full of jargon, nonsense terms and equations that made no sense. His purpose was to expose the impoverishment of the humanities in our universities. So, the first important lesson, the first comforting illusion is we've got a superficial problem here. Now, we've got a problem that runs deep. We've had decades of miseducation. So much so that I worry that many of the people who teach at universities, and for that matter run universities, have lost sight of the true meaning of a liberal education.

Guy Benson (3:02)

Okay. So that's one of the big ones. What's maybe one more that you think is a pernicious and needs to be uprooted?

Peter Berkowitz (3:10)

Well, here's another that it's related, of course.

The curriculum as it stands is just fine because it respects individuals and individual choice by letting them more or less put together whatever set of 32 courses over four years suits them with some requirements for their majors. But my own view is that there's some substantive knowledge all students should acquire if they're going to be liberally educated. And here, of course, I'm using liberal in the old fashion term, the old fashion sense, meaning the kind of education you need in order to exercise your rights and discharge your responsibilities of citizenship in the American Republic. So I think all students ought to be required to study the basics of American political ideas in institutions, the basic ideas in seminal events of Western civilization, and all students should be required to seriously study some other civilization. That would require a massive reconfiguring of the curriculum. And for that matter, it would require bringing in new faculty who are capable of teaching such courses.

Guy Benson (4:26)

Yeah. And so you're talking about Western civilization there. I think inevitably to Columbia University, just to pick on one obvious example, and some of these associated groups and sort of hangers on these left-wing, like, you know, pro-Hamas organizations, anti-American organizations, and they organize. One of them was very prominent post-October 7th. One of their big leaders and spokespeople was this guy, Mahmoud Khalil, who is apparently still in our country. The administration is trying to kick him out. He's not a citizen. That group that he fronted refers to itself as seeking the destruction of Western civilization. It's written down. That is the goal. That is within. That's burrowed within our country, and it's sort of proliferating, especially in these radicalized groups on campus.

October 7th and the aftermath, obviously, we saw a lot of this explode.

For many, many people, they have just bought into it. It's like the air they breathe is just this anti-Israel sentiment and all the language around genocide, which is a lie. And you can say, well, whatever you think of Israel, that's not really our fight. It's not necessarily relevant to America. So that's a secondary issue. I disagree because I think they are using Israel as the entry point for this wider war against the West. And they're seducing a bunch of people with these talking points. And you have not just young American students, sort of like zombies, lurching along with this genocide nonsense against Israel. When you dig a little deeper, there's no desire, it seems, among many of them, to stand up for this country either. And a lot of them are being told that we're actively bad and some of the real rotten villains of world history. I mean, these, I don't know how to start to reform this because it feels like a deeply ingrained problem that our enemies have to be delighted by.