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Robert P. George
American Enterprise
Excerpt: A disturbing trend I have observed over the course of my academic career is the general decline in classical education. The slow demise of classical learning—particularly in core liberal arts fields—has hit our universities hard, damaging an entire generation’s understanding and embrace of civic thought and classical wisdom.
Even our nation’s so-called “elite” institutions—such as Princeton University, my own academic home—have moved away from classical education. Most strikingly, Princeton’s Classics Department eliminated bedrock Latin and Greek language requirements for students majoring in classics as part of an effort to become more interdisciplinary and “inclusive.” At the same time, signs of hope are emerging—especially in the past few years.
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Faith in higher education continues to plummet, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)—the nation’s leading organization representing faculty interests and a longstanding voice on academic freedom and university governance—has decided to train its guns on the growing movement to establish civic education centers at public universities. The AAUP’s objections amount to a single, unlovely demand: we get to decide what students learn, and nobody else gets a vote.
Six days after the report went online, the AAA fired back with a full-throated defense. “Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline,” wrote its president, Carolyn M. Rouse. “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.
Since faculty voted in may to proctor in-person exams, national news outlets and some alumni have decried the end of Princeton’s 133-year-old tradition of unsupervised testing, but students, faculty, and recent graduates say the conversation within the campus community has been mild.
