The Dumbing Down Of America - The Fall Of Yale And The Decline Of Intellectual Honor

Yale was once a proud institution of higher learning, and as importantly a standard of aristocratic values - an unshakeable faith, noblesse oblige, manners, a certain simple but elegant sophistication, and an living archive of America's history. 

 

Yale was a place of certainty - from there young men from the best families would go on to finance and industry armed with the same Christian rectitude and belief in the fundamental rights and obligations of the Constitution with which they matriculated - more so, for along with Blake, Kant, and Planck, Yale provided a moral education. 

There has always been a universal code of moral and ethical behavior at the foundation of every successful civilization.  Honor, justice, courage, respect, discipline, and compassion, principles taught by Cato the Elder as part of his education of young Roman leaders are no different from those of Ancient Greece, Persia, or Great Britain. 

Cato taught the future leaders of the Empire in a series of courses on governance.  Not only were there lessons on management, organization, economics, and military strategy, but on morals and ethics - duty, honor, responsibility, courage, and compassion.  Leadership was a multivariate, complex concept, and those who did not honor its basic principles would fall. 

Seneca, Epictetus, Plutarch, and Cato were Roman moralists who provided the intellectual and philosophical foundations for the education of the future leaders of the Empire.  All of them stressed respect, honor, discipline, empathy, intellect, and reason.  The young Roman aristocrats may have been born with wealth, breeding, and culture; but without the foundation of a moral education, they would weaken, and both they and the empire would suffer.

The self-confidence needed to be a Roman leader, these philosophers knew, came from a certainty about moral principles.  Right action would be rewarded and respected. Self-confidence, one learns from the Romans, comes from this singularity of purpose and absolute commitment to moral achievement.  The diptychs of Cato are illustrative:

Practice your art. As diligence fosters talent, so work aids experience

If you can, even remember to help people you don't know.
More precious than a kingdom it is to gain friends by kindness

Do not disdain the powers of a small body;
He may be strong in counsel (though) nature denies him strength.

If you live rightly, do not worry about the words of bad people,
It is not our call as to what each person says.

America's Founding Fathers incorporated such values into the Bill of Rights.  Jefferson was clear about his sense of moral integrity.  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were values realized only within the context of community.  Individualism itself was derived from the moral and religious principles of the Enlightenment.  It was man's duty to explore, nurture, and preserve his immortal soul and through reason and rationality to better know God - and individualism meant only that, never an amoral quest for personal satisfaction. 

 

Yale continued in this tradition until the 1960s, a decade of revolutionary change in values, principles, and morality.  The foundational principles of the new nation considered by Jefferson to be absolute, innate, and irrefutable - belief in God and country and the individualistic spirit which encouraged both - were unchallenged in 1787 when the Constitution was signed and ratified, and this core ethos remained central and respected for almost two centuries. 

Whether demographics, historic post-war prosperity, or Dr. Spock, the Sixties was a time of radical shifts in attitude.  Gone were assumptions of a universal ethos. 'Love the one you're with', an all-encompassing social and moral laissez-faire replaced the more demanding ethos of the Enlightenment and Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Hamilton.  

Out of such an individualistic ethos came, ironically, the lionization of selected groups.  Black people, the poor, gays, and women could not enjoy the privilege of free social movement and expression, and the social fabric would never be completely knit without their full integration.  Inclusion, however, replaced ethos. It no longer mattered whether or not you subscribed to God, patriotism, or the higher values of the Enlightenment and Cato the Elder. As long as you were free to 'do your own thing', nothing else mattered. 

As part of this new social dynamic all institutions were suspect because they were spiritually incarcerating, intellectually vacant gulags. Only individuals mattered and they would regroup, reconfigure and reconstitute a new, more inclusive, loving society. 

The erosion of these Roman, Enlightenment, and Founding Father principles accelerated in the decades to follow, and has hit its nadir today.  American society is a moral free-for-all, but a gulag of political enforcement and denial of individual expression. The identity politics of race, gender, and ethnicity is the result of such centrifugal thinking.  There is no center to America today, only a collection of races, ethnicities, and genders.  They only live here, pay nominal dues to belong, and are encouraged not to think about polity or the commonwealth, but only their own struggles for recognition. 

And so it is that Yale, once one of the country's premier institutions, embodying the principles of intellectual pursuit, responsible leadership, a respect for history, and a sanguine but still realistic approach to progress and prosperity, is unrecognizable.  Affirmative action and the fretful concerns about the dispossessed turned the tables on excellence. Intellectual diversity - the unique talents of artists, musicians, physicists, and mathematicians - was replaced by an errant sense of social justice.  

Affirmative action -  letting a person of color into Yale, regardless of his abilities - was tantamount to historical ignorance and worse, Utopian idealism.  'Proximity means change' replaced 'Lux et Veritas' as Yale's adage. If a student body is diverse by color, sex, and ethnic origin, then respect, tolerance, and admiration will automatically occur. 

Wrong and wrong again.  The Yale campus has become a microcosm of society at large - identity groups vying for recognition, support, and primacy, running on fumes, insubstantial, and marked only by sexual preference, color, or national origin. 

Such a culture of identity can only mean protest - whining, whingeing, and yelling for 'our rights' - and that contentiousness can only mean a further dismissal of rational thought, once the sine qua non of a liberal education. 

'This is not your grandfather's Yale', says the new wave of publicity for the university, a debunking of the George H.W. Bush days of Fence Club, the Vineyard, Nantucket, and Wall Street; but what Yale has lost in this decommissioning of its historic legacy, is relevance. It is now no better than any other college or university, any cow town vocational school, any two-year holding pen, any 'we take all comers' money mills.  

 

Yale and the other Ivy League colleges will never recover from this sorry descent into chaotic populism. They are ashamed of their history rather than be proud of it and revere and respect its traditions, and we are ashamed of them.