Stanford's new freshman curriculum illustrates exactly what's wrong with college

A mandatory course intended to introduce students to liberal education replaces the Western intellectual tradition with critiques of identity, power, and oppression

Hoover Tower, Stanford University

I’ve been writing about the rot in higher education for a while now. In Half of Social Science Falls Apart Under Scrutiny, I covered how a massive seven-year DARPA-funded study found only half of social science papers hold up when tested, a consequence of the ideological monoculture I documented in Academia Is Exactly as Biased as You Think. In We Stopped Teaching the Story of Prosperity, I argued universities have quietly abandoned the intellectual tradition that built the modern world. And in The End of America’s Marxist Era, I traced how postmodern Marxist ideology, dressed up in corporate-approved buzzwords, embedded itself in American institutions. We’ve debated and discussed these previous topics, but taken together there’s a clear story our universities are ideologically captured. And if you still want to debate it’s not a big deal, at the very least you can acknowledge universities have failed to provide a bulwark in the broader culture against things we’re seeing play out now.

In our latest piece of evidence, Stanford goes and votes, nearly unanimously, to expand a mandatory freshman curriculum that perfectly illustrates everything I’ve been describing. Today I want to go into that briefly and hope people will read with an open mind, because I think it’s important we get everyone on the same page with this problem so it can be clarified and discussed.

A courageous Stanford accounting professor, Iván Marinovic, brought actual diversity of thought to his school by voting no to a new curriculum and wrote about it in the Stanford Daily. His piece is worth reading in full, but we’ll go through just a bit of it. The mandatory course Why College? is meant to introduce students to liberal education and the good life. It assigns roughly 45 pages of canonical Western philosophical writing across an entire quarter, against more than 500 pages of contemporary work organized around identity, oppression, and “indigenous ways of knowing.” That’s an 11-to-1 ratio of, I would argue, ideas meant to undermine Western values and ideas that you and I would find honorable.

And it’s not like the canonical 45 pages are a greatest hits collection. Students get 8 pages of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a short Epicurus and Seneca selection, and a single Nietzsche aphorism. As Marinovic puts it: “There is no Aristotle, no Augustine, no Aquinas, no Montaigne, no Locke, no Mill, no Newman, no Steiner, no Bloom, none of the writers who built the case for liberal education that the course claims to defend. A course advertised as a defense of liberal education has been built without the thinkers who defined it.”

It truly is incredible that Stanford is charging students and their families a staggering amount of money for a mandatory introduction to the life of the mind, and the architects of that very tradition are essentially absent from it. What fills the space instead? Students are introduced to two flavors of determinism: biological (Sapolsky argues free will is an illusion) and social (Lowery argues the self is a social construction) and to a sustained critique of Western education as an instrument of power and oppression. That’s the philosophical orientation Stanford has chosen to hand to 18-year-olds in their first weeks on campus.

The epistemology section is quite revealing. Week 7 of the course assigns 50 pages arguing that Western scientific epistemology should be supplemented or corrected by “indigenous ways of knowing,” at the university responsible for a quarter of all Nobel Prizes in physics awarded to American institutions in the last half century. The students arriving at this university, many of them on their way to becoming the scientists who will extend the tradition being questioned, are introduced to that tradition primarily through its critics. This is a university that has been ideologically captured.

This is simply not a normal liberal education, it’s something else entirely. And I don’t even think it’s subtle. It’s written into the syllabus, ratified by a faculty vote that was nearly unanimous, and dressed in the language of liberal education while gutting its actual content. The replication crisis I wrote about earlier is deeper than a methodology problem, it flows from exactly this kind of intellectual capture, where a discipline becomes so ideologically uniform that weak ideas never face real challenge. What Stanford is now doing is taking a postmodern leftist monoculture and hard-coding it into mandatory freshman year curriculum before students have even had a chance to encounter the tradition being replaced.

Students deserve better. They deserve Aristotle on virtue before Freire on oppression. They deserve actual arguments for freedom before arguments against it. They deserve a university that trusts them with the real intellectual tradition, not a curated critique of it designed to turn students against the culture that built their society. KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov warned us about all this, and we continue to ignore that warning. It’s hard to see how any rational person doesn’t see our culture is being subverted by our enemies, and even if that wasn’t happening, reality is indistinguishable from what they would do.

The faculty voted and we know where they stand. I personally wouldn’t want my kids attending a school like this, would you?

And how has all this been carrying over into the world? It’s not good:

And if you don’t like the CATO institute, there’s similar data from GALLOP and others we’ve shared before, it’s hard to call this fringe any longer.

You can see the “long march through the institutions” (a slogan coined by the German socialist student activist Rudi Dutschke to describe the strategy to create radical change) has trended actual, factual communism (not Nordic-style capitalism) higher across demographics. And yes, social media and economic conditions play a role too, but I don’t think you can just ignore the bias in our education system which heavily favors this ideology, and should really serve as a vaccination against this.