How Higher Education Turned Against America

How did America’s colleges and universities move from teaching the foundations of Western civilization to promoting ideologies increasingly hostile toward the nation’s history, principles, and institutions?

In this episode of Roots, Rights & Reason, Lee Smith speaks with Peter Berkowitz, the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, about the rise of campus antisemitism following the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks and its connection to a broader rejection of Israel, America, and the West.

Berkowitz traces the decades-long decline of liberal education, explaining how universities shifted from helping students examine competing ideas to encouraging political activism and ideological conformity. He also discusses his forthcoming book, Reclaiming Liberal Education in America, and outlines how educators can restore intellectual inquiry, constitutional principles, and the study of America’s founding.

The conversation concludes with a call for Americans to rediscover The Federalist Papers and the extraordinary experiment in ordered liberty entrusted to each generation.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

From the brave roots of our founding, to the unstoppable force of American ingenuity, to the sacred inheritance of freedom we must protect. This is our legacy. Join investigative journalist Lee Smith on Roots, Rights, and Reason. Powered by America's future.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Hi, I'm Lee Smith. Welcome and thanks for joining us for this new episode of Roots, Rights, and Reason. This week we're discussing one of the cornerstones of our republic, liberal education, and the evidence our colleges and universities are failing from coast to coast. Campus Antisemitism. Since the October 7th, 2023 Hamas massacre in Israel, Americans have watched with disbelief as anti-Semitic demonstrations, encampments, and acts of intimidation spread across college campuses from coast to coast. The Anti-Defamation League documented approximately twelve hundred anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses in the year following October 7th, including harassment, vandalism, assaults, and intimidation. In 2025, Combat Antisemitism Movement's Antisemitism Research Center recorded 531 anti-Semitic incidents on American college and university campuses alone. More than one quarter of all anti-Semitic incidents documented nationwide that year. These numbers are disturbing in themselves, and they point to a deeper crisis. Campus antisemitism is not simply a failure of university discipline or campus security. It is evidence of the failure of liberal education itself. The purpose of a university has never been merely to prepare students for successful careers. A liberal education is meant to cultivate citizens capable of reason, historical understanding, moral judgment, and civil disagreement. Students should graduate able to distinguish evidence from propaganda, argument from intimidation, and political disagreement from hatred toward an entire people. And yet, since October 7th, students at some of America's most prestigious institutions have celebrated or excused the murder of civilians, embraced slogans calling for the destruction of the world's only Jewish state, and in too many cases harassed Jewish classmates because of their identity or presumed political beliefs. That is not the product of sophisticated politics. It's the abandonment of critical thinking. It's antisemitism. A genuine liberal education depends on robust debate and freedom of expression, but too many institutions have failed to cultivate the intellectual virtues that make such freedom possible curiosity, humility, historical knowledge, and the willingness to challenge one's own assumptions. When ideology replaces inquiry, slogans replace evidence, and tribal loyalties replace independent judgment, universities cease to be places of liberal learning. The crisis we have witnessed is not only a warning about antisemitism, it is a warning that too many of our universities are no longer fulfilling their most essential purpose, educating free citizens capable of reason, responsibility, and respect for the equal dignity of every human being. Today we're speaking with Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He was also director of the State Department's policy planning staff during the first Donald Trump administration. Peter is also author of numerous books, including his forthcoming work, Reclaiming Liberal Education in America. Hey Peter Berkowitz, welcome. We're here to discuss what's essentially evidence of the failure of our universities from coast to coast. And this is the the the out uh astonishing and repulsive outbreak of campus anti-Semitism.

SPEAKER_02 3:56

Uh yes, I uh I agree. And we we saw this, you know, uh on October 7th, 2023 itself, the day that uh Hamas and other jihadist terrorists invaded uh Israel, massacred twelve hundred, uh took two hundred and fifty-one hostages, mostly civilians. As the massacre was going on, but late enough in the day, so that uh w we had some idea of the horrific proportions of this massacre. So in other words, five PM on the East Coast, thirty-four student organizations at Harvard posted a formal statement online at Instagram declaring that uh they hold Israel quote entirely responsible for the violence being perpetrated against Israel. Why would thirty-four student organizations suppose accuse Israel of responsibility of uh of guilt for the violence perpetrated against against itself? Most of these student organizations had nothing to do with the Middle East. It must have been some campus uh ideology, some contagion of the mind that uh that prepared thirty-four student groups to immediately denounce Israel as Israel, the Jewish people were suffering the worst catastrophe to befall them since the whole Holocaust. What was this ideology? Well, I should first say, and then this madness swept campuses around the country, but especially elite university campuses.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

The doctrine uh that W was Harvard the first? I mean, that that would be astonishing. Nominally the the the greatest uh country in our oldest university that were they the first out with a statement like this? Again, this is not uh the university, this is 34 students. I'm sorry, right, not not the right, not the university itself, but student groups.

SPEAKER_02 6:07

However, the university, of course, is implicated in this. Somebody admitted those, the students who made up those student groups. Somebody was educating those students. Somebody, some institution was uh was implanting in them or consolidating in their minds a pernicious ideology that would lead them to believe that Israel was somehow responsibility for the m responsible for the massacre perpetrated against us. So 5 p.m. on October 7th is at least the first such outrage of which uh I know. But uh as you as you're suggesting, uh Lee, throughout the country, especially at elite universities, students rose up, they created in uh encampments, they uh uh they they chanted in opposition to Israel, they um uh effectively took the side, not of the Palestinians, but of Hamas, a jihadist organization that is officially dedicated to the elimination of Israel. That's in their 1988 charter. That part of the charter has never been been changed.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

So we and I believe Western civilization generally. Um I can't remember if if if if that's in the charter, but certainly its origins uh as a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot. Yeah, so it's it's about and there's the there's the uh anti-Semitic paranoid stuff in there from the protocols of the elders of Zion. There's the anti-Western stuff. So for people to understand thoroughly the the depths of depravity of what's going on at the campuses, seeing you know, these people, you know, the these the students tragically seeing Israel as a way to, you know, seeing Jews as a way to go after all of Western civilization and uh America.

SPEAKER_02 8:01

Well this this is a crucial uh point you're making. While the Hamas Charter of 1988 emphasizes that its mission, as a branch, as you said, the Muslim Brotherhood, is to destroy the Jewish state. This ideology is uh i uh the Muslim Brotherhood ideology is in the first place anti-Western. The rage at Israel is uh rage uh uh is uh derived from seeing Israel as an outpost of the enemy West in the Middle East. Take us back to American campuses. Why do so many students who are raging against Israel, taking the side of uh Hamas and yet almost entirely ignorant of the conflict between Hamas and Israel? As we know, we've all seen the videos of the students on campuses who are uh neither able to um identify the river or the sea, which they want to see free. What's driving that? Here we have to draw a crucial connection that, as you say, Lee, Hamas does draw, as the Muslim Brotherhood draws. By the way, as the Ayatollahs and the IRGC of the Islamic Republic of Iran draw, for all of them, Israel is an outpost of the West, and the great exemplar of the West is the United States. So the rage against Israel, the notion of resisting Israel is to a very significant extent bound up with anti-Americanism. This is a way of uh conducting the fight against rapacious settler colonial America. And by the way, this is important because this is an ideology that is promulgated on campuses, sometimes often explicitly, but uh often also implicitly throughout the throughout the humanities and sometimes in the social sciences.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

Look, uh uh Harvard, Harvard is a settler colonial university. I mean, really, as the as you know, I mean, this was this was founded by people, by people who settled the country. Um, so it's literally a settler university. What what what is going on? How has liberal education failed so intensely, so profoundly that this idea look, I mean, the United States has had we've had we've had Nazis, we've had neo-Nazis, uh, we have Islamists, we have all sorts of anti-Semites, but never have we seen before, uh before October 7th, never have we seen this the the this uh the the I mean it's almost a main at certainly on college campuses, it appears to be a mainstream version of of Jew hatred. What is going on at these what is going on at these schools uh uh that that that we've seen this liberal educ the the the prize of education, liberal education has been so perverted and so corrupted.

SPEAKER_02 11:13

Well, of course, this is uh this is a long story. I have identified um uh anti-Americanism as at the core of uh of this ideology. And uh I've argued that uh um that that the hatred of Israel is uh is grounded in in the conviction, by the way, an accurate conviction that th that Israel is uh is close to a partner of uh the United States. But all this we can take uh back mu much further. We can tell a history of the decline of American education that starts, let's say, in the early uh or let's say its recording uh begins at least in the early 1950s when William F. Buckley publishes a book, the young Buckley, called God and Man at Yale. And Buckley documents through the analysis of uh course syllabi from Yale College in the late 1940s, that the humanities faculty uh uh seeks to promulgate atheism, not teach atheism among other views, not report that it's out there in the United States at what it stands for, but to uh indoctrinate students into atheism and that the social sciences classes based on the syllabi attempt to indoctrinate students into he calls it collectivism, we might call it uh progressivism. In other words, what many of us think of as liberal education is already been debased by the late 1950s. Another crucial moment in the debasement of liberal education is when the students of the 1960s arrive on campuses, uh sorry, arrive in graduate schools in the early 1970s, bringing a new understanding of the purpose of education. What is that new understanding of the purposes of education? From henceforth, scholarship in teaching, by the way, as you know, Lee, this is an echo of the 11th theses, the Marxist theses on Feuerbach. The new um Thank you for giving me credit for for for for knowing uh for knowing all of the theses on Feuerbach.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

I thank you, Peter. Well, at least the 11th.

SPEAKER_02 13:27

You're the best guest ever. And at least the 11th, which uh in other words, these students are now now believed that the purpose of scholarship and the purpose of teaching is to change the world. No much, no more of this understanding the world, no more of this safeguarding the treasures of Western civilization, no more of this coming to understand the ideas and institutions that inform America. No, the purpose of the classroom, the purpose of scholarship is to change the world in a progressive direction. And to make a very long story short, the students carrying this sensibility get their PhDs in the late 70s, they arrive as assistant professors in the early 80s, they're tenured in the late 1980s or so, and around this time we see the first big outbreak of what we then called political correctness. But there is a line. One can understand what we today call uh wokeness or progressive wokeism on campus as a direct descendant of political correctness. That political correctness was a descendant of uh the new attitude on campuses in the 70s, and that had already been prepared by the use of the classroom and scholarships, use of the classroom uh in the early 1950s, late 1940s and 1950s to promote uh progressivism.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

So I I just I just want to go back for a second, go back to the William F. Buckley book, not necessarily the book itself, but the subject. So this is the late 40s uh and early 50s. So what we're talking about here is we uh as as we we've seen in the media from that period, there was the you know fame famous uh uh uh Whitaker Chambers book. So we're that the university has been infiltrated, the faculty was infiltrated, certainly no later than the late 40s, probably much earlier, but by by by real red activists, right? By real communist activists. And so what we're seeing now is in a sense, what what is that, three, four generations? I mean, it's it's more than it's more it's 80 years. Yeah. Um 80 years of communist activism.

SPEAKER_02 15:40

Yes, but I want to distinguish here. Um the there's a difference between infiltration by communist activists and the mainstream, uh almost casual use of the university for indoctrination purposes. In other words, what what Buckley now Buckley of course was a great anti-communist, but what he's charting in the early 1950s is not in the first place communist infiltrators. He's studying rank and file faculty members who think of themselves do not think of themselves as communists. They think of themselves as good Americans. They think that they're just doing what professors ought to do, teaching the truth of the matter. They're simply assuming that the truth of the matter is atheism and progressivism. Now, this is a uh, in my view, a terrible misuse of the classroom. The purpose of the classroom is to introduce, especially in the humanities, introduce students to the uh great ideas and seminal events of of the West. Uh enable students to appreciate the power of their arguments, not to not to pro not to promote one ideology or uh or another. So this is in a way, this is more powerful because while there were communist infiltrators, this was uh uh there was uh action against that. But the the casual indoctrination, that turned out to be over the long run more pernicious because it got accepted as just the way we do things here, as uh as Greenwich mean time. Right.

SPEAKER_01 17:23

I mean, so you're talking about that, you know, the liberal educ cla classical liberal education is supposed to present, you know, present different ideas and say, well, look, let's have a have a discussion, debate about them. But I mean, again, to keep to let's keep beating up at Harvard, or let's beating up on Harvard, or let's praise Harvard for saying, look, at the core, uh at the core of uh of our teaching is an understanding of how our country was settled. And our country was settled, not only by religious people, right, but by people who believed that they were living out the reality of the Old Testament, right? The Hebrew Bible. They named, they gave their names, uh, they gave names from the Hebrew Bible to their children, they named their towns and settlements after after these uh after these places in the Hebrew Bible. So how do we get from there when this is really at the foundation of who our country is? I'm like, well, actually, no, it's not that important. And I'm not just bringing it up to now, the campus anti-Semitism. I'm trying to go back to the 50s as well. Say, well, actually, no, that idea is not as good because here's an idea that's actually at the uh at the core of the founding of our country and who we are as a people. So even if you don't believe in God, even if you're an atheist, certainly you must understand where we come from and what we prize as a people.

SPEAKER_02 18:46

Well, uh th that's right. Um and your suggestion is also correct that this the falling away from uh the proper understanding of the American founding, a proper understanding of what this country stood for. It's got a longer history than I was suggesting. I thought I was being daring by taking things back to the 1950s. No, it was all right to take us back even farther to uh to to the founding. There have been several steps in the falling away from um what actually Tocqueville called the America's original point of departure. What was that point of departure even before the American founding? It was a combination of um Protestant or Puritan faith mixed in, blended together with uh uh an uncompromising commitment to individual liberty. And of course, that uncompromising commitment to individual liberty itself had a root in Protestant Christianity. Uh so we one way of thinking of that history is the same freedom that we were uh that that our Protestant forebears were so proud of over the years was directed against the American tradition itself, saying uh as as generations grew farther and farther from that original point of departure, uh they thought that the freedom should extend to freedom from the American inheritance as well, not understanding that that original inheritance is what made sense of our freedom, what gave freedom strength, but also help um limited our freedom so as to make sure that he that freedom contributed to uh to human flourishing. So, yes, it's an old story. It we do need to go back to our founding, but this just is further reason why liberal education in America, or to borrow the title from my book, why we need to reclaim liberal education in in America. We need to go back to those roots. Uh only this will help us understand who we are, where we've come from, and what are the requirements to preserve our freedom.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

I'm I'm glad you mentioned, because I w I I I wanted to mention your book, uh, which should be out soon. It's forthcoming reclaiming liberal education in America. Peter, first of all, how many books have you what what what number book is this that you've written? I don't know, but it's not it's not that many given uh it's a lot. You've written many, many books. Per gray hair, it's not that many. Okay. Um so how what uh how do we reclaim liberal education? And look, you're you're on the front lines in many ways. You've taught, you've taught in universities. Also in Washington, you you you you teach students as well. So what's your sense? How receptive are students? Uh how do we do it? And and and and and and do people want it? Do do younger students want it? Are they uh hungering for this?

SPEAKER_02 21:53

Yes, so well, you're right. I I remain in sense on the front lines, both through my work for the public interest fellowship. In Washington DC and uh at at Stanford, where uh for the last five years I've taught a spring spring quarter class called Varieties of Conservatism in America. Um it's very important to me to get a chance to um study with young people, um hear their and hear their concerns. Uh here's something important that I've found uh on the front lines. Um many of the students I deal with, most of the students I deal with have been deprived by their universities of the opportunity to study seriously the United States, the ideas on which we're founded, the seminal events of our history, the contest over these ideas, America's great achievements. Just about all they learn okay, slight exaggeration, but it's sometimes it seems like just about all they learn is that um the United States uh um gave legal sanction to slavery for hundreds of years, and the United States never has and may never be able to overcome that poisonous legacy. Of the achievements of America. Um that America was the first country ever anywhere to be established in dedication to a universal principle that proclaimed, that effectively proclaimed slavery to be an evil institution, one hears next to nothing about that. The idea that liberal education is meant to uh also expose one to the treasures of one civilization, they don't discover that. And uh and to participate in a classroom where the principal aim is to understand the arguments that are presented in uh in important works, and that and that the aim of the classroom is to debate these ideas, to understand their assumptions, their implications, their impact. This I see is a is a novelty for many students, but I also see they enjoy it.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

That's what I'm gonna say. If they're really excited about it, like, wow, I wish we had more of this. We we need more of this.

SPEAKER_02 24:24

I uh it is it is my experience, not with absolutely every student, that many students um say, yes, we would like to do this more.

SPEAKER_01 24:36

Peter, um I'm gonna leave with one last question. Uh aside from aside from your great new book, forthcoming book, Reclaiming Liberal Education in America. I want you uh imagine that you have a classroom full of students in front of you. It's not me, uh no one behind me, and actually I haven't read Mark's uh uh 11 thesis on Feuerback either. But tell us one, give us one book, give us one great book, um uh uh a classic, a new book. Give us one great book to uh to to to inspire us with the idea of of of liberal education or the idea of like to understand what what what America is about. I mean it can it can whatever Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, whatever you think is one book that we should all have read by the end of the summer to be excited again about the uh about the origins and and direction of our country.

SPEAKER_02 25:35

Well, uh that's too hard a challenge, but I'm gonna pick one of the books that uh that that you already mentioned. If it's got to be one, I think the Federalist is an extremely exciting work. Very few universities. I know of no university, no selective university that requires students to read it. I know of no selective university that requires students to have um to have read even a part of the Federalist. As you know, this the Federalist is the authoritative commentary on the U.S. Constitution, but it's more than that. It was a work written in real time. It's a collection of 85 newspaper articles. If you just take Federalist number one, open it up, um yeah, you you you will you will become uh amazed by what uh our founders thought could move a part of the reading public to vote for the new Constitution. Hamilton makes clear in that that what the United States is undertaking is a great experiment in ordered liberty. It's never been tried before, that uh patriots should be ex should should read the Constitution with the greatest care. But he also emphasized, I'm now talking just about the first paragraph in the first newspaper article that uh of '85 It becomes the Federalist. But he also says people who care about humanity in general should take an interest in this because the United States it has fallen to the United States to test the proposition that human beings are capable, based on deliberation and choice, to uh establish just governments rather than always relying upon force and violence. And uh the fate of the United States, therefore, should interest all those who care about um about the sacred rights and liberties of uh of humanity. So uh please read The Federalist, learn something about the spirit in which the United States was established, learn something about the structure of government, learn something about how our Constitution aims to protect uh individual liberty. And from there, please continue forward and backward to uh understand our great civilization.

SPEAKER_01 28:07

I I I love the way you tell that story, Peter, because also, I mean, most fundamentally it's like it's a it's it's it's a bunch of people, it's a bunch of Americans, the first American who said, you know what, I bet we can make an argument. I bet we can persuade people. They're not, you know, the the they're not in a court of law, they're addressing regular people, saying, here's what we're doing. Isn't this exciting? And it's supposed to be exciting. Uh and Peter, thank you for getting us excited about it. Congrats on your new book, Reclaiming Liberal Education in America, and we'll see you back here very soon on Roots, Rights, and Reason. Thanks, Lee.