Two recent stories that dominated academic Twitter were the cancellation of the Western Art History course at Yale and the incorporation of the 1619 Project in the school curricula in Buffalo, New York and Washington DC. Though political centrists on Twitter were outraged, no one noted that those two incidents are thematically similar. Without understanding the connection, fighting back against indoctrination throughout the education system will be impossible.
Consider the situation at Yale. Yale’s administration ended a decades-old course on the Western canon because it is arguably too big a field to cover. The course, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present,” was once taught by authorities like Vincent Scully but has caused “unease” among some students and faculty because it is an “idealized Western ‘canon’—a product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.”
Putting European art “on a pedestal” is “problematic,” as every genre and tradition are “equally deserving of study,” according to Tim Barringer, chair of Yale’s art history department. He elaborated: “The class will also consider art in relation to questions of gender, class and race” and discuss its involvement with Western capitalism. Art’s “relationship with climate change” will also be a “key theme.” Incidentally, the course was extremely popular among students, a significant number of whom were disappointed and dissatisfied with this sudden change.
In DC and Buffalo, the situation is similar, but in reverse. As the NPR report notes, the heavily criticized and flawed 1619 Project, a revisionist history about the American founding, will be a mandated part of the curriculum for 7th through 12th graders, teaching students that the American founding was predicated on slavery, not emancipation from monarchic rule. But that isn’t all. The project, essentially spearheaded by non-experts and activist journalists, also argues that “plantation economics led to modern corporate, capitalist culture and how post-Civil War politicians blocked universal health care because they opposed medical treatment for recently-freed slaves.”
Are those structural changes reflective of student-driven radicalism? While it is fair to claim that campus radicalism has increased in recent years, the evidence to the claim that they are student-driven remains sparse. On the contrary, most structural changes and campus activism are led by a section of activist faculty, who in turn take advantage of students to use them as pawns or justifications to ensure a radical agenda.
Consider the evidence from just one week of news. There’s a push for banning military presence at freshers in Cambridge University, led by university bureaucrats and political union leaders; and another push to ban a centuries-old student club for failing diversity quota at Oxford. A climate action group led by faculty and activists in the United States want the Big Ten schools to divest from fossil fuels and move toward carbon neutrality. And Berkeley rejected “76 percent of qualified applicants without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence” for failing to adhere to university standards for a commitment to diversity.
None of those efforts are student-led. Nor are the faculty-led “open letter” campaigns and petitions—almost always started by activist-academics, who lead campus and student activism, sometimes causing de-platforming and violence.
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