“We can’t hold them. The city is lost.”
“Tell the men to break cover. We ride for Minas Tirith.”
So Faramir, captain of Gondor and son of the steward, says to his lieutenant during the battle of Osgiliath. It is a pivotal scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King that Faramir realizes Gondor’s great and ancient capital is overrun. To save the lives of his men, he orders a retreat. Likewise, to save what is left of Western Civilization, it is time for serious students to abandon the Ivy League.
I just finished reading Adam Kissel’s new book, Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation, coauthored with two of his colleagues from the Heritage Foundation, Rachel Alexander Cambre and Madison Marino Doan. The authors researched the general education programs at the eight Ivy League universities and reached a conclusion long in the making: general education is fragmented, politicized, and “another opportunity for undirected self-actualization.” Students can graduate from the Ivy League without having learned much of anything. These students are referred to as “slackers,” rightfully so. They will take courses on gender, sexuality, anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, anticapitalism, antiracism, feminism, occultism, activism, climate change, reproductive rights, equity, bias, prejudice, inequality, queerness, critical race theory, white privilege, cultural appropriation, oppression, comic books, pop culture, television, and video games.
The authors’ conclusion is apparent across the Ivy League with Columbia as a minor exception. The Core Curriculum at Columbia College has been in place for over 100 years and includes major works of the Western canon. But Brown University’s open curriculum—adopted in 1969, no surprise—allows students to create their own degree program from scratch. The rest of the Ivy League has minimally structured “distributional requirements,” “ways of knowing,” “skills requirements,” and “educational outcomes.” The irony is that little to no objective skills, knowledge, and facts are taught.
Each chapter features a hypothetical general education experience for slackers based on courses available during the 2024-25 academic year. Additionally, the authors completed the near-impossible task of choosing courses representing a strong general education experience for serious students. Serious students have the opportunity to learn the bits of American history and Western Civilization that still exist in the Ivy League, as well as mathematics and science, devoid of climate change hysteria. They will take courses on ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Dante, Chaucer, Tolstoy, Virgil, Milton, Tocqueville, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Thucydides, Galileo, Darwin, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, micro and macroeconomics, physics, biology, neurology, chemistry, neurology, astronomy, calculus, and statistics.
The authors note that serious students can still piece together a meaningful general education. These students, however, are fighting an uphill battle. The Ivy League, as a consortium, has declared there is not a body of knowledge that all students should learn, much less a body of knowledge that is more important than another. Courses on Twilight and The Hunger Games fulfill the exact requirement as courses on Beowulf and Paradise Lost. But as a group of serious students themselves, the authors provide a roadmap for those who enter the valley of the shadow of death. With Dante—figuratively—as their guide, there is hope. To the nine rings of hell with top-down reform, it is unlikely anyway. Closing Pandora’s box is easier than fixing the Ivy League’s general education requirements.
The authors mention briefly the origin of general education as a “reaction to the curricular fragmentations of, on the one hand, the disciplinary specializations built for the German-style research university and, on the other hand, the elective system built for Emersonian, Romantic-era self-discovery.” Ironic, once again, that general education in the Ivy League has become the very thing it sought to replace. So, instead of preserving and disseminating the intellectual heritage of the West, the Ivy League has endorsed the subjective individualism of the post-modern era. While serious students may still study the remnants of Western Civilization, they need to pull back.
The Ivy League is a shell of its former self, and it is not a home for serious students. The Ivy League will always retain an essence of prestige, but in name only, not content. Serious students would do well to forsake the Ivy League altogether and look to the horizon. Resources are available for serious students to choose a serious university. The Cardinal Newman Society’s Guide to Choosing a Catholic College is a great place to start, and so is the Heritage Foundation’s Choose College with Confidence data visualization tool. The Ivy League is lost. Serious students should not be sent on a suicide mission to reclaim territory that is overrun. When Faramir was sent to retake Osgiliath, the attempt nearly cost him his life. He pleaded that any assault was folly. And so serious students take heed, the Ivy League is taken.
Cover by Jared Gould using book cover on Encounter Books and book shelf background on Adobe; Asset ID#: 495370723
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
