‘A nation cannot survive when its miseducated elites treat … Western history as a catalogue of crimes,’ scholar warns
The identity politics lens through which most universities teach American history today could lead to “civilizational suicide,” a research scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation warned.
In a column published Friday at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, classics scholar Nora Clinton criticized classes at Harvard University and other institutions where history is now based around “activist indoctrination.”
For example, she said several courses at Harvard “portray museum collections as mere products of ‘imperial desires’ and ‘the violence of colonialism.’”
Others teach black-and-white oppressor-oppressed narratives instead of the nuances of historic relationships between different cultures, Clinton continued:
One example is the recent course Harvard and Native Lands, cross-listed by the English and History departments. Its description declares that “Harvard’s endowment included Native lands expropriated through war, theft, and coercion” and presents the course as an inquiry into “Indigenous dispossession and resistance.” That framing is not academic but accusatory: before students have weighed evidence or historical context, the institution is condemned through the vocabulary of criminal appropriation and colonial oppression.
The blanket “stolen land” narrative is historically misleading, indicative of activist polemics rather than scholarly scrutiny. Conquest, migration, intertribal warfare, negotiated transfers, and shifting territorial control were common throughout human history, including precolonial North America. The concepts of “native” and “indigenous” are historically relative: the peoples living in North America before European arrival descended from populations that had migrated from Asia. Every human population ultimately came from elsewhere, with different peoples establishing communities in particular regions at different times. …
At Harvard, the fragmentation is institutional as well as curricular: students may pursue Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality or secondary fields in Ethnicity, Migration, Rights and Latinx Studies. Recent course offerings include Power to the People: Black Power, Radical Feminism, and Gay Liberation, 1955–1975; Afterlives of Violence: Race, Gender, & Colonialism in LatinX Studies; and Queer Interventions in Latinx Studies. Such courses are intended to stoke feelings of grievance against the U.S.
As for the positive contributions that the West made to society, students rarely learn about them, Clinton wrote.
But providing a balanced view of history is nothing less than vital to Western civilization’s survival, she wrote.
“Students taught that America merely symbolizes oppression will neither defend constitutional liberty nor reliably recognize its enemies. A nation cannot survive when its miseducated elites treat patriotism as ignorance and Western history as a catalogue of crimes,” Clinton wrote.
Read the full column at the James G. Martin Center.
