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Principled Ideas from the Centennial Institute

Volume 7, Number 4 April 2015

THEY STOOD FOR TRUTH

By Bradley J. Birzer
Centennial Institute has
asked me to explore the
topic, Must the left
dominate
academia?
Certainly they dominate
it now, no question. But
with what degree of
seriousness? With what
kind of intellectual capital?
When one group is in
charge for too long,
unchallenged, whether on
the left or on the right, you get groupthink. Ask the average
professor about their political beliefs and the answer is
mush, kind of a tapioca leftism. Its not based on theory,
but simply on conformity. That I find extremely
dangerous.

Publisher, William L. Armstrong

Editor, John Andrews

His opening argument can be paraphrased this way:

Whereas intellectual freedom is chiefly an aspiration, sought
by the solitary man of contemplation, academic freedom is
a historical reality. It has true limits and true prerogatives.
It must be preserved and extended.
Kirk is suggesting that there is a very long tradition of this in
Western civilization. Its the idea that we as free women and
men have the right to challenge even our god king. There
in ancient Greece, unlike in ancient Persia under Xerxes or
Darius, you had the right to challenge those who would tell
you what to think on the level of your conscience.
Three Heroes
This actually came up in class today at CU-Boulder. For
my students in an honors course on Western civilization, I
held up three heroes who represent the best of our liberal,
liberating tradition: Socrates of Athens, Cicero of Rome,
and the early Christian martyr Perpetua.

What sustains

Socrates, I reminded them, taught adamantly that

you never have the right to do harm to another
person, no matter the circumstances. You can
never do evil in the name of good. You can never
do wrong calculated in the name of right. It will
always end in an evil. It will never end in a good.
Thats one hero, one lesson.

Growing up in Kansas in the 1970s, I had some

great teachers, but I resented those former leftists the dominant
from the 60s who wanted to mold me in their academic left?
image. Thats one reason I became a libertarian
and a conservative. I resented these people telling me how
Next we looked at Cicero, the great Roman republican,
to think, and not even because they had a hard-core belief.
who said, Our allegiance must always be to humanity, not
They just liked having the authority.
to the soil in which we live. Hes saying that the material
Liberal Education
substance by which we survive, though important, is only a
We believe at Hillsdale, as you do at Colorado Christian
means to an end. The end must be something higher.
University, that in order to have a conservative education
You can apply that to the American founding and think
you need to have a liberal education first. Thats based on
about George Washington saying in his first inaugural
the idea of being liberated from the things of this world
address, Any nation that ignores the eternal rights of order
going back to Plato and Aristotle and asking:
has no prerogative to live. It deserves its fate to die.
What are the most essential questions that we can consider? How do
those questions allow us to have relations with one another? Do we
have to make everything political, or can we transcend left and right?
The asking of those questions in an educational setting was
a concern of the late Russell Kirk, one of the founders of
modern conservatism, a great man whose biography Ive
recently written. After bringing out his seminal book The
Conservative Mind in 1953, Kirk published another book in
1955 that is one of my favorites, Academic Freedom: An Essay
in Definition.

Bradley J. Birzer (Ph.D., History, Indiana University) is professor of history and

American studies at Hillsdale College and the 2014-2015 visiting scholar in
conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He is
the author of five books, including the forthcoming Russell Kirk: American
Conservative. This essay is adapted from his lecture at Colorado Christian
University on Jan. 12, 2015.

Centennial Institute sponsors research, events, and publications to enhance

public understanding of the most important issues facing our state and nation.
By proclaiming Truth, we aim to foster faith, family, and freedom, teach
citizenship, and renew the spirit of 1776.

Hes making the same

point as Cicero. The
ultimate moral soil of
Americas survival is not
geography. Its humanity
itself. The good is good
no matter where you
find it. The true is true
everywhere, whether
its on the Tiber or the
Thames, the Potomac or
the Arkansas.
Nor can the true be
destroyed. It can be
Russell A. Kirk, 1918-1994
forgotten or ignored or
mocked, but it remains true. This is the Ciceronian idea.
Nearly every one of our Founding Fathers, remember, was
fluent in Greek and Latin by the time they were fourteen,
the age at which they went off to college. And in that
context, who was the person they looked to most when
they founded the American Republic? Cicero.

This is what Russell Kirk is giving us when he defines

academic freedom as the sacred right to question, to look
at the good and true on our own terms, and take our stand
for conscience, albeit at great cost.
Questions of Life and Death
We must not lose touch with these incredible examples,
these people who have energized not just their own
societies but the bigger scheme of history. Where would
the church be without the martyrs? Where would any of
us be, Christian or not?
Look at the last hundred years. According to recent
scholarship, when you count up everybody who was killed
in the gulags, the Holocaust, the killing fields, something
like 205 million people were executed by their own
governments. The U.S. population right now is about 315
million. Imagine if two of every three people you know
were gone. Thats the death rate of the 20th century.

In a century when warfare took 50 million lives,

governments killed four times that many. The state did
that. So these questions of left and right are not merely
academic questions. They are literally questions
Conformity of life and death. These matter.

The third person I brought up to my students

today was someone who is less well known, but
truly a heroine of mine. She is a young Roman
What about us, then? What about you and me?
threatens
noblewoman, just 19 years old and pregnant,
we fall into a pattern of conformity when
conscience. Do
who accepts martyrdom in the Roman arena
conscience is threatened, or do we resist? How
rather than give up her Christian faith. This is Perpetua.
do we resist wisely, in a manner that is effective, that is just
and right?
Martyrs All
So think about these three figures in the Western tradition.
Socrates, telling us never to do harm. Cicero, telling us
always to put humanity and the good above your immediate
expediency. Perpetua, symbolizing that its worth dying for
the right things. And all of them, as I told my class at
Boulder, paid with their lives.
The Athenians killed Socrates. Mark Antony didnt just kill
Cicero. He had his head brought into the Roman Senate
and placed on the podium while Antony gave a speech
declaring the old republic dead. And Perpetua, this brave
girl massacred for her beliefs, for the crowds entertainment.
What amazing people, martyrs all. People who taught us
dramatically what it means to live the good life, and to die
the good death. To be happy at the moment of our death,
even in blood and agony, because we did the right thing. To
know that our soul was intact even though our body wasnt.

Grave Responsibilities
These are the kinds of things that a young Kirk had
to ask himself when he walked away from a tenured
professorship at Michigan State over a disagreement with
the administration and went out on his own as a writer and
lecturer, refusing on principle to be part of academia any
more.
Out of that crucible of conscience came the book on
academic freedom, which Kirk defines as the pursuit of
Truth, capital T. The pursuit of Truth puts upon us, as
those who claim to be its followers, he writes, the gravest
of responsibilities.
Now let me take us back to America and back to George
Washington again. He said in one of his beautiful speeches,
America now carries the responsibility of republican
government entirely upon her shoulders for the next
thousand years.

CENTENNIAL REVIEW is published monthly by the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University. The authors views are not necessarily
those of CCU. Designer, Bethany Bender. Illustrator, Benjamin Hummel. Subscriptions free upon request. Write to: Centennial Institute, 8787
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tomorrows leaders. Your gift is tax-deductible. Please use the envelope provided. Thank you for your support.
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Centennial Review April 2015 2

Was that meant to breed arrogance, to say how great we are?

No. It was Washington saying that he and his countrymen,
including you and me, have the responsibility of carrying this
thing and making it work. If we mess it up, its over. Its
going to be another thousand years. This is what the father
of our country is saying to Americans down through the
generations.
Its also what Kirk is saying about those of us who go into the
classroom. Honestly, sometimes I lose sleep over this. The
worst thing I could do as a professor, right, left, or center,
would be to expect my students to be little clones of Brad
Birzer at the end of the semester. That would be diabolic.
Little Clones
Think about this from a theological perspective. What does
God do when he creates us? He creates every single one of
us in his infinite image. We are never to be repeated, ever. We
are the one reflection of that aspect of God.
We have that core of humanity in common, and yet we are
radically diverse from one another, and its for a reason. So
those of us who go into the classroom have this responsibility
never to try and conform those who trust
Never. We teach them what we believe
Students us.
to be true, but the most important thing is
are not teaching them to question and to think.

fooled.

Then when a situation arises and you have to

make a decisionwhether youre in business
or in the military, in politics or in academiaits not just
repeat back to the professor and pass the exam. That
spark of conscience has to arise and prompt you to ask: Is
this a just order? Is this the right thing to do?
This is why Russell Kirk says every philosopher in the
academy must dedicate himself completely to the Truth,
capital T. This is what we pursue. This is what we worship.
We dont worship the crowd. If philosophers are treated as
servants of a faceless community, they will acquire the vices
of servants with few redeeming virtues.

Can I know it fully? No, because Im not God. But do I

have a hint of it, an inkling? Of course, because Im made
in the image of the divine; even the pagans understood
that.
Any two of us, as people of good will, dedicated to
pursuing truth, may each have very different visions of
what justice is. We can debate those. But in the end, we
recognize that its probably greater than either of us can
decide. Thats the idea of objectivity.
We dont claim to know everything. We do know there
is an everything to know, even though we dont know it
yetand maybe we never will, because were not God.
We have pieces of the puzzle, but not the whole.
This what we see stressed in Russell Kirks book. He
points out that down through history, in the classical
world and the medieval world, the academy always
possessed a freedom unknown to other corporate bodies.
That was because the actors there, whether philosopher,
scholar, or student, were looked upon as persons who had
been consecrated to the service of truth in the way that a
soldier is consecrated to the service of protection.
Tired of Platitudes
But when I tell my students there is an absolute truth,
whether at Hillsdale or at CU-Boulder, their immediate
reaction is, Oh no, theres not. Ive got my opinion,
youve got yours. When I tell them, though, that Socrates
believed in truth and he died for his beliefs, its amazing
how interested they are.
They are tired of platitudes. They want to search for
something deeper. They long to hear stories of greatness.
No matter how cynical this generation of college students
may seem, at the core they want truth.

Seven Virtues
What are the virtues anyway? On opening day at Hillsdale, I
ask my students to tell me the seven virtues. Someone will
say happiness. I tell them no, happiness may be a goal in your
life, but its not a virtue.

Socrates

Cicero

Perpetua

Washington

Then one of the students from a religious background will

say faith, hope, and love. Good, those are the highest ones.
But remember that before those emerged in Christianity, the
pagans had already identified prudence, justice, temperance,
and fortitude.
Our Western tradition, starting with the great Greek
philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, teaches us to
think about our knowledge of such things as follows: Can I
accept that there is an ideal form of justice? Yes, absolutely.

Centennial Review April 2015 3

Centennial Institute

They Stood for Truth

By Bradley J. Birzer
Must the left dominate
academia?
They do now,
but with waning intellectual
capital. Academic dominance
by any ideology is dangerous.
Education should not indoctrinate but liberate. Professors and students must pursue Truth, emulating classical
heroes from Socrates to Cicero to St. Perpetua, and great
Americans from George Washington to Russell Kirk.

So we come full circle to Kirk, to academic freedom, and

to the question we started with: How much does the left
control? They control a lot, and when we look specifically
at academia, their grip seems ironclad.
The good news, though, is that they dont
know why they believe what they believe
any more. They dont understand it. They
havent thought about it. They dont know
the principles of it. They are not based on
anything, and students are not fooled.

Colorado Christian University

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on public money. When the bubble ends, the implosion

will make the housing bubble look small. Our very cultural
capital is at stake. But places like Colorado Christian
University and Hillsdale College and a handful of others
will emerge stronger because they believe in
without
truth. They do real education.

Power
morality? Thats
not the West.

Give students the chance and they jump at intellectual

discussion. They jump at ideas that are older than yesterday.
Real Education
They care about things that really matter. Theres a huge
change between an 18-year-old and a 22-year-old, for good
or ill, and there are a few places, places like this one, that are
working to turn it to the good.
A shakeout is coming. The economics of college are almost
untenable at this point. Too much debt, too much reliance

What happens if you train all the technicians

in the world, you foster all the scientific
curiosity, but theres no morality any more?
You can do whatever you want. Theres only power. Thats
where the Nazis and the Stalinists were. Thats not America.
Thats not the West.
Does the left have control now? They do. Will they 20
years from now? Im not so sure. I think theyre in their last
days. They have no imagination and no intellectual capital.
They only have power and at some point power no longer
works. Weve seen that over and over again.
Remember Perpetua, Cicero, Socrates. They knew the right
thing to do, and they did it. They stood for truth. So must
we.
*Past Speaker | Confirmed 2015

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