https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/24/bright-spots-do-exist-in-american-higher-education-are-they-the-future/
On April 8, the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, did something unusual: it found and showcased bright spots in American higher education. Such hidden gems are rare, so the event and its participants deserve attention and support.
Many Americans are painfully aware of academia’s current pathologies: soaring tuition resulting in unprecedented debt for students; leftward politicization with Democrat professors outnumbering Republicans 50 to 1; grievance studies such as Women’s Studies or Queer Studies displacing real learning; and, consequently, graduates who are ignorant, especially in American civics, world history, math, and finance, as the repeated schemes to cancel student loans attest.
The humanities were the first to go bad, though the sciences have certainly caught up as politically correct “diversity” and “equity” initiatives are now common in medical schools. The liberal arts used to focus on what was common to all of humanity—hence “the humanities.” They instructed us on our shared vices and virtues, our passions and reason, as depicted in the Great Books of Western Civilization, such as those by Chaucer, Milton, or Shakespeare.
But today’s campus identity politics inverts this and encourages a focus on self, one’s tribe, or one’s pet politics—the direct opposite of the word “education,” the root of which is the Latin ducare, meaning to bring forth or draw out. Traditionally, education was never a focus on one’s own problems but rather a means to broaden the mind and one’s world, to see universals, including human nature, not to fight today’s political battles. Alas, whether they know it or not, most colleges today instead subscribe to the Communist Manifesto line that, “Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.” Campus protests make the point.
But a few notable schools reject this Marxist norm. Presidents of four of them spoke at the Heritage panel, Reclaiming the Culture of Higher Education, introduced by Jonathan Pidluzny, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Programs in the Education Department.