I’m starting to come to the view that having K-12 education and colleges and universities shrink because of COVID-19 might be one of the bits of good news arising out of the pandemic. Our universities are the principal source of the noxious ideas that are plaguing the country right now, and decades of conservative attempts to reverse this slide or reform campuses have proven largely unavailing.
An article by Arthur Milikh in National Affairs recently caught my eye: “Preventing Suicide by Higher Education,” in which he argues that conservatives should move to outright opposition to our universities, before they take the country down any further, and so I knew I had to have him on our podcast to kick around his ideas. He also has an excellent article on “‘Hate Speech’ and the New Tyranny Over the Mind,” which we also discuss in our conversation here.
Arthur has served as the associate director of the Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation, but as of just this week has joined the Claremont Institute’s brand new Center for the American Way of Life in Washington DC, from whom we’ll be hearing a lot more shortly. Along the way in our conversation we mention the Claremont Review of Books, and if you aren’t yet a subscriber, you can sign up here.
You’ll want to listen all the way to the end—extra fun and very topical exit music this week! And you know what to do next: listen here, or download from our hosts at Ricochet, or your other favorite podcast platform. (You can, for example, find us on Spotify here.) And be sure to tune in again tomorrow, when we’ll have another edition of our Three Whisky Happy Hour.