Hugh Hewitt’s First Principles is a 125-page manual on how to handle the cacophony of illiberal thought that flourishes in our universities.
Consider the experience of one prominent victim, Amy Carter. The freckle-faced little girl who once stood at the knee of the President of the United States has become a self-described “feminist-socialist” in the ranks of the America-hating campus left. Amy used to worry about nuclear war, but someone at Brown University told her that the CIA is the imminent danger.
How could it happen? Jimmy and Rosalynn certainly bear blame. But the American academy, it seems, must also accept responsibility for how Amy Carter is turning out. After Amy traveled north to Brown, she decided that she was not going to become a scholar, but an activist. “Graduation is not important to me,” she announced proudly. So at Brown, where students not too long ago voted to urge the university to store cyanide pills in the event of a nuclear war. Amy was placed on probation for disrupting a board of trustees meeting. At the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Amy prevented other students from signing up with the dreaded CIA.
Hewitt’s First Principles challenges the monopoly of liberal political, economic, and cultural thought by providing short, biting chapters on relevant campus concerns such as money, government, communism, defense, poverty, race, and God.
To incoming freshmen, Hewitt writes:
[Y]our mind is about to come under assault. Between now and your graduating from college you will listen to hundreds of voices—the voices of students, professors, and academic advisors. Further input will come from books, periodicals, and news reports. All of these voices will share a common aim: To influence your way of thinking. If even one of them tells you this, I will be surprised. Professors teach for money, but of the many I have known, all have also taken up teaching in the hope of attracting adherents to their views.
Herein lies the beginning of the book’s instruction, which assists the incoming freshman in discerning the motivations of certain ideologues. It may help them to question authority. Hewitt recounts the time as a graduate student he finally concluded that one of his politics section leaders was a smooth Marxist who didn’t announce his particular agenda.
Hidden agendas are a part of everyday life . . . so roundabout the seller comes, feeding you this morsel and this bit and this piece. Eventually you will have swallowed the whole thing. You may not be able to digest it and you may toss it back. But it will have had the chance to take hold. Vendors of ideas need nothing more than that chance.
Noted Marxist vendors Bertell Oilman and Saul Landau are such shrewd salesmen. Landau, a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, once wrote a friend in Cuba: “I’ve come to dedicate myself to making propaganda for American socialism.” Oilman, who teaches at New York University, has become known for his proud claim that “a correct understanding of Marxism (or any body of scientific truth) leads automatically to its acceptance.” In other words. Oilman tells his students, “either you understand the science of Marxism as I do, accept it, and apply it, or else see me after class to discuss your learning disability.”
Some American history books will “spare little ink on Communism, its nature, or its history in practice,” warns Hewitt. Quite. Students may even encounter popular American history texts such as Marxist historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. (Zinn claims that his history text is written from the point of view of the Indians, the slaves, pacifists, and draftdodgers.)
The publishing of First Principles comes at a time when the American academy suffers from a number of harmful unintellectual diseases, especially in promoting the myth of “moral equivalence” that Professor Jeane Kirkpatrick has confronted in all its dangerous implications, and in promoting the idea “that it’s all relative.” If students equip themselves with Hewitt’s handy manual and apply the wisdom therein, we might be able to begin again the discussion of how to reopen the minds of our future leaders. With Ms. Carter, it might be too late.
[First Principles: A Primer of Ideas for the College-Bound Student, by Hugh Hewitt; Chicago: Regnery Gateway]
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