all right so we're talking about the fact that everything the left touches who's bad everything they touch goes bad and then they can't figure out why and there was such a beautiful example of this uh in the New Yorker magazine and it's one that's very dear to my heart the subject's very dear to my heart a lot of been a lot of talk about this is a massively long article and I read every word of this piece I just you know I don't know if you guys have ever seen the New Yorker but the stories
gonna just go on forever they're like book length stories it's called the end of the English major enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country what happened what happened so I read every word of this it took me I think about seven and a half weeks I could have told them at the beginning the left took over the humanities the humanities turned to crap but there was like what happened what happened before we get to the article I want to start with a personal reminiscence and this was uh this is
part of this was in my Memoir the great good thing uh I was I was a lousy student and I I didn't pay attention I was a renegade I was a rebel I didn't want to have anything to do with it I got my education after I got out of college when I read all the books uh that I had bought in college it took me 10 15 years really to get an education that way which I should have been able to get in college but I didn't and it was my fault I'm not blaming
anybody about it but while I was there the left was starting its takeover of the institutions as the 1970s so they're really just beginning to come in and you would kind of hear them it was kind of like that scene at the end of the movie Cabaret where you look around and there's just a few more Nazis in the audience than there used to be that's what it was like at universities they started with the moral relativism the racism stuff all of this stuff was just coming in now I took a course in uh Victorian
poetry I believe it was in and the lady who taught this course is now a very big deal all right I'm not going to tell her name because it's not really her fault but it was indicative of something was that was happening the time she was just an English teacher she was teaching poetry and she was teaching one of my favorite poems a poem I already knew because at those in those days everybody knew it the charge of the late Brigade now this is a by Alfred Lord Tennyson uh one of the greatest top tier
poets the top tier is what happens right after Shakespeare uh the particulars above it and then comes the top tier poets and and Tennyson is out of favor because he represents the Victorian uh you know Imperial Britain but he was one of the greatest poets whoever lived and this is one of his greatest poems The Charge of the Light Brigade which is about a charge in 1854 in the Crimean War uh the the Light Brigade because some orders got screwed up was sent to charge a full frontal into a line of Guns of cannons right
and they were just blown away and people watching them from above saw they were so disciplined that as they each one of them was blown away they were just close ranks and keep going and they actually charged through the guns it was one of the great tragedies one of the great screw-ups uh in military history but it was also one of the great acts of nobility and in This brilliant brilliant poem uh Tennyson manages to capture both the glory of it and the stupidity of it you know just the the kind of you know there's
a line in it someone had blundered you know but at the same time you understand the incredible courage of these men uh but you understand also that they are being sent to their deaths for no reason and so we're reading this brilliant brilliant poem and this girl stands up in the class A student stands up and says to this lady who would later become a very very big deal in the English game says why are we learning this poem it's pro-war why are we talking why do we like this poem it's pro-war it glorifies War
and she couldn't the teacher could not answer the question she Shrugged she literally just I don't know I don't know and she didn't know she didn't know why we were learning it she was an English teacher and as I said became one of the leading lights in this field and could not answer why we were reading Charge of the Light Brigade one of the greatest poems in the English language he couldn't answer it she didn't know so I was so upset that I left to my feet and I was I couldn't talk I was completely
inarticulate I just babbled for a few minutes and I kept saying you know the poem goes half a league half a league half a league onward all in the Valley of Death rode the 600. you've maybe heard the famous line there's not a reason why there's but to do and die do or die and so it's like this beautiful boom I'm saying happily happily halfling onward so you can hear the horse's Hooves look I'm trying to explain and I couldn't I finally just flopped back into my chair a completely unarticulated made a complete fool of
myself because if you couldn't hear why that the poem was great then you shouldn't be learning about poetry in the first place because you're an idiot and the thing is this was an ignorant child because all children are ignorant that's what being a child is about you come to college to be taught she wanted to hear her own ideas talked back to her because she was a child because that's what children want they want to be reassured that everything they think is true and you have to break it to them as a college professor yes
but this is a brilliant poem bringing an amazing moment to life it with Incredible talent and it doesn't matter what you think about war this is an experience in itself you can still hate War you can still think the war can even think any stupid thing you want but at least have this experience with another mind speaking to you out of the past it's like a time machine this is why I mean these guys are editing Roald Dahl this is why they're editing James Bond and eventually they'll edit Shakespeare too they're just starting with these
guys because they can say oh it's not important it's just Roald Dahl it's just James Bond but they'll get to Shakespeare believe me they want to silence the voice of the writer so their voice is the only voice around don't don't give us objectivity just give us reality and we know what reality is it's the same thing right so the question then becomes why study literature if it's just going to tell us the same things we already know because if it doesn't tell us the same things we already know we're going to silence it and
re-edit it right so we can't figure out why nobody's taking English classes anymore because you don't get anything from English classes you just get the left telling you what you already know because you read it uh in because you were taught in high school so the article begins in the New York this is the article in the New Yorker about why the where went the Wither went the English you know why did the English Department turn to crap can't imagine cannot figure it out the crisis when it came arrived so quickly that its scale was
hard to recognize at first they're always surprised everything they touched turns to crap and they're always surprised when it happens from 2012 to the start of the pandemic the number of English Majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from 953 to 578 according to Robert Townsend the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Humanities indicators project which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated Humanities majors at Ohio State's main campus fell by 46 percent Tufts lost nearly 50 percent of its
Humanities Majors Boston University 42 percent Notre Dame uh ended up with half as many as it started with SUNY out just on and on people are abandoning these things right now the thing is some of the some of the people they go around asking people why is this happening why is this happening nobody says because the left got hold of it and everything that left touches during scrap nobody said up strangely enough well we'll get back to one person who said one interesting thing but but nobody really came up with the big answer being it
but somebody said well you know it's impractical somebody always wants you to do stem they want you but being an English major was always impractical when I was an English major we called it pre-short order Chef that's what we called it because we thought you know like you're in pre-med or you're pre-law or something like that we were pretty short ordered Chef because there was no reason to take it but even as a bad student I learned stuff stuff filtered into my mind I was at UC Berkeley had this the second best English Department in
the country that was Yale and UCB so I was getting great professors and even though I was a dope and even though I didn't show up for things and even though I was drinking and chasing girls doing all the stuff that you think I was doing I was you know I I got something I learned for instance that the Greeks came before the Romans and the Romans came before the Europeans and the Europeans came before us that's an important thing you start to see oh there was a an idea working itself out over thousands of
years in great literature I realized that the West is unique in its ability to self-reflect that only the West's artists can win say the true Trojan War and then they can defeat the Trojans the Greeks can defeat the Trojans and then the Greeks write plays about how badly the Trojans uh were treated I mean that's only in the west you know you think about the Middle Ages and you think oh back then everybody was Pious and holy and the church was in charge and then you read Chaucer and is filled with sex people are constantly
writing to me why is there so much sex in your books it's not like the good old days they should read some Chaucer you know if you got you can get a translation and get it in Modern English instead of middling says girls sticking their butts out the window because guy wants a kiss and it's too dark for him to know then like farting in his face I mean it's like amazing stuff that is going on in the depths of the Middle Ages in the 13th century and then of course there's Shakespeare who in some
way invented who we are that is he put on paper what it means to be a man and a woman in a Christian world people say he's a secular artist that's not true it's just that his Christianity is so deep it just permeates the world and people don't have to talk about it all the time because it's just the way the world works so you break the more you can break the moral web you can bend the more web but the more web snaps back in Shakespeare all the time if you kill your way to
the top of the throne uh the ghosts of the people you kill are going to come back and haunt your conscience and you or your life is going to become meaningless it's a realistic portrayal of life now you don't have to agree with Shakespeare you can think no I don't want to live that way you can think no there's a better way to live you don't have to uh agree with any of these guys but Visionaries are speaking to you from the past it is as if it's as if people had come to you in
a time machine and said this is what it's like and they're genius people they're not your professors who are second-rate people the are genius people with vision and talent that comes from God they're being spoken to by the muses from God this is what Shakespeare is doing he's channeling stuff he's not just thinking it up by himself you know the Folger Shakespeare Library one of the greatest Shakespeare libraries in the world what are they teaching over there go go look at their website exploring race and whiteness in Shakespeare now the funny thing about that the
funny thing about that Shakespeare says a lot of things about race he has a lot to say about race you want to read a great article about it go to City Journal and look up a nation of iagos absolutely brilliant article uh by one of our great yes by me I'm joking but it is still a good article about what Shakespeare has to say about race a nation of iagos but he's not talking with CRT if you're talking CRT critical race Theory you're not talking Shakespeare you're talking you he said it had a lot to
say about gender but if you're talking feminist Theory or queer Theory or critical race Theory you're obscuring the voice of the author and so when a kid says to you why should I learn this when I'm just learning you yeah I'm not learning genius I'm not getting a visit from the past this article goes on forever let me read some of the reasons people give give the writer about why this is happening technology it's technology it's changed me I probably read five novels a month until the 2000s if I read one a month now it's
a lot over the New York Times Ross do that don't that said the same thing he no longer reads uh great books I read great books all the time now I use technology but I read great old books all the time another one says young people are very very concerned about the ethics of representation of cultural interaction you think that just popped into their heads this is what they say she says um several teachers described young people as having an orientation toward the present to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past
the last time I taught says one teacher this last time I taught The Scarlet Letter I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences the sentences like having trouble identifying the subject and the verb their capacities are different and the 19th century is a long time ago it's not the 19th century being a long time ago it's you who the hell taught them in high school you did just the high school version of you it's leftists have taken over our education department so these kids are ignorant that's the problem the problem is
not they're oriented to the present it's that nobody's taught them about the past it's your fault that's why this is happening one teacher said there's a real misunderstanding that you can come in and say I want to read post-colonial texts that's the thing I want to study and his answer is that uh all the big writers you want to study the black writers and the Indian writers and the writers from other cultures they all read Dickens and she says one of the tragedies of the British Empire is that all those writers read all the British
books terrible tragedy guess what the British wrote better than anyone they were better at writing their books are better their language is better their insights are better I've read all the Europeans I've read a lot of people from other places the British and the period uh in the 18th and 19th century wrote better than anyone had ever written before Oh I'm a racist I'm all right but I'm not British I'm not British my race is Ashkenazi Jew the British were mean to oshkoshi Jews for 2000 years but boy oh boy there they sure wrote well
buried in this article one paragraph buried in this article foreign the author is very much alive says Robert Fagan a Robert false scholar and a longtime literature professor at Claremont McKenna which is a more conservative college and he said we are very concerned with the beauty of things with Aesthetics and ultimately with judgment about the value of works of art I think there is a hunger among students for the thrill that comes from truth and beauty and of course their enrollment is up their their enrollment is doing just fine when I went to Hillsdale one
of the students told me there that when the teacher uh it was actually Larry Arne I believe the president of Hillsdale made a speech about truth and Beauty about bringing uh living with truth and beauty and she started to cry because she had never heard that concept before when you say these kids are uh are oriented to the present it's you they did this to these kids the kids don't just grow up like that kids don't want to hear about the past until you teach them until you make it interesting and exciting and tell them
that they're getting something you know Maya Angelou terrible poet but but one of the poets who's always over praise because she's black right and she said she had this wonderful line where she said Shakespeare must be a black girl she read Shakespeare she said Shakespeare must be a black girl why did she say that because Shakespeare spoke to her she said the Poetry you read has been written for you black white hispanic man woman gay straight it has been written for you and that is the whole point literature art is like salvation it doesn't come
to the world it comes to you it is about you the present knows nothing about itself we know nothing about ourselves in the present but the past knows a lot because it's already gone and when learning how great minds great talents saw the past you learn about other people you get other people inside you you know I talk a lot on the show about what I call the great speculation which is the basis of the golden rule the golden rule is doing to others as you would have them do unto you but that is based
on the speculation unprovable the speculation that your inner life is as important to you as my inner life is to me and both are equally important before God that is the great speculation it's a two-part speculation it can't be proved but there it is you learn this by loving you learn it in marriage you learn it by having children and you learn it through ART because art is communing with another soul and if you can't hear the artist because some idiot theorist is telling you about feminism and queers and uh and race and gender in
a way that the artist wasn't talking about it if you don't let the artist speak you aren't going to hear anything if you don't think this is true look at the Arts now look at TV now look at the movies now nobody goes Nobody Cares nobody wants to see it why because the left is in control of the culture and the culture has turned to crap and the left can't figure it out what went wrong where are all the English Majors how could this have happened it's the same thing over and over and over again
it is them when will they wake up never we have to wake up for them we have to do it ourselves for more great content like And subscribe And subscribe to the Andrew klavan show wherever you get your podcast foreign [Music]
