Peaking Through Fingers: A Look at the Decline of Education

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, and the namesake.

That's Victor Davis-Hansen.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow with the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is the final episode we do before Christmas.

If you're...

You leave early before we get to the end of the podcast.

Merry Christmas.

Thank you.

Victor and I will be talking about a number of things today.

Actually, Victor will do the talking.

I'll ask the questions.

We have a lot on education and the university and academia.

But the first question we're going to talk about is Japan and its move away from pacifism.

And we'll get Victor's thoughts on why that's important right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor, I saw a piece in National Review.

It's on the website, it's in the new issue of the magazine.

It's called Japan Abandons Pacifism.

And

for those of us who, I'm 62,

our whole life that Japan, it almost seemed, and I could be wrong on this, but the perception was that Japan treated pacifism almost religiously, not more so than just the

byproduct of war, its defeat, that it had to be pacifist, but it seemed like that was part and parcel of what it meant to be Japanese that had developed and developed quickly.

And here's Japan, though, sitting next to the Soviet Union, in North Korea,

a hostile China.

And Japan...

has now decided, probably long overdue, although maybe this was long in the works, Victor, to say Sayonara, to pacifism and has begun a significant rearmament effort.

So this seems quite important, geopolitical stuff.

Maybe I'm overstating it, but Victor, what are your thoughts about this?

Well, it is important, but I think we should keep in perspective.

I think they're going up to somewhere on 2 or 2.5

percent GDP, which is a lot for them.

They were below 1 percent, but it's not up to 3 or 4 percent

that we want for NATO.

And it's probably not.

I mean, we at one time we were at 4%.

I think we're under Biden.

We've gone back down below, but it is important.

And

the Japanese are very worried because of the fate of, on the one hand, Taiwan not too far away from them and Chinese encroachment there.

the Chinese rhetoric that's coming out of Beijing that's anti-Japanese, the

surrogate Chinese power, i.e.

North Korea, that's sending missiles gratuitously into Japanese airspace,

the

tension, the frenemy relation it has with South Korea.

It's sometimes a staunch ally, sometimes it's

so embittered from the World War II treatment by the Japanese that it's that it's hostile to Japan.

So it's a very tumultuous region now.

And yet

they're much closer to us than they were in the 1970s and 80s with the so-called threat from Japan, Inc.

They've got a lot of problems with deflation, with they overreacted about the nuclear accident.

They have problems with energy.

They have problems with deflations, fertility.

The fact that they're creating a robust military is pretty amazing.

And they've got, they've even built a new carrier.

It's kind of funny.

It's called the Kaga.

Remember, the Kaga was, I think, with the Akagi, of the six, they were two of the most formidable of the six carriers that sailed or steamed 3,000 miles in late November and early December all the way off Hawaii with outbreaking radio silence and kept the fleet together in stormy weather.

And then those two, they were, I think they were built on battlecruiser hulls.

They were huge, the Kaga and the Akagi.

I think Akagi means

red tree, and the Kaga is flower blossom, but the flower blossom.

And that's their new carrier.

They had no qualms about saying we're going to name the carrier after our distinguished World War II carrier that bombed the crop out of the Americans at Pearl Harbor.

So

they're confident.

This came from the Abbey government that made this big change, and they're looking towards closer ties with the United States because of a common fear of China.

And because they're one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world,

they're way ahead of people in things like drones and cyber.

They're very good.

So even though they only have a population, I guess, of 135, 140 million, and they're right up against 1.4 billion.

The quality of Japanese arm, I mean, their arms will work like Toyotas and Hondas.

So

it's a big asset for the United States if we know how to appreciate it.

And if we could get South Korea to drop its animosity in the modern period to Japan and to arm like

Japan, and we had Taiwan, then that's a pretty formidable trio along with Australia.

Victor, is that animosity between South Korea and Japan

strictly about

Japan's treatment of Korea during the Second World War?

Or has it, are there other components?

It goes back before that.

Korea was part of Japan, I think, until 1910.

It had been

conquered.

And then

it wasn't just, yeah, it was the comfort women were

Korean women in general en masse were used as prostitutes.

Not prostitutes, that's an unfair word because they weren't paid or they weren't, it wasn't willing on their part.

Right.

They were, I guess a better word would be sexual servants or

slaves to Japanese soldiers.

And then it was mined and exploited ruthlessly for its natural resources during World War II.

And so it goes way back.

You know,

I don't know how that relationship is now, but in the last four or five years, I think both sides have real.

And Japan has apologized.

Japan has given some reparations, but it's never really, Japan, unlike Germany, never really fully apologized.

And,

you know,

Japan was

that's a whole different story, but Japan was never invaded.

And it was occupied, but not through invasion and a post-occupation.

And so it was never, there was never a bloody, horrific war on the homelands as it was in Germany.

And although it was bombed in a way that was just devastating, not just the atomic bombs, but the fire rates.

But anyway, we have a peculiar history, and so do the countries around Japan.

But in the year 2022,

they need to realize that they either stand together or they're going to die together.

I mean, they're going to die separately, excuse me, because China

got an agenda for all of those countries, and it's not good.

And the United States, when they look at the United States and they see that we're in a neo-isolationist movement, or we're $31 trillion in debt, or we're borrowing a trillion and a half dollars

a year, or we're in this woke madness,

and they see what's happening in Iran and Russia and China.

I think they just kind of wised up and said, you know what?

We're going to arm and take care of ourselves.

We hope the United States is on our side and will be a strong ally.

But if it's not and it's got too many internal difficulties, then

we can't rely on their security blanket anymore.

And I think if North Korea keeps pushing it with these missiles and China keeps pushing it with their aggressive rhetoric and they move on Taiwan, then you'll see Japan go nuclear.

They could go nuclear in six months.

They've got enough stored plutonium from their nuclear industry.

And you know what?

When they go nuclear, it's not like North Korea going nuclear, Iran going nuclear.

I mean, they would make sophisticated nuclear weapons that were comparable to any in the world.

Right.

Well, Victor, moving on from Japan, there's a lot of things, academic, academia, to get your thoughts on.

Some of the questions we'll talk about or issues we'll talk about have to do with the decline in professorships across the board in the liberal arts, particularly in history.

But let's get this started with your thoughts on the new president

of

Harvard University.

There's a great piece I want to recommend to...

our listeners they'll find on a website called the Manhattan Contrarian.

And this, someone sent it to me, but I noticed today, Victor, it was also linked to by

Powerline blog, which I know you check out every

morning.

So, Claudine Gay, who's currently the Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, will be replacing on July 1st,

resigning or retiring president Larry Bacau.

I'm not sure that's how he pronounces his name.

She has

a black belt in all things DEI

at Harvard.

She has quite a record of taking on conservative or conservative leaning, or let's say non-leftist professors at the university.

The famous

case of Roland Fryer, an economist who put out a study

on

blacks in America that didn't toe the line properly on how the left wants blacks in America to be perceived or portrayed.

Anyway, as an ideologue who is now the president of what many people consider the most prestigious university in America, if not the world, your thoughts on that, Victor?

Well,

there's two things.

One is specific to Harvard.

So she was,

I think, dean of the faculty before.

And I only

came across her name because I don't follow Harvard affairs.

She was the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, I think.

I came across her name because of this.

Yes, she was.

This brilliant economist, Roland Fryer, African-American economist that we at the Hoover Institution for years had been interested in because he was,

you know, and the article, as I remember reading it, included a quote from, I think, Glenn Laurie's that he was the best economist of that generation.

So he was a big, and he was beloved at Harvard.

And then, of course, he did some research that found that there wasn't a systemic pattern among police of

prejudice or violence toward African-American in custody and that or arrest and that just enraged everybody because he was basically through his research undercutting the entire premise of the current African-American academic movement and particularly someone like Ms.

Gaze.

And what is that, that there has been such systematic racism that continues as a legacy of Jim Crow and slavery in the United States and will never end,

that repertory action has to be substantial, immediate, and forever, forever,

because of the endemic and built-in racism.

And therefore, African-American elites must be hired in disproportionate numbers to correct these pathologies.

And then when you have someone who is African-American go along and said, my research doesn't show that, I'm sorry, then he has to be destroyed.

And she was the point woman in destroying him.

And how do they destroy him?

They, and I'm doing this from memory, but as I remember, somebody he fired said that he had systematically been harassing her.

But when it came to finding evidence, it was something like comments that he just said out loud, like, oh, I have a good strategy because this is how I got laid in high school.

Ha ha.

I mean, it was off-color, just talking.

It wasn't, it was, you know what I mean?

It was not sexual harassment.

And a Harvard board found out that it was maybe

irreverent or uncouth.

And they suggested, as they always do, indoctrination, you have to go take sensitivity training.

And then

it was, for some reason, bounced up to her committee, of which she was a very prominent member, and she wanted to fire him.

And of course, that was a little bit too much for the president, but they did suspend him, as I remember, for two years without pay.

And she,

the irony of all this is she's an elite.

So the idea that she's going to adjudicate oppression and racism, she went to Exeter.

She went to every, I think Stanford.

She went to every, she was among the elite of the elite, of the elite of any race, of any class, just the elite.

And so that, and so she becomes an icon or metaphor that when you get people

from the so-called marginalized community that in their entire life has been defined as one of privilege as defined by prep school, Tony Universities, fast track,

promotions, hiring, et cetera.

And then they are the arbiter of what's wrong in America and what is oppressive in America and what's discriminatory in America.

And it's based entirely on race.

I would say to her, Have you ever been to Tulare, California?

Have you ever been to Carruthers, California?

Have you ever been to Riverdale, California?

Because I can show you a lot of poor white people that have never gone to college.

They have no opportunity to go to college.

They're dirt poor.

They've never really

advanced beyond the lower middle class.

Their grandparents came from Oklahoma during the Dust Bow.

So race is not the arbiter, at least as you think it is, of poverty and oppression,

even in discrimination, as you think it is.

So, my point is

she would be very upset about a Roland Fryer because his disinterested research, and

he has no advantage.

There's no advantage to be an African-American genius.

And boy, wonder if I could use the word boy and not in the

stereotypical.

The Batman sense.

Yeah, the boy, meaning boy genius, we use of everybody

below 30 who's just

has such potential and has done so much, and then suddenly to find to engage in a research project whose results don't confirm the status quo of the affirmative action, woke, diversity, equity, inclusion industry, and then to still publish those results in the trust that people are classical liberals and disinterested and they will not object, and then to be essentially destroyed by

Harvard under the guise or the direction or whatever term we use of now, President Gay is pretty disturbing.

And

this is a larger problem, Jack, if I could just detour a minute with these Tony universities, because I know that you and I have discussed this data

that the humanities and history, some of the social sciences that are really humanities like history and literature, if you look at their faculty tenured positions or the numbers of majors, they've suffered drastic declines, 30%.

And what am I getting at?

I'm getting at that the laboratory of wokeism in academia takes place at about eight colleges.

These are the most influential.

These are the people who train the professors, the Harvards, the Yales, the Princetons, the Stanfords, the Berkeleys.

the Dukes.

These are the universities that train the people that go to Iowa State, or they train the people who go to Cal State Fresno, or they train the people who go to Michigan State.

But it's at those places that they can't afford to lose the humanities.

But when they come out of these elite Ivies

and they are woke, or they're still imbued with French postmodernism, and they have this jargon-filled vocabulary, and their research is so esoterical, and their politics and ideology drive out disinterested research and teaching and they are confronted with working class, middle class kids and they try to indoctrinate them.

We only look at the Antifa ranks and the people who are the AOCs who leave a Boston University indoctrinated.

But that's the minority.

The majority walk.

They say, nope, not this pig.

I'm not going to take this class.

Or they just snooze in the class.

And that's why majors are declining.

That's why faculty positions that are based on full-time equivalent FTE are declining.

So what I'm getting at is that

the people who are destroying the humanities in these Tony universities are never subject to the consequences of their own ideology because there will always be a history department at Harvard.

They can subsidize it.

They've got a 50 billion plus endowment.

Same with Stanford.

Same things happened to the Stanford History Department.

They become completely ideological.

And when they train PhDs, those PhDs go out and they replicate what they were taught.

But unfortunately, they don't have endowments where they end up teaching in large part.

And therefore, they ensure there's going to be massive cuts in their own field.

So we're talking about collective suicide.

If you're a young person and

you're interested in history, and you want to know

about the exploration of the Americas or or the Civil War, or you want to know about World War II or classical Greece, you don't really want to sit into a class and have somebody say,

you know, the Civil War was really about false consciousness on part of white people and their need to atone for all the sins.

And

Harriet Tubman was the hero, not Ulysses S.

Grant.

You don't want to hear that.

Or you don't, if you hear about, you know, World War II, you don't really want to hear that the Pacific campaign at Iwo Jima and Okinawa was racially motivated and was

characterized by hatred of Asian people.

And that's what these courses are.

Or

if there are those courses,

but if they're not those courses, they're these esoteric, narrow dissertation topic spin-offs that these professors who are not broadly educated.

So it's a rhetoric of gender, you know.

I'm going to teach about the rhetoric of gender or transdressing in the Middle Ages, or I'm going to have a seminar in

sexual ambiguity and the Roman banquet or something like that.

And nobody wants to take them.

So these IVs and these prestigious schools, they destroy interest in the humanities and history.

And that's reflected in crashing,

descending faculty positions and lower general enrollment in general, and in particular, particular, fewer majors, and the death of these disciplines altogether.

But it's not going to affect the people who kill them.

Kill people.

Right.

They've got theirs and they've got it pretty well, too.

I mean, we have, yeah, Princeton professor bragged that he thought classics should die.

Mr.

Peralta, I guess what was his name?

Daniel L.

Was he also a classics professor?

Yes.

Yeah.

He was a classics professor.

Suicide.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

He said that, you know, he was one of the people who ensured that classics at Princeton

would not have a Greek language requirement.

And so I think it was

his name came to me, Daniel L.

Padilla Peralta.

And he said he wanted the field to die.

But when he means that, he means classics of a program, say that I started with help from Bruce Thornton and others, and now is very successful after I left, probably as successful or more successful.

And teaches mostly underprivileged people from the lower middle classes, many of them Hispanic, teaches them the value of Western civ composition skills, historical knowledge, classical languages.

Well, he means that he wants that to be destroyed.

But it won't, when they destroy classics, he just reinvents himself as a literature person and he'll have his tenured position forever.

And so that's how that operates.

So it's really neat and funny and cute and cheap to say, oh, I'm a classics professor.

I want to destroy classics.

I don't want to want Greek.

I'm a suicide nihilist.

Am I not cool?

And then the real, that filters down to an assistant dean at Cal State Fresno or San Jose State or Eastern Michigan saying, you know what?

If they're going to destroy classics at Princeton, they don't think Greek should be.

Why when the hell would we offer it here?

Right.

That's what happened.

Well, the snapshot, one article, Victor, on this topic from Inside Higher Ed

states that

between 2019 and 2022,

1,799 historians earned their PhDs, and only 175 of them are now employed as full-time faculty members.

People should remember one thing about academics.

There's a lot of things to remember, but one thing they should remember,

they are as right-wing and capitalist and self-interested in private as they are virtue-signaling, loud, socialist in public.

And by that, I mean the academic world is more exploitive of labor, whether it's graduate students or part-time teachers or untenured professors, than Walmart is of greeters.

So you can make fun of Walmart all you want, but you can go to any university and see some poor woman or guy who's teaching five classes a semester at maybe $35,000

cobbling together at the mercy of the chairman each year to get the classes with no benefits.

And then you can see the same class being taught by a full professor with tenure at five times the rate.

Or you'll see a full-time professor at Stanford teaching two or three classes a year and a lecturer teaching eight at CSU or nine or 10, 11,

and graduate students teaching for very little pay, and no one cares.

And that's what's the class element at the university is never talked about, but there's more exploitation there than ever.

And so, what usually happens is full professors, endowed professors, tenured professors in this new woke generation, they teach these narrow, esoteric, boring, dreary,

commissar-like classes, and they destroy interest.

And then they destroy, and when they retire, they destroy that tenured position, and it's farmed out to part-time teachers at half or quarter of the pay who are terribly exploited and will never get tenure and never get a full-time position.

And we call that, you know, academic liberalism or progressivism.

And you wonder about, is anyone actually getting educated well on this

rigamorole?

Yeah.

That's not the point, is to educate somebody.

Nobody

in these universities and history departments, or very few, say,

these 18 and 19-year-old students have a natural curiosity, or if they don't, I want to create one in the past.

I'm going to give them two things.

I'm going to teach them how to be inductive so that they look at the past and then they make a series of general conclusions based on that evidence, of which I will not interfere or try to change their opinions as long as they're not deductive.

In other words, they follow the methodology of inquiry, you know, like examples, diagnosis, therapies, prognosis in the medical sense.

And I'm going to give them the reference, the dates, the facts, the people, the wars, the pieces, the depressions, the renaissance, all of the things that they need to make that inductive journey.

And I'm going to teach them how to do that.

No, it's, I'm going to teach them very narrow fields.

And these fields are going to be

ripe fodder for deductive transformation and who they are.

So they're going to start out.

naive and I'm going to tell them just how awful I can select passages from history and teach them in such a way and grade their papers in such a way that they're going to agree with me that this is a racist, homophobic, protectionist, nativist, awful place,

in particular and the West in general.

And that's my duty to

graduate or produce legionnaires and the global cosmic war against the West.

Right.

And that's what they do.

They say they don't, but they do.

And the students, it doesn't matter what I say on a podcast.

It doesn't matter all of their stupid little apologies they print and you know letters to each other on the internet.

All that matters is students are walking and

positions are disappearing.

I wrote over this, you know, well over

1998.

And so it's been 25 years ago, Johnny Heath and I wrote Who Killed Homer.

And it was about the suicide of classical language.

And I think, with all fairness, that everything we forecast has taken place.

Although I didn't quite, and I don't think John did either, anticipate that Princeton University would eliminate the requirement of Greek language to be a classics major.

I didn't think, or that a tenured professor that's very influential would argue that classics should be destroyed, or one of their most brilliant scholars, Joshua Katz, they would systematically go out and try to destroy him personally, professionally,

because he wrote an article suggesting that when people take over a dean's office and won't leave, they're acting in this terrorist fashion.

That's where we are now.

And yet, there are conservatives who will give money to these institutions still.

If you're a conservative out there

and

you want to save education,

then don't take a gasoline can of your money and pour it into a burning inferno at Stanford or Harvard.

If you insist on doing that because you're an alumnus or you think that it'll help one of your relatives get into that campus or they will honor you, then try to be as specific as possible.

Say, I will give a million or a half million or a hundred or twenty thousand to this particular program under these conditions.

And when you do that, you will be severely ridiculed, probably, by the development.

They'll say, well, we don't really need it, we can't do that, or we can, but you have to insist on it.

And if they don't do that, you'd be much better giving it to Hillsdale College.

It's a place like that.

Hillsdale College, I can guarantee you, I've taught there 20 years that if you call up their development office and you say, I'm worried about

Western civilization and I'm worried about the teaching of history and I'd like more civic education, they will sit down with you and say, There's this program, this program, this program, and this program.

Here's the faculty, here's the curriculum, here's the name of the courses, here's the books they order, here are student reviews.

If you want to help this program, here are some of the suggestions that the program thinks that would help them, and you can give as you feel fit.

And I can guarantee you, donor intent will be honored.

It really is.

And Victor, transcending, in the case of Hillsdale, transcending the actual institution where people who

wish to help education

probably needs the help earlier on,

they have created this

classical school model, which is spreading significantly over the country.

And that's another place for people to show their philanthropy.

Absolutely.

The Hillsdale Academy model is sweeping the country.

And of course, the schools of education hate it.

If you really wanted to really reform higher education, I have a piece coming out tomorrow

in American Greatness about 10 things that could save America.

It's probably, by the time you hear this, it's been out.

One of them is you could really just say to school boards and to state school boards, I should say, that you should pass one law if you're going to pass any laws on the state level just say if you want to teach in k through 12

you do not need a credential issued by a school of education you need a one-year master's program in an academic subject and so if you are a preschool uh third grade teacher and you could get a math master's in math or you could get child development, whatever it is, but it would have to be an academic subject and not a woke indoctrination from the school of education and that would that would make a

a big difference it really would and that's and not not outlaw the credential just say you get a choice right just like you do it you know

parochial school you can have a teaching credential or you can have a nap master's in most of them sometimes just a ba jcs it's it's you can get a master you don't need a teaching credential to teach at a community college i don't understand that Why you have to have a credential to teach a high school senior, and that has to be from an education department.

But six months later, you can teach him

at a community college, and you don't need a credential.

All you need is a master's.

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense.

Well, Victor, there's more on things academic to discuss.

And I believe you've got something about Cornell University you want to discuss, but we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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So, Victor, a few more things on this right before Christmas edition

of the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

You had mentioned before we started recording that there was something about

Cornell University that you wanted to bring up.

Tell us about it.

Well,

this was

about either demanding as the new school in New York, I think it's a university, private, you know, it better than I do, left-wing, it was 10,000 or so students.

Right.

It's just typical of a left-wing university, 50,000 plus for tuition.

But the students have demanded that everybody get an A grade.

And Cornell students are demanding an N to

letter grades passive.

And this is a growing phenomenon at schools.

And if we just stop there, and I'll put a little dash, and I want to distinguish how this is different from the 60s even.

When I went to University of Santa Cruz, UC Santa Cruz,

I was on a waiting list to get in.

I mean, I thought that was the best place to go.

My parents wanted my brotherhood, it was there.

It was very, very hard to get into.

And I did not get in.

I had to wait, even though I had a whole year of advanced placement.

But, you know, I had, I think, a 3.95, but Selma High School was not competitive.

Most of the kids that were let in from prep schools and places in Los Angeles, top schools.

But my point is this, when I got there, finally I was let in almost the last week of summer when somebody declined and they took me.

But this is what there were no grades.

But it was so hard to get into, it wasn't really a dumbing down because the professor had to write an evaluation and they could be, I read some of the evaluations.

They were absolutely brutal.

So you got to pass or fail.

If you didn't come to class, you didn't take, they failed you.

If you did the minimum, you got a pass.

But then you had a page evaluation, and they could really either enhance or detract.

And they were pretty tough.

And,

you know, I got a, I took a senior political science class from a

very left-wing professor.

And I was only 18 and kind of arrogant and stupid.

And it was.

It was massive reading.

It was about 2,000 pages.

And he would turn on the radio so we could listen to radio Beijing and he would translate from China, Chinese to us.

And he would talk about China's Communist Party was a model for California, all this crazy stuff.

And I would write, you had to write five essays in 10 weeks.

It was just a lot of work.

And he wrote in his evaluation, I can still remember it.

This is

kind of obsessive, isn't it?

It's 50 years ago, Jack.

Kind of.

Go ahead, though.

And he gave me a pass and he wrote,

Victor Hansen is a first-year student who should not have taken this senior political class.

He was warned and the results confirm my admonitions.

He has an ability to write well and pose interesting questions on assigned topics.

But

the conclusion from my reading his five papers is his analyses are typically thin.

Thin.

And

that was pretty devastating.

And I remember when I went to graduate school, somebody read that and said, wow, were you stupid or what?

A professor was kidding me about that.

But my point is that it was very, in those days, schools that used SAT scores and GPAs and they had a mechanism.

It wasn't just everybody passes.

And when it was, when Santa Cruz blew up in the late 70s as a difficult place to be admitted and it radically expanded and the standards were relaxed,

guess what?

They got rid of the past fail.

And so now they went back to grades, at least until recently.

But my point is that this is the logical culmination of what we've seen in the woke trajectory, because once you went,

in the 1980s to proportional representation or proportional

admittance.

And that is you determined arbitrarily that this group is marginalized and that group is marginalized and this group is marginalized.

And therefore, we're not going to apply

the SAT minimum score or mean score or the GPA mean average or

the minimum average to this particular group.

And we're going to take this other group and this other group and deny them admissions that more than qualify because we in our saintly goodness want a diverse student body.

And then you trump that 80s paradigm in 2020, 21, and 22 by repertory admissions when you said, ah,

it's not just enough that 12% of the student body shall be African American or 10% shall be Latino or 2% should be Native American.

To make up for past discrimination, maybe

these

spoil systems should be increased by 3 to 5% for each grade.

Of course, we won't tell anybody that.

And then we have to take even a greater bite out of white males, to take one example, and perhaps Asians.

Okay.

And then you do this.

And then what?

Well, the problem is that you're not addressing the problem of a lack of parity in the sense that if African Americans' SAT scores or GPAs

are not competitive with, let's say, Asian Americans, or they don't meet minimum standards, then the problem was back in K through 12.

So, what you would do if you were intellectually honest and you really wanted to rectify the problem, you would insist that K through 12 be competitive, that you have private charter schools, academies, parochial schools offering competition to the public schools in the inner city of Chicago or the inner city of Baltimore.

You would want different paradigms, some school uniforms with mandatory Latin, but the point would be we are going to produce schools that are

competitive with Andover or the Menlo School.

And we can do it if we, and then you would not have to do any of this because the African-American student at six would have an education that was competitive with anybody else.

You could do that, but nobody wants to do that because that's hard and it's easily characterized and you'll be called all sorts of names.

So you just wait to do it on the back end.

But then what happens, Jack?

So you've got all these students coming into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and they have not on

standardized test or GPA performed at a level of the other students under the traditional requirements.

So something has to give, right?

Well, the first thing has to give is the individual faculty member then has got crosshairs on him.

Because if he starts in a German class or a Latin class or a physics class or a calculus class to grade entirely on performance in class, and he has 25% of the students have not met the statistical entrance requirements of the past that were pretty,

whether you like them or not, maybe they were unfair or maybe they were biased in the sense that kids that had money went to camp and studied the SAT.

But whatever the reason, at the back end, they were a pretty good determinative who had computational and reading and writing skills to do level at this expected level of work in college.

Okay, so what do you do if you're a professor of these courses and you start giving C's

to,

you know, just C's, you look at, you don't even look at the name on your papers.

You just correct them.

If you're in a social science or humanities or your standardized multiple choice in physics or math.

And you notice at the end of the semester that the names of people getting C's are disproportionately maybe

of a marginalized community.

And you keep doing that.

And the new

ubiquitous, what, diversity coordinator, the the assistant provost, the dean, the special assistant for diversity, equity, and inclusion says, ah,

this professor and that professor are racist because they have a systematic bias that's revealed in the percentage of people who don't get good grades based on their race, based on the percentage who do get good grades.

And if they argue that they're just using standards, I will contest that because the standards are warped.

They are racist.

So how do you solve that problem?

You solve it either two ways.

The faculty capitulates and said, I'm not going to die on the altar of standards.

I'm 45 years old.

I'm tenured.

I have a good life.

You think I'm going to get on the wrong side of these student groups and call me a racist and ruin my career?

So I'm just going to give everybody C,

either give them all C's or give them all A's.

And that transforms enough people have done that.

So people at the new school said, we all want A's.

We demand that everybody get an A.

And that's one of the student demands.

Or

they

grade, a few of them grade according to what people earned.

And then that enrages people and said,

I, you know, I was in Lenin this university and I had all these hopes to be the first in my family.

And I'm doing all this.

And Professor X gave me a C and just crushed me.

And it was so unfair.

And there were racist things.

I go back and I remember now.

And her mannerisms, her way, they were racist.

They were.

And so we don't want any grades.

But this isn't because it was very hard to get into a university and everybody was pretty qualified.

And I want to say in my, to be in all candor, when I got to University of California at Santa Cruz, it was a new school experiment.

It, I think, failed.

This experiment failed.

But at that moment, it got the top students.

I did not have the competitive education that kids did.

from a rural high school.

And when I looked at what they had read and their math classes, I had good teachers, but it was nowhere near the level of preparations.

And for the first year

or two, all I did was stay in my room and study 18 hours a day.

I got the flu.

I just got, I didn't have a little social act to catch up is what I'm saying.

In other words,

it was very hard.

So I am very empathetic.

But as a result of what's happened, the admissions policies,

you know, the faculty is going to have to adopt no standards and give everybody good grades as the students at the new school want, or the alternative is a school at Cornell, that paradigm, and that is everybody gets no grades.

And I don't think they're talking about evaluations.

They're just talking about pass or fail.

And so then what happens?

to end this conversation.

So then what happens?

So you're an executive at Google and you're woke, and you've got a student

applying from, let's say, Stanford Electrical Engineering, and they have all A's or all B's.

And you've got a student applying from Cornell that's got all passes.

And you've got a student applying from Georgia Tech that has all A's.

And in your little devilish mind, you think,

I'm not going to bankrupt this company and have coders who can't code or computer science designers that are not.

And I can't trust the Cornell system.

I just don't trust it.

I don't know what that pass or fail means.

Or I feel that the Stanford degree now is so woke, I'm not sure that I trust those grades.

But back there in Georgia Tech, they still grade according to what you produce, and their admissions policy reflects it.

So that's happening.

And if we continue down this trajectory,

I think what's going to happen is,

and this, you mentioned, Jack, this Manhattan Contrarian article, and he pointed out in reference to President, if we continue down this, people are going to say, okay,

the Ivy League is back where it was in the early days when it was kind of a social network and you were rich or aristocratic and you got into Princeton or Yale.

But it wasn't really an academic powerhouse.

You either, in the old days, you learned religion or the other days, it was a social club.

Okay.

But it wasn't academic.

And so we're going to revert back to that.

And you either get into a university today on three criteria.

One,

you have some athletic skill.

Two, you claim that you're a member of a marginalized community.

Or C,

you are well connected.

You know the president, the dean, the provost is your uncle.

Your parents gave 10 million bucks.

You're a legacy or they're eighth in the family to go, whatever.

But it's not going to be merucratic.

That's what I'm trying to say academically.

You just don't, you know, you don't grow up in Des Moines, Iowa, and on a farm, and you get a perfect SAT and straight A's, and you're a white male, and you get into Harvard.

It's not going to happen.

You either got to be a marginalized person, quote unquote, or you have to be an athlete, or you have to have some leverage pull from either money or or contacts or alumni legacy.

Okay, so that's what we're going to do.

And

the second thing that this guy points out is

that's already happening, but people are still going to Stanford and Harvard, and they're harder to get in than ever.

And so he's making the argument that it's a cattle brand still,

not because it's a sign that a person is highly educated.

You said there's enough graduates that leave these places with these degrees that are clearly not educated.

That the names of those universities for a variety, whether they're athletes that leave, or whether they're legacies that leave, or whether they're marginalized people, whatever the reason was, they were admitted without the standard criteria, or they didn't achieve the standard

criteria

in the four years they were there, that the academic reputation is no longer there.

And a BA from Yale, Yale, or a law school degree from Yale doesn't mean you're going to be a top lawyer.

So then he says, well, what's the attraction?

And the attraction used to be, the fallback was, well, you're going to go there and you're going to meet Bill Gates' nephew.

And Mark Zuckerberg is,

his cousin is there.

And you're going to have to be a roommate with Alan Dershowitz's son.

You see what I mean?

You're going to meet all these movers and shakers.

So that's why you're going to go to Harvard or Yale or Stanford.

Are you going to meet Chelsea Clinton?

Are you going to meet the Obama

girls?

The point is, you're going to make social networking contacts that are going to pay off big time

when you graduate.

And somebody's going to say, hey, I got a startup in Silicon Valley.

My dad and a bunch of people are financing.

You want to join?

And you're going to get that contact.

But, and this is what was, I thought, kind of disturbing about the article.

He suggests hinting me, not explicitly, but if you make, let in all these people

that aren't legacies and well-connected and made the maybe even the requirements, then you're going to lose that as well.

Because who,

if you're not going to let in the kids of the elite, right, with all the connection to at the same degree as you did in the past, well, then you're losing that attraction to that university for a lot of people.

In other words, if you're going to let your child in, and there's a lot of people who don't have those contacts or money, or there's a lot of athletes,

then the number of people that used to pay off is if you looked at education, which I think is terrible, but if you looked at it as an investment for a career, just a career or compensation, then that attraction is going to be lost.

And so what the ultimate

takeaway as he's dissecting the new Harvard president and what he believes her ambitions will result in is that eventually these schools, even with these multi-billion dollar endowments, will not be attractive places to go because half the people will say, you're not going to get a rigorous education there.

And when you leave, employers are going to know it.

And you're going to pay a lot of money for a mediocre degree.

And you'd be better off to go to

University of Ohio.

You can better go off to Ohio State or Baylor or somewhere or Texas Christian because you'll get a better education.

And then B, for the other people, say, yeah, but you're still, I'll still meet, you know.

Steve Jobs' niece and I'm still going to

meet the Google peoples.

No, you're not because there's not enough of them on campus, because there's so much competition to get that legacy billet that it's not going to be the laboratory of future aggrandizement.

And so they're not going to have that appeal.

It's a pretty cynical view because what the article is saying is it's essentially now a cattle brand.

It's no longer equivalent.

And this gets back to our own conversation that you and I had that I've talked to more than one person in Silicon Silicon Valley, and he kind of laughed.

And the other woman has laughed too, a woman.

And they basically said that there are people in Silicon Valley that no longer trust the degrees that come out of, say, Stanford University or

UC Berkeley.

They don't believe that the BA or the MA or even the PhD

is proof positive that that student has the skills that one would assume they had in 1980 or 1990.

And therefore, for them to hire that person, they're either going to have to offer them an SAT standardized test,

or if they're in coding, they're going to give their own specialized coding tests before they will hire them.

And they're not going to talk about it.

Yeah, Victor, if I may, layered onto that, on top of that, and beside it, is this new study by the National Association of Scholars

on this collision between DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, with STEM, science, technology, engineering, math, and how DEI has swamped STEM.

And

this is a broad study of many colleges and universities.

So you've got the branding problem.

You've got the DEI weakening these kinds of, you know, the coders,

the folks you've talked to who are looking for folks that have applicable knowledge and things like science, technology, et cetera.

And now even broader than the

Ivy League and the cattle brands, these other

alternatives are themselves being weakened.

So I don't know who's going to not have to be tested by employers at some point post-college.

The same thing.

And there's another collusion.

I mean, we're talking about...

mass suicide on part of these schools that they're going over the cliff at full speed.

And I I think they know they are and they can't stop it because if they were to stop it, they'd have a riot on their hands or social turmoil that

they couldn't deal with.

But the second thing is every faculty member that I've ever met in my entire life, that's no exaggeration,

at one time or the other has bitched about administrators.

And it always went like this.

You know, I used to know dean so-and-so and provost so-and-so.

Man, now they're into empire building.

They never teach.

They don't do any research.

Why are we got so many administrators?

And then they'll quote a data like the CSU

system, the largest college system in the world, 3% increase over 25 years in faculty.

I think 212% increase in administrators.

So what they always say is, we're creating these administrators, and they don't do anything.

They don't teach.

They don't do research.

They just administrate, but they create problems or they say they are intrusive.

They bother the faculty.

Well, that was nothing, nothing until this latest spate of diversity, equity, inclusion administrators, because they not only not do nothing, they do something.

And what they do is they get involved in hiring and say, you know what, we have a plan now that every new applicant is going to have to give a diversity, equity, inclusion statement.

And when we read that and we approve that at the dean or provost level, I don't care if

your applicant that you want to hire has written two books and he's a marvelous teacher.

I didn't like his diversity, equity, inclusion statement, his commitment.

It wasn't there.

Or

they're going to call up a faculty member and say, you know what,

we have across the curriculums diversity, equity, inclusion standards for all syllabi.

And your course on the Civil War or your course in introductory chemistry does not reflect a reading list or a type of teaching that advances diversity, equity, inclusion.

These are going to be people now dictating to faculty who are not nearly as well trained and have not published much and have not had much classroom experience.

And they're going to be lecturing distinguished scholars and professors about what they can and can't do in the classroom.

And then after they grade, as I said earlier, they're going to run some statistics and they're they're going to say, we've got a problem here at Brown, we've got a problem here at Duke, we've got a problem here at Amherst, because we have a particular faculty that again and again are grading severely people of color or marginalized people or whatever the group is.

And

that is an enormous overhead.

And to pay for that overhead,

the faculty who bitch are going to say,

wow,

I'm a Renaissance lit professor and I'm going to retire next year and they're not going to replace me.

I just got word from the dean.

In other words, I spent 40 years building the Renaissance department in art, philosophy, and history here.

And

I have about 30 students I trained.

I was their PhD advisor, and they're all ready.

to assume a position and I could hire any of them and they've eliminated them.

They're going to break up the position.

And yet, they just hired five diversity, equity, inclusion.

So, what are you going to do then when that traditional lament about administrative bloat collides with the fact that the latest surge in administrative bloat is all on the woke side?

And so, what do you do if you're a professor, if you're woke?

Hmm.

On the one hand, administrators siphon off all of our scarce funding.

And on the other hand,

I agree they're woke.

So, what will I do?

Does that mean that they won't monitor my class, or they won't monitor my grading, or they won't monitor my hiring because they're woke?

No, that means they will.

But it only means I can't criticize they will because I'm woke.

And we'll see how long that tension lasts, but it's already starting to fray.

And I guess if I was going to write an article and I said,

I'm the

chairman of Beijing University and electrical engineering,

computer engineering, calculus physics.

And I want to make sure the United States is a permanent second place to us.

And I want to destroy their universities.

What should I do?

The top universities?

And somebody would say, you've got to get them sold on the Commissar idea.

The commissar idea is the only thing that matters.

What the Soviet Union did, that's what Mao did, that's how Mao wrecked our country.

Remember what he did.

He made ideological concerns a necessity to be hired.

He made the curriculum reflect ideology.

He made the results biased by ideology.

And out of that, we've lost a whole generation of meritocracy.

That's what you've got to do.

And you've got to create racial, ethnic, social, cultural, class tensions within the university against this.

And then it'll be in a permanent state of turmoil and it will lose its commitment to meritratic excellence.

And then we will be able to design better airplanes and rockets and mass drones and batteries and so on.

And I think it's kind of ironic because that's what we're doing.

Well, Victor,

we are kind of way over, but I still have to ask you a question about something that happened on this state, December 22nd.

You're going to be limited to just a couple of minutes' answer.

And we're going to get to that right after this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So this podcast's happy home is just the news, John.com, John Solomon's website.

And this is the, I think, 78th

thereabouts

anniversary of

General Anthony McAuliffe responding to the German request that the American troops who were under siege

in Bastogne

surrender.

And his infamous and famous response was nuts.

So, Victor,

Bastogne, the Battle of the Bulge, lives

high in American minds of those who, you know,

love their country, follow America, you know, World War II history, military history.

But

it's something that really shouldn't have happened.

The American troops should not have been in a position to have been under siege there.

So I'd like to get your quick view on

why did Bastogne happen?

I'm going to put it this way.

Who's to blame that the Americans were put in such a tenuous position that the Germans almost broke through

the Ardennes Forest late in the war?

Well, I wrote about this in the Second World War.

So, I mean, got to put yourself very quickly.

It's December, mid-December, and it's cold, and you're on the Belgian border and the French border, and the huge Ally brilliant move toward the Rhine River is stalled.

And it's stalled because of your supply lines have lengthened all the way back to the D-Day beaches.

You never really freed up the major ports.

They were sabotaged by the Germans, or they're still held by the Germans in Niolistic strongholds, or you diverted

an enormous amount of Allied manpower and materiel for this crackpot Montgomery idea of Operation Market Garden, and you never got the final bridge at Arnheim.

And you wasted all of that and you shut down George Patton's Third Army basically in September, first week of September, when it was, I don't know what it would have done, but it was ready to go across the line.

Okay, you're stalemated.

And you're trying to regroup and it's cold and you've got rookie divisions in areas where you don't think they would ever invade.

They did go through the Ardennes in 1940 when they invaded France, but they wouldn't do it again in winter.

It's about, you know, I think Baston is 1,600 feet above sea level.

It's kind of like the Sierra foothills.

It's not very, it's, it's not an alpine 7,000, but it's difficult terrain and it's not conducive for heavy tanks in winter on icy.

So they thought they put green, green, two green divisions there, but in a hundred mile sector.

And Hitler was told not to do it.

They had heard from the Ultra that he was massing.

There was radio silence.

They couldn't account for certain divisions.

There was 250,000 of them under Mantofel, who was a pretty good, you know, he was kind of a cosmopolitan general.

He spoke fluent English.

So They were poised to strike on December 16th.

We didn't know about it, Jack,

because we couldn't couldn't have air reconnaissance.

It was snowy.

It was overcast.

They observed strict radio silence.

We picked up what we wanted to hear that the German high command didn't approve of it.

It was kind of the tragedy of von Rundstedt that he was against it, but it was called the von Lundstedt offensive because he was senior commander in the West.

And they blew across on December 16th.

And the idea was to cross the Meuse River and get through Antwerp and cut the Allies in half half and destroy that port so they wouldn't have any materiel and then sue for peace.

It's a crackpout idea.

It would drain all the reserves in Germany that were necessary for the defense of the homeland, but nobody thought they'd do it.

And

they spearheaded it by

people like Colonel Piper, who was a fanatic Nazi and SS divisions, and they burst across with Tiger and there was no stopping them.

And they thought they would get the fuel necessary, the gasoline.

Remember, the German tanks did run on gasoline, just like ours.

And they,

in some areas, the bulge was 50, 60 miles, and they destroyed two American divisions.

It was the most costliest land battle in Europe for the Americans.

And they had to do something.

And

Maxwell Taylor, the head of the 101st, was in the United States

on a

military conference.

They cracked the seam between the first and third army.

And Montgomery,

you know, the third and Montgomery's force and the first army.

And Patton was way down, 100 miles away, ready to go on an offensive when the weather cleared, and it looked pretty bad.

And Bastogne was this nexus because there were four or five roads.

I've been to Baston, and you can really see that the roads from all different directions

converge in Bastogne.

So the idea was they would swarm in and take Baston, and then they would have control to direct the offensive as it spread out toward the Meuse River.

And of course

the Americans knew that and they had a skeleton engineer crew,

a skeleton crew, and they were racing to get the 82nd and the 101st there.

And they did.

But on they were without supply.

They had no air support.

they were wildly outnumbered and the germans were fanatically confident that this was the final chance they would have to be on the offensive and they sent them this december 22nd very germanic note saying you know the tides of war have changed you have no choice we're going to annihilate you and

the brigadier general in charge of the one on 101 the 101st General Mikolov, just he saw it and he threw it in the trash and said, ah, nuts.

And he apparently did that all the time.

He said, nuts, nuts, nuts.

And somebody picked it up and said, oh, that's a good reply.

So they gave it to the German

envoys and they said, nuts, what does that mean?

And then they unleash their firepower.

And they should have just gone around Boston and reconnected with the Popper Rose.

But Germans, being Germans, they wanted to take the objective that was assigned and they wasted that whole week and they couldn't take it.

And meanwhile, George Patton said to Aikt, and this is very important, very quickly, he knew that this was going to happen.

Don't ask me how he did, but he knew that

they were too spread out.

The Germans had too much reserves that were unaccounted for.

The green divisions were all that was between them and getting back into Belgium.

He knew that they might go to the Antwerp.

And he had a plan

to make a sharp 90-degree 90-degree turn if ordered.

So he went to this famous conference at Verdun and ICAN.

Everybody had their head in their hands.

And what are we going to do?

We have no reinforcements.

We can't get these troops back up there.

It's out up in the wilds of the Ardennes, and they're just killing us.

And Patton said, I can move two divisions in 24 hours, 30,000 men in the snow, and I can be there in two days.

This is crazy.

Shut up, George.

I'm kind of exaggerating.

But he went out and he phoned and coordinated the code and that's exactly what they were prepared to do.

It was his finest hour.

They made a sharp turn

northward and they got there in time to save Baston.

And then almost magically,

and Patton was always having his weathermen pray to God for a change in weather, the weather cleared.

And then the skies came open.

And you know what happens with air supremacy, the P-47s, they just began to

really take their toll on the German advance.

It ran out of fuel.

It didn't get the fuel depots.

And then Bastone

is iconic because that was the one hurdle that slowed down the progress.

In other words, had they taken that three or four days earlier, they would have been on their way.

They probably would have got a fuel depot and made it not all the way to Antwerp, but maybe.

It was a stupid idea in the beginning, but it would have caused a lot more damage.

And the final fillip to the whole thing is this is the tragedy of George Patton, that he understood that the way to destroy a bulge was not to go back at the tip of it and slowly push it back to the normal line, but was to cut it off at its base and then trap a quarter million Germans and encircle and destroy them.

So when he

said something to the effect that this is good.

You know, you don't want to lose two divisions, but I'm going to, instead of having me go to Bastone, let me go right across the wide swap and you, and we'll have all of our remaining cut off that bulge.

And that will end the war because Germany's empty.

And they lost, the sad thing is they lost more total casualties after Bastone than before because they didn't get the bulge back until mid to late January.

And it was horrible fighting.

because the Germans were backpedaling, mining, destroying artillery.

And when they finally, so they lost all, they lost a terrible amount of material, manpower, death, destruction to get that bulge back.

Well, I think they could have cut it off.

And then, of course, when they crossed the Rhine in March, everybody was shocked that there was no, I mean, once they got across the Rhine, they just went wild,

late March and April, because there were no reserves, because the crazy, insane, unhinged Hitler had drained Germany of manpower, infantry, and armor to go into this offensive, which failed and lost in his last pockets reserves of manpower and tiger tanks and air support, etc.

So that was really the end of the war once you defeated the Germans in the bulge and you finally pushed it back and you across the line because in the West

there was nothing happening.

The people in the West wanted the war to end after the Bulge failed on the German side.

And they were very, there wasn't very many of them left that were battle ready after the Bulge losses.

But they did want to, if you're a German soldier, you want to surrender to the British, Canadians, and Americans.

You don't want to.

So the idea.

You want to end up in Siberia.

Yeah, you don't want to deal with the Russians.

So there was this idea that...

Well, let's just collapse.

And not that they didn't fight and kill a lot of Americans in late March and April and early May, but they didn't fight like they did on the Eastern.

And Patton, that was the tragedy of Patton.

You read War as I Knew It, and you look at Martin Blumenson's, the Patton Papers, and you start to see that beneath this show-off narcissistic, blowhard,

pearl-handled, whether they're ivory or pearl,

guns, and the shiny helmet, and the movie, all that crap.

You see a lifetime of discipline, military studies, a fluency, near fluency in French, a desire to read classical military history from Klaus Witz to Caesar, a brilliant mind, a record of pretty much continual success in North Africa, in Sicily.

And when he failed, it was usually because he was right and his commanders didn't want to take a risk on him.

And

this final great victory at the bulge of saving the stone, which could have been even greater had they listened to him, and then the initial disgrace, final disgrace in the post-war era where he said some things that were prescient, i.e., we freed, basically we freed

Eastern Europe from the Nazis.

That's why we went to war.

At least Britain started the war.

And now we've guaranteed that it's in the hands of similar fascists called the communists.

And so that got him relieved, and he ended up with a miserable death.

And

Eisenhower and Bradley were the standard

reference of military history for a half century.

And their

subordinates wrote history.

And when you read about Patton, except,

you know, for

a few,

Ladislav Farago or Dieste or finally Martin Blumenson, you finally get the truth after now Eisenhower's gone and Bradley's gone and Hodges is gone and their lieutenant colonels are gone and their colonels are gone and their

and the Army war.

You finally get a picture that the most uncouth and maybe unhinged officer was actually the most sober and judicious and capable military mind that the Americans have produced since William DeCompsey Sherman.

Yeah, great warrior.

By the way, Victor, I love one of my favorite war movies is Battleground, and it's a great scene because the Germans come and it's Van Johnson and George Murphy and others are waiting for the answer to come back, the eventual nuts answers.

But George Murphy blowing smoke rings in the face of the Nazi

Jeep driver sitting there.

It's just one of my favorite little scenes.

Yeah.

Was that 19, was it middle 60s with Henry Fonda and Robert Shaw?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It wasn't as big as Battle of the Bulge.

It was all about fuel, and they didn't get the fuel.

Yeah.

One of my favorite actors was in that Dana.

Dana and a minor point

role, Dana Andrews.

Oh, I love Dana Andrews.

Oh, my gosh.

He was terrific.

Especially the other colonel.

Robert Shaw was, yeah, he was.

Robert Shaw, as I remember, he was that German.

I think they had a name.

It wasn't Piper, but he was considered one of the

fanatical Nazis.

Right.

Panzer.

But it was Henry Fonda was,

you know, he was

Henry Fonda.

It wasn't a great movie, but it was another treatment of it.

Yeah, no, it's well, it's a movie.

Anyone that likes World War II movies has got to have seen that movie a few times.

Well, Victor, hey, we are way over, over, but

who's going to complain when you get an hour plus of Victor's wisdom?

So thanks to everyone who does listen.

Thanks to those who go on

Apple Podcasts to rank the show, rate it, and to leave comments.

We read them all, especially those that say shut up, Fowler.

But here's one that doesn't say shut up, Fowler.

It's by old AULD Monroe,

and it's titled HDF Keto Forever.

And those are the initials.

Humphrey D.F.

Keto, who was Victor, talked about

Keto,

classicist a couple of episodes ago.

Here's the note.

Carry on, Victor.

Love listening.

I've read most of your books, and I'm happy to have met you several times last December with Andrew Roberts and in 2003 or so during an ISI presentation with my teacher, Andrew Tady.

Toddy, hello again.

Was delighted to hear you mention Professor Keto.

I'm reading, coincidentally, Greek tragedy, 1939 by Keto.

Yeah, unpack my Greek books and have them as a goal to read.

Presently studying Italian and Modern Greek, NT and Xenophon and Homer next.

Have about 40 Greek books, 30 Latin books.

Anyway, Au Monroe,

very happy to be a happy listener.

Thanks, Richard.

Everybody should read H.D.

Kiddo's the Greeks, H.D.F.

Kiddo, the Greeks.

It's a masterful little introduction to Greece.

He also wrote a great book, as I think I mentioned, about traveling up in northwestern Greece, a travel book.

And

I took two courses from him, but I in Greek when he was in his 80s in Athens.

Right.

And

I don't think he liked me, but I sure learned a lot from from him on Greek grammar and

translation and things.

He once said to me,

I tried not to use notes or vocabulary lists.

I would just read the Greek.

I would really work hard.

And he turned to me and said, so you don't think you need to have a vocabulary list?

And I said, no, I don't.

I think I can read it.

And he said,

and you think that I should know that?

And I said, no, it's up to you.

And

then he said something that was very funny.

He said, and you're the one that doesn't think I'm going to make it up the stairs.

And he gave me a B plus.

And I thought I had all A's, but he gave me a B plus.

And he would have

five stairways up of this fifth floor.

And he was very elder.

And we'd hear, boom, boom, boom, boom.

And then we'd hear,

and I should have been empathetic, but I was a smart ass 19, 20-year-old.

And I said to one student, I don't think he's he's going to make it this time.

And when he got it, and he remembered that.

He was a humanitarian.

He was a non-Oxford Cambridge academic.

In other words, I think he was from Bristol.

He wrote a good commentary on Sophocles Ajax.

And I liked him.

I liked his wife.

Those were good years.

I was very fortunate.

I want to stop now, but I had very, for a guy who came out of a farm from Central Salma, I had some of the greatest classicists as teachers that were there in that generation.

I was very fortunate at the American School of Classical Studies.

Yeah.

Well, so do the students that had you, Victor.

So now we've got to just say one last thing to our listeners.

And I'm going to say thank you, Victor, for all the wisdom you shared today.

But hey, y'all have a very Merry Christmas and thanks for listening.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

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