What happened to Harvard?

By Robert Curry
Real Clear Wire

Harvard has rejected common sense.

When Lord Acton, the great 19th-century historian and champion of liberty, visited Harvard in 1853, he found that the college’s philosophy was common sense realism. Acton wrote that by “the third year, Reid becomes a textbook.”

The Reid in question was Thomas Reid, author of An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764). The common sense realist philosophers—especially Reid, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson—fundamentally shaped the thinking of America’s Founders and provided the foundation for teaching and learning in American colleges until Acton’s visit and beyond.

Harvard was not alone in its dedication to Reid and common sense realism. In fact, as Arthur Herman notes, common sense realism was “virtually the official creed of the American Republic.” Allen Guelzo puts it this way:

“Before the Civil War, every major [American] collegiate intellectual was a disciple of Scottish common sense realism.”

In his book Scottish Philosophy in America, James Foster states that it provided the “philosophical orientation… at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale, as well as newly founded colleges stretching from Rhode Island to Texas.”

By the time of Acton’s visit to Harvard, although it was then—and is still today—referred to as Scottish, America had become the real home of common sense realism and the center of its continued development. James McCosh, president of Princeton from 1868 to 1888, is a prime example of this trend. McCosh published prolifically, was admired for his clear and readable style, and was one of many American thinkers who kept common sense realism strong in the nineteenth century.

The core idea of common sense realism is that self-evident truths exist and can be known through common sense; common sense enables us to recognize what is self-evidently true. Read the Founders, and you will find them constantly referring to self-evident truths. They drew their understanding of self-evidence from Reid. Because the Founders’ thinking relied on Reid’s conception of self-evident truth, Harvard, Princeton, and other institutions at the time aimed to teach American college students how to think like Americans.

We have heard and read these words: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident…” all our lives. To understand the Founders’ conception of self-evident truth is to approach the very heart of the American founding. Jefferson and the other Founders held that “all men are created equal” is self-evidently true. According to Lincoln, it is “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” For more than a hundred years, American colleges dedicated themselves to teaching the philosophy that the Founders and Lincoln relied on in making that declaration.

Things have changed at Harvard and virtually every other American university. As in the early days of the Republic, American universities today share a philosophical orientation.

Postmodernism rejects truth and common sense. This explains how a Supreme Court Justice can declare that she does not know what a woman is; Justice Jackson received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and her law degree from Harvard Law School. But postmodern academics are often not content simply to teach their students to reject truth and common sense – the foundation of the Founders’ idea of America. They also frequently indoctrinate students in Progressivism, the systematic rejection of the Founders’ idea of America itself. 

This is the explanation for all those fabulously privileged young Americans demonstrating their violent rejection of the American way of life by rioting in the streets and chanting anti-American slogans. They could not make their anti-Americanism any clearer – and, for the most part, they were taught this anti-Americanism in American schools and universities.

Robert Curry is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea and Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World.

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