This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church and I'm joined as always by the Libertarian

Professor Richard Epstein.

Here at Hoover, Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford senior fellow.

He's also the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU,

and he's a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Now, Richard, you wrote an interesting column about what has caused the

decline of the study of Western civilization in American universities. This is a

topic I think we come back to every once in a while but there's a specific reason to get into it.

And today Richard I want to ask you, you know, three things really. I want to know why

Western civilization, why the study has declined. I want to talk about what it actually teaches people and I want to know why we can't get the same lessons elsewhere.

So let's start with the first one. Let's talk about why we're even talking about the decline of the study of Western civilization.

Well, I think the explanation really has to do with the change and the aspiration and the origins of the faculty.

When I took this course in 1960, universities were relatively monochromatic places and everybody to some extent was in the Western tradition.

It wasn't that we had everybody from Brooklyn, New York, although there was a very large fraction

of Columbia College that was.

But the faculty, every faculty member that I had

was somewhere or other steeped in that tradition.

And they were all believers in the tradition,

or at least in some fraction of it. So for them teaching these particular books

was the expression of what they thought was the sort of highest ideals of the human

mind and this was the tradition of Columbia College. So if you look on

...