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The John Batchelor Show

#Stanford: The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization in Palo Alto. Richard Epstein @HooverInst

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2023

⏱️ 16 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary


#Stanford: The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization in Palo Alto. Richard Epstein @HooverInst

https://www.hoover.org/profiles/richard-epstein
1900 Carthage

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is CBS Eye in the World. I'm John Bachelors. Modern liberal education. What does it

0:10.8

consist of? At least in part, awareness that we here in the 21st century in the United

0:17.1

States of America are the product of centuries, of challenges and adversity by men and women

0:25.3

we can't know, some who speak English most or not. And all of that adds up to Western

0:31.7

civilization in my college years in the 20th century. No more. I welcome Professor Richard

0:38.2

Epstein of the Hoover Institution, who introduces me to a program I had no knowledge of at Stanford

0:44.5

University, a distinguished liberal arts college. It's called itself College, which is

0:50.9

an acronym for civic, liberal and global education introduced into the Stanford curriculum

0:57.3

in 2021 with the intention of, quote, steer clear of the cultural issues that doomed Western

1:04.6

Civ. End quote. So my understanding is college is meant to replace or take the weight of Western

1:12.8

Civ in the 20th century. My education, Richard, a very good evening to you. College, what

1:18.8

is it look beyond steer clear? What is it steering toward? Good evening. That's a very difficult

1:25.8

question. To say that Western civilization courses are doomed is to make an extraordinarily

1:31.5

broad sweep and denunciation. But in fact, wholly, apart from anything that was set

1:36.8

on in Stanford, that was the temper of the times for the 20 ideas beforehand. It was encapsulated

1:43.8

in an expression called, we don't have to spend any of our time worrying about dead white males.

1:49.5

And when you start to do that as this kind of categorical denunciation, it's a kind of form of

1:55.0

intellectual impropriety at the very least because you're lumping together all sorts of people who

2:00.0

are very different amongst themselves, different ages, different languages, different perspectives,

2:04.7

different disciplines. And you're dismissing them all one in hand with a remark, which is not

2:09.4

applicable to any of them. So when I wrote this little essay about the Stanford program,

2:13.9

you know, in the class of dead white males, you have everybody from Palmer and through

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