WTW113: Harvard Professor Announces His Exit Because History Dept. Needs More White Classes

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:41 Thomas: And welcome to Where There's Woke, I'm Thomas, that over there is Lydia, how you doing?

0:00:44 Lydia: Hello. I am doing great because I'm excited to talk about a crazy professor. It's been a while since I've gotten to go down that kind of rabbit hole, and I'm looking forward to it.

0:00:54 Thomas: That's right, this is the Crazy Professor Show, might as well be called.

0:00:58 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. This guy's interesting. This me just tease it a little bit bit before we dig into the meat. This crossed, man, I think it was maybe like one of my Google alerts or something like that for woke, like anyone who uses the term woke.

0:01:12 Thomas: Professor Asshole is an Asshole, just a bunch of alerts on that. These damn kids, they can't understand Woke.

0:01:15 Lydia: Yeah. But is titled Why I'm Leaving Harvard. And it's published in Compact, which is like an online magazine that is severely paywalled. And I tried so hard to access this article without paying for it. And I couldn't and I was like, I have to know what this freaking thing says. So I signed up for compact for about a month and then I canceled It. But yeah, well, heavily, it's a conservative, conservative, uh, magazine.

0:01:25 Thomas: Compact?

0:01:36 Thomas: Whoa, heard of it. It. I like the idea of it being heavily paywalled. Like you had to pay like three different fees for it.

0:01:51 Lydia: Paywalled. Yes, yeah, it. It felt that way to me, honestly, um, but it didn't disappoint, you I sit here, um, poorer for having done it but richer in some ways too, because I think we have some really good material for today, and it sent me in, uh, an exploration of academia and, uh, tenure and the classics, of course. So I think we have a lot of fun stuff to talk about today.

0:01:53 Thomas: Oh man. I don't even know. So someone's leaving Harvard hard over it being too woke. I'm sure. Yeah.

0:02:19 Lydia: Kind of, sort of, yeah.

0:02:21 Thomas: Okay. Can't wait. I love that classically woke university, Harvard, famously woke. Can't wait to hear it. I push play on the podcast? I don't know

0:02:32 Lydia: Yet, because we have to let people know that if they want intensely,

0:02:34 Thomas: You want to support Lydia's habit of subscribing to have severely, severely paywalled, intensely, uh, conservative BS crap, then go to patreon.com/wherethereswoke, and 100% of your donation will go to conservative media.

0:02:43 Lydia: Yeah, overwhelmingly, pick your adjective.

0:02:59 Thomas: It's exactly, no, sorry, no, no, 98% of your donation, no, just kidding, uh, big drive.com. Thank you for supporting, everybody, we love you, and we'll take a break and get to it.

0:03:00 Lydia: No.

0:03:15 Thomas: Right, so an asshole says what?

0:03:17 Lydia: Yeah, exactly. So I'm going to start off with part of his article. I think we're going to read quite a bit more of it, there's a lot that we're going to want to break down. So just kicking it off, this came out end of December, and so many things were going on, but I was like, oh, I got to hold on to this. I need to do this article. So it starts off, two weeks ago, I gave my last lecture at Harvard, where I've been a history professor for 40 years. I don't even think I said his Name. His name is James Hankins, and we'll hear from him soon. My four decades of experience at one of the world's leading universities have given me a unique vantage point to trace the replacement of Western history by global history.

0:03:41 Thomas: Oh. Wow.

0:03:56 Thomas: Just, just thought a thought that, like, this is, this, this guy's retirement plan, like, he didn't save for his pension or whatever, he's like, Oh, I've been here 40 years, shit, I don't have an ounce, I don't, I don't have a dollar to my name in retirement, all right, well, um, I quit after 40 years, the woke kids have made me quit, just, like, that's his way of bankrolling, uh, that's

0:04:03 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. So funny. So I have theories about this, too, you'll and hear about it two more sentences.

0:04:21 Thomas: I imagine his financial advisor, like, going, like, okay, I think you should do this.

0:04:26 Lydia: There's a lot of money in the right wing. This change is part of the reason why the younger generation finds itself in a state of moral and intellectual disorientation.

0:04:26 Thomas: Sure. Isn't sure the hell isn't, sorry, the fact that we're not reading no, that's, uh, oh yeah, because the global is, the globe is just moral turpitude, but, but west yeah stupid

0:04:39 Lydia: We're not doing Western Civ as much as we're doing global history. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, any other culture except Western culture is, immoral. My decision to retire was not a sudden one. I am coming to the end of a four-year retirement contract that I signed in the fall of 2021. That year, I decided I no longer wanted to teach at Harvard. And so then he gives reasons for this. One of the things, well, OK, I'll have you guess. What do you think sparked his decision that he wanted to leave Harvard?

0:05:18 Thomas: Four years ago, the Israel thing already, oh, okay.

0:05:19 Lydia: No. 2021 is what we're looking at.

0:05:22 Thomas: President Biden? I don't know.

0:05:25 Lydia: So it was COVID. There are COVID requirements. Mm hmm. And

0:05:28 Thomas: Oh, really? Oh, geez. I've like moved past that in my brain, like that anyone could still have. Okay.

0:05:34 Lydia: So he says, "We had just endured almost two years under the university's strict COVID regime. This was a form of emergency governance that mirrored to a fault the whole country's uncritical acceptance of" in capitalized "the Science, and its proclivity, when backed by public power, for tyrannous invasions of private life."

0:05:40 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, uncritical. I cannot stop hearing you idiots criticize it. It's been five years and I've still every day. I feel like I hear somebody criticize the response to COVID that happened for two seconds until everyone quit. It.

0:05:57 Lydia: You keep going. Yeah, we're hearing about it now from you.

0:06:07 Lydia: Yeah. At Harvard, professors were told we had to lecture in masks and give seminars on Zoom. Neither practice accorded with my idea of liberal education.

0:06:22 Thomas: A pandemic, you see.

0:06:23 Lydia: There's another reason why he decided to retire. What do you think the other reason is?

0:06:28 Thomas: I don't know. Beyond this, the wokest? I don't have

0:06:31 Lydia: The Year earlier, the university had collectively taken a knee during the, in capitals, "Summer of Floyd." The

0:06:39 Thomas: Summer of Floyd. This is okay. So this is a throwback. I think what's what's killing me is somebody being on the time delay of like four years ago, I signed a retirement contract. So I have I have to go back to like four years ago stuff. And I'm just not in that that mindset right now.

0:06:40 Lydia: Yeah.

0:06:55 Lydia: I Think that's so interesting, like, like this idea that I signed a retirement contract four years ago and I've had four years to plot how I'm going, going to write this essay.

0:07:03 Thomas: Yeah. Well, or my question was going to be, has he written this a bunch of times, but like, was he not allowed to talk about it?

0:07:09 Lydia: Oh, we don't have the details. We don't know.

0:07:11 Thomas: No, I mean, like, was he Not allowed to announce that he was retiring or not? You know, like wouldn't you have already done? He could have already Done an article that was like, I'm going to retire because of this bullshit.

0:07:22 Lydia: Will say he doesn't actually have like a huge online presence. He contributed to Harvard Crimson, their, you know, student newspaper once that And it was about pushing back on and ending legacy admissions. So he wrote a piece about that.

0:07:39 Thomas: Another great take.

0:07:40 Lydia: The only other time I really see him in the Harvard Crimson besides this piece, and you know, we'll get into where he is now, is a 1991 article, history prof, History.

0:07:52 Thomas: Why the age of consent is too high.

0:07:54 Lydia: Prop denies charges of sexism, so, uh, you know, we can get into that if you want to, but uh

0:08:00 Thomas: That was him writing about another professor, right? No. He did some reporting on a different, no, that's obviously a

0:08:03 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. No, yeah, he, he allegedly said, quote, feminists have invented sexual harassment and date rape in order to gain dominance in our society. Yeah.

0:08:13 Thomas: Rape, that's, wow.

0:08:15 Lydia: One of the students said, I turned around after the comment, and every girl in the class was sitting there with her jaw dropped, including my section leader. Um, male student in the class said people took it that he was saying that date rape and sexual harassment are kind of being made up, in a sense. It sounded really bad, uh, and then apparently, in response, Hankins, during the class, that, I hope one of you won't report me to the Dean of Political Correctness.

0:08:29 Thomas: Crap. Dude, oh, My god, what year? Oh my God, these idiots have been doing this forever. It's so consistent, it's nothing new, it's the same bullshit. How did he not get fired then? God, god, nothing ever happens to these idiots.

0:08:49 Lydia: Well, so here's his, his statement, nothing ever happens. Here's his statement in response. I use the word invented, and that was the origin of the problem. Feminists do claim to have invented the concept of date rape, but the reality is there and has always been there. People thought I was denying the reality of date rope, which I don't deny. I didn't say that feminists use this as a way of controlling the world or anything like that. This is a natural reaction of the female sex to get control of its relationships again after the anarchy of the sexual revolution. Yeah. Yeah.

0:09:14 Thomas: Are you talking about always love the, yeah, keep explaining, keep explaining what you were thinking. I'm sure it will make it all better.

0:09:23 Lydia: He explicitly said, I'm not going to make an apology because I don't think there's anything to apologize for. But I am going to explain tomorrow what I meant. And then, of course, he later goes on to say he said that his own wife, quote, has been sexually exploited a lot. So, yeah, um, trying to, like, indicate, like, no, this is serious to me because my wife has been sexually exploited a lot, yeah, so exactly, this is back, 1991, you know, uh,

0:09:39 Thomas: God, a lot. Yeah, some of my best friends have been sexually exploited a lot, a lot look, she's been sexually not just a little bit, either, not just like one of you Johnny-come-lately's. That is so Jesus, these people

0:10:01 Lydia: I know, I know, it's incredible. Incredible. So during the summer of Floyd, for him, I think another piece of this that pushed him over the edge was.

0:10:12 Thomas: Dude, hey, dude, you were already over the edge. I just heard your take from night, the years when George Bush senior was in office for Operation Desert Storm. I heard you, you were уже over the age, uh, you didn't need to be put over the edge, you were all ready there. You're an asshole. You've always been an asshole forever.

0:10:18 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. So he thought that the way that Harvard responded in the wake of George Floyd's murder was going to be virtue signaling. So he wasn't like initially really concerned with it.

0:10:37 Thomas: Was was going to be virtuous.

0:10:38 Lydia: Yeah. Like like he thought it was goingto be like, oh, Harvard, you know, just kind of like pretending or whatever. And then he was on the receiving end of this because, quote, in reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020, I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program. In past years, this candidate would have risen immediately to the top of the applicant pool. In 2021, however, I was told informally by a member of the admissions committee that, quote that, meaning admitting a white male was, quote not happening this year.

0:10:38 Thomas: Oh, oh, I see, no, you weren't no, so there were no, no white males were admitted that year, I guess, if we checked the records

0:11:08 Lydia: Yeah. Right. And that's one of the biggest things. I like spent so much time looking at demographics of is the history department. It is historically incredibly white, incredibly male. And this has been a pervasive problem for decades. And like, you know, the the various organizations around history scholarship have been trying to find ways to expand this. And, little you pin in this, teaching history related to other countries.

0:11:43 Thomas: Like, hey, step one, maybe don't tell your students that, um, date rape was made up by feminists. That would be just to get more women involved, you know, that would be one way.

0:11:53 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. And also teaching history relevant to other people and their heritage, I think, is also a way to encourage that. That. This is something that really, really bothered him. He said that an undergraduate that he had tutored at school, he said, who was literally the best student at Harvard, was rejected from all of the graduate programs to which he applied. He, too, was a white male. Applied to various graduate programs, I don't know that he necessarily applied to Harvard. I don't see anywhere that he applied to Harvard, so James Hankins' position wouldn' matter.

0:11:58 Thomas: Uh-huh, that could help that could help so somebody that so his student oh,

0:12:27 Lydia: Yes, he said he had tutored him.

0:12:28 Thomas: Was applying elsewhere, and they didn't get in somewhere? Oh, okay.

0:12:30 Lydia: Yeah. I called around to friends at several universities to find out why on earth he had been rejected. Everywhere it was the same story from probably all of his white friends.

0:12:39 Thomas: White yeah, Yeah. Oh, no, this is made up. This is not real.

0:12:43 Lydia: Graduate admissions committees around the country had been following the same unspoken protocol as ours. And then he said the one exception I found to the general exclusion of white males had begun life as a female. So,

0:12:58 Thomas: That's so weird. So if we go to the records, we'll see that there just aren't white men in college at that time. Like they're just they don't all of sudden. Isn't it weird that every university just all ofa sudden there weren't white people there? It was alarming. I got to say, I'm on this guy's side.

0:13:05 Lydia: Mm-hmm, mm‑hmm, yeah. He goes on to talk about where he's going. Do you have an idea of where he might be going? Well, so he's not quitting teaching. He's not retiring as a professor. He's just moving to a different school. And I think we have a couple choices here.

0:13:21 Thomas: Hell. Hell. Yeah.

0:13:31 Thomas: Hillsdale?

0:13:32 Lydia: What, yeah, what state do you think he's going to end up in?

0:13:32 Thomas: Oh god. Florida? Is he going to Oh, is he going to the stupid university, the

0:13:35 Lydia: Yeah, Florida. No, not New College. He's going through University of Florida because they established the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education. So this is under Ben Sasse.

0:13:38 Thomas: Oh, Okay. Trying to take back Hamilton, like, we're gonna reclaim our word? You're not allowed to use that word, it's ours.

0:13:49 Lydia: Yeah. It's ours. He says, The reason why is that the Hamilton School is committed to teaching the history of Western civilization. When late liberal pedagogy replaced Western civilization courses with global history, serious harm was done to the socialization of young Americans. When you don't teach the young what civilization is, it turns out people become uncivilized. And I was aghast when I read that sentence. I was like, Jesus Christ.

0:14:16 Thomas: Wow.

0:14:27 Lydia: So, before we dig into talking about, like, Western Civ courses and stuff like that, because I think we should talk about that, I want to hear from the man himself when he gave an interview to, wouldn't you know it, PragerU.

0:14:23 Thomas: So obviously racist, yeah, this

0:14:40 Clip: So why should the American people care that an institution like Harvard University is no longer prioritizing the teachings and virtues of Western civilization? What I'm talking about is the failure to replace anybody. It looks like we're being zeroed out.

0:14:54 Thomas: Looks exactly like, what you would think of

0:14:55 Lydia: Yeah.

0:14:56 Clip: Somebody has decided that we're going to not hire any more Western people, and instead they're hiring more global historians of various kinds. So this is, and it's, it's the acknowledged direction of the department that they have wanted for, well, 30 years, to go in the direction of global history, international history, transnational history. So what that means is that if you studying the west at all, you're normally studying empires and colonialism and things like that. You're not studying the French Revolution. You're not studying the Enlightenment or the Reformation or the English Civil Wars. We don't have any courses in those things. There's no American history survey, there's no Western history surveys. So basically, European history has been

0:15:01 Thomas: No, more Western people Oh like in terms of topic, okay,

0:15:02 Lydia: Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah.

0:15:20 Thomas: Is that not part of history? Right,

0:15:51 Clip: Dissolved

0:15:51 Thomas: I I'm gonna, I'm gonna pause them right there, the, the number of students who are taking these history classes, classes, how, I didn't take a history class in college, like, not a one. What, how many people, like, then, I, maybe you have some gen ed, and and maybe he could make the argument that, like, oh, now they're, the gen ed is not like that, and so that, but it's kind of a, it's, it's tough to to try to make the agreement that, like, civilization itself hinges on, like, a general education course that maybe some students take, because those aren't required, usually take different

0:15:52 Clip: Into ...

0:15:57 Lydia: Mm-hmm. Right.

0:16:24 Thomas: Ones in different subjects. I had, again, not a one in history, nothing. I hate history, or I hated, I hated history, just as a class, like, I wasn't good at it. I was interested, and I'm more interested than ever in history itself. I just was not good, like at that kind of class, yeah, so I was like, well, no fucking way, I'm taking that. And I just didn't. And I, the number of students who take a history course might be some, what could it be, 10%, 20%? But the amount who take more than one, to the point where, like, even matters, you know, like it's an actual focus of what they're doing, it's got to be a fraction of a fraction. A college students.

0:16:39 Lydia: Memorizing dates and, yeah, yeah?

0:17:02 Lydia: Found an article on historians.org. This is a serious problem for people who care about history and academia, the decline in history majors. It is really, really bad. The article starts out, history has a majors problem. It's fallen precipitously after the Great Recession of 2008. an eight.

0:17:08 Thomas: What is? Oh, yeah, yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. Hmm.

0:17:21 Lydia: It's improved a little bit, but usually what you see is double majors, right? You don't see a dedicated history major, which I think is fine. I don't think it's problem to double major. I think that's really great. I wish I had double majored in something because I just wanted to get out of college as fast as quickly.

0:17:25 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that just aren't the jobs, I imagine, where people are like so. Specifically And after that time, when people get way more sensitive about like, oh, shit, I got to do something that makes money.

0:17:36 Lydia: Right. Yeah. So it says in 1967, okay, if we go all the way back, history accounted for

0:17:49 Thomas: Back when this guy was a young, budding, racist piece of shit, KKK member.

0:17:56 Lydia: Of all bachelor's degrees.

0:17:57 Thomas: And that's like the heyday. That's like, yeah,

0:17:58 Lydia: That was the heyday. And so as of 2019, it was slightly less than 1.2% of All-Bachelor's degrees, and again, that could include people who are double majoring. So it's something where do struggle to have have people pursuing this major.

0:18:16 Thomas: I hear all that. But just from the structure, like if you're just a person hearing this guy, I think that a lot of people and I myself for a second went into the mindset of like, oh, yeah, we're not teaching kids history. But he's a professor at fucking Harvard, that like it, would be one thing if you were trying to say, and they all, I know they also do try to say this, but I'm taking this guy's arguments. If you're trying to say like, oh, well, you know, in elementary school, they're only teaching the blah, blah, blah. You'd be like, oh, okay.

Well that's affecting kids. I guess this is like, nobody is affected by it. Like fucking nobody is effected by the choices of history taught at universities. The only people who are RP are a select group of people who want to do that. And they should be exposed to a bunch of different history. That's probably good. That is not all. If you want to try to pin like the collapse of our civilization on a class that 1.2% of people take, take maybe, you know, like, and, and that class being slightly different than it was, it's just silly. It's so hysterical.

0:18:29 Lydia: Mm-hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. It's also, I think, one one of the things, too, that he really gets hung up on is, you know, that we had mentioned before is the global history and the ideas there. But again, I'm just going to reiterate

0:19:31 Thomas: I love how it's either, it'S either Western or global. Like he said, French revolution. I was like, well, that sounds global, but no, but now they're the one of the good ones there.

0:19:34 Lydia: Right, yeah, exactly, he they're white people, yeah. And and they also, like, to claim, um, grace in Rome as part of

0:19:40 Thomas: Yeah. I got a question which is closer to us, France, or South America, just, I'm not very good at this stuff, but like, you would think that would be more relevant, like, just spatially. And we are way more involved, way more, as a country, in a lot of their history recently. That's important. I don't know. No shit about that, because no one teaches it.

0:19:45 Lydia: Yeah, yeah, definitely, Um, but history has also been one of the least diverse disciplines in all of academia, um, you know, I'm just looking at this graph here. And here, I'll just send you this, this screenshot, because I think it's honestly shocking.

0:20:12 Thomas: Yeah, I bet. This guy looks like someone did an amalgamation overlay of every history professor, like every college, and it's all distorted and weird. He's not a good-looking man. Sorry to look, Shane, but he looks like the racist he is. Whoa.

0:20:25 Lydia: Yeah, exactly. A little AI. Yeah so this image is how stark the difference is in the racial makeup of history majors.

0:20:45 Thomas: Yeah, we got a line graph. And it what it looks like to me is you've got one line, ironically, that's brown. That's white people. I don't I love that choice. You know, sometimes when I'm doing recordings, I do the track colors and I'm like, should I make the only girl pink in the track? No, I can't.

0:20:52 Lydia: Yeah, white, non-Hispanic, and it's brown. Yeah.

0:21:02 Thomas: No, but sometimes I do because I feel like you would like the nice lavender ish color that I know. What is that? It's like a pink Whatever. I don't what that is, but I'll assume you're right because I don't know what that color is. Um, it's like that, but they've decided the white people line needs to be brown.

0:21:08 Lydia: Mauve.

0:21:17 Lydia: I'm going to go with that this is an unfortunate Excel.

0:21:19 Thomas: The Asian one is yellow, just in case anyone was wondering, the Asian line is yellow.

0:21:23 Lydia: Okay. This is an article, though, about like how we need to fix diversity the problem. So I'm gonna think that this this is like an Excel, you know, like.

0:21:29 Thomas: Yeah, that's fair. It isn't, you know. It's a tough, you're literally painted into a corner, like it's tough, it's such a choice, like how do we, just my first thing would have been Asian is not yellow, like that would have been my first, like, okay.

0:21:42 Lydia: I will say, had I prepared this chart, that's something I would have fixed. I would have like done an Excel, you know, like, like the automatic color selector, and then I would been like no this won't work.

0:21:46 Thomas: But it is hold on this would be a really good Skit, if no one's ever done it, like it's almost like, remember that weird comedy skit, you see, well, I, people will probably know this, but I only ever see it in like meme form, where the guy's talking about the abbreviations for the states or whatever, that's like kind of fun, I don't know if you know that one, it would be like a, that but for like figuring out which color the lines are going, going to be for each race. And you're like, okay, well, white can't be white because the graph is white. Okay, that doesn't work. So it can't go literal. Asian, we can't do yellow. And then by the time you piece it all together, you're stuck with some really tough decisions.

0:22:03 Lydia: Oh okay. Uh-huh. Yeah.

0:22:22 Thomas: I would just go all neon craziness colors. Make it all colors that are never associated with human beings in any way. That's what I would do. Different, just bright purples and pinks and And, you know, just like all, but no.

0:22:22 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. So we're all just aliens.

0:22:38 Thomas: Yeah. But anyway, the joke I started to say is what this looks like is a graph that has one line that's, the white people, one that's brown. And then the rest is like, here's the other colors we would use if anyone was in it. Here's the color. Here's crans that we have ready. If anyone ever graduates with a history degree that isn'T white. That's what it looks like. Like,

0:22:52 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, it is pretty shocking how how stark the contrast is here. So over time, you know, this goes back to 1997, we have just over 20,000 degrees awarded to white white people.

0:23:09 Thomas: Back just after date rape was made up.

0:23:12 Lydia: And we have fewer than 2,500 for the other races of the categories, right? So we have Hispanic or Latino is one of them, Black or African American, other or unknown, Asian, non-Hispanic. Temporary visa holder has its own line here, which I think is interesting.

0:23:18 Thomas: Jeez. Huh. I've never heard of that country. It's probably because we aren't taught the history of the temporary visa holder country that we probably bombed at some point.

0:23:30 Lydia: Yeah. And then American Indian, Alaska Native.

0:23:46 Thomas: Oh.

0:23:56 Thomas: Yeah, what is that, like an Iraq war boom or something? I don't know. People were like, let's learn about the countries we're bombing right now.

0:24:01 Lydia: To that. What do you mean that we shouldn't be doing this? I feel like I've missed a lot in my high school history courses. And and then the drop come 2013. The the only demographic that's really grown over time is the Hispanic population pursuing history degrees.

0:24:18 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. A lot of that's probably just like population dynamics, I imagine. Because a lot of this also I was going to wonder if the the surge in 2001 and three is also just like a college attendance surge a little bit because it was like I think I think things were going well, like dot com era into like some some pretty good economic stuff until the economic collapse. And that's like the peak. So it could just be that as well. But it also so like this isn't like controlled for anything. Right. So, it's just like this is just number of degrees.

0:24:31 Lydia: Yeah, Oh, right.

0:24:47 Lydia: No, no. Just pretty straightforward numbers.

0:24:54 Thomas: Yeah. So who knows? Anyway, point is, one way or the other, the point is it's all white people.

0:25:00 Lydia: Yeah. And then there's always been a pervasive gender disparity in history departments as well, which this article points out is, you know, really unfortunate because humanity's disciplines tend to be, yeah, humanity's disciplines tend to be kind of flipped the other way, where they have more women representation in them. Even just bachelor's degrees in general at or near 57% for women receiving bachelor's degree as compared to men.

0:25:06 Thomas: Yeah, some women were involved in history, too. Yeah Yeah point.

0:25:32 Lydia: But in history, the highest it's ever gotten is 42 percent, um, and it's, you know, been around 40, 41 percent and they can't make gains there, um, whatever they do. And so, you know, we don't know why from this article, what's going on.

0:25:36 Thomas: Jeez, geez. Huh.

0:25:47 Thomas: Dinosaurs. Like this racist piece of shit, maybe, could be

0:25:49 Lydia: Um. But something clearly isn't working, and and why.

0:25:52 Thomas: By getting rid of this asshole, particularly

0:25:59 Lydia: But he has some thoughts on women in this field, um.

0:26:02 Thomas: I can't wait. Wife's been sexually exploited a ton. What was it again? God, that quote, it's a lot a lot It's So perfect, this guy, this is the most awful thing because it's like, it's so not specific. Like he clearly hasn't listened during whatever this story was or something, oh yeah, she tells, she always talks about how she was sexually exploited, like what, it's such, like if I were going to talk about anything like that involving you, I'd be a bit more sensitive than being like, yeah, just a doll, man, like, like, seven, like, like tons, sons.

0:26:07 Lydia: Yeah. That's pretty. My wife has been sexually exploited a lot, yeah. A lot of times.

0:26:39 Lydia: Just also like to be his wife and to like have it cited in like the student newspaper. I'd like, I didn't say that was okay, like I

0:26:42 Thomas: Yeah. God. I know, but somehow they always are okay with it or something. I don't, I never understand that. I always expect that like next headline is local, local asshole kicked out of house immediately and divorced. And then it's always like, no, she's it's, I don't know what it is. Do they just like, I think they just like pretend it doesn't exist. These women sometimes are just like, well, I'm married to this guy, either they're that they're as shitty as the guy, or they're just like, I'm just gonna tune it out, I don't know.

0:26:50 Lydia: Know.

0:27:15 Thomas: It's weird.

0:27:14 Lydia: Yeah. It could be

0:27:16 Clip: I think that's the way to prevent politicization from within. So you just said you were against quotas of women, which actually brings me to my next I want to read you another quote, and I want to make sure I get this right. You had said in the article, quote, there was a two-book standard at Harvard. The two- book standard meant that staff were expected to have published two books proving their expertise in a subject area. The two book standard would be shelved in the late 1990s when we were under increasing pressure to hire more women faculty. Feminist activists at Harvard, as elsewhere, were demanding that half of all new appointments be women. That, they claimed, was what liberal standards of equality required. So I guess when thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion, DEI, do you think this is something that we can mend or something we have to end? Is there any way that we have more inclusive environments without DEI? How do you see DEI within contemporary higher education? Well, DEIs are later phenomenon. Phenomenon. What was the reigning philosophy of Harvard in this period was multiculturalism. The two-book standard was what I was told

0:27:56 Thomas: We're

0:28:25 Lydia: What does that have to do with Women

0:28:25 Thomas: Talking about women.

0:28:26 Clip: When I got into the department.

0:28:26 Lydia: Quotas. Yeah.

0:28:27 Clip: Actually, everyone told me that I would never get tenure because no one got tenure. But if you wanted to get tenure, you have to write two books, one of which is your dissertation, and the other is a major book of some kind, a field-changing book. That was the word people people used. And that standard was openly acknowledged in department meetings, but there just weren't enough women, right? At that time, the history profession was about 10% female at most. The recent PhDs coming out were 10% women. And in the cohorts where we hire at Harvard, which is usually hired mid-career from outside, there are even fewer women in that. We happen to get a wonderful female historian, by the way, named Laurel Ulrich,

0:28:26 Thomas: Yeah. Women are not a culture. Are they been sexually exploited

0:29:15 Clip: Who I like very much and wrote a wonderful history. But that's because we're Harvard. We can afford the best.

0:29:15 Thomas: A ton. So yeah, one of the good ones, yeah.

0:29:22 Lydia: Yeah.

0:29:22 Clip: But the idea that we're to hire 50% women when the cohort of available PhDs is 10% means automatically you're going lower standards, right?

0:29:22 Thomas: The best we got, got the, we got the one. Oh.

0:29:34 Thomas: Yeah.

0:29:34 Clip: It's mathematically impossible not to lower standards standards.

0:29:34 Thomas: Sure.

0:29:37 Lydia: You're not a math professor, James. Hankins.

0:29:38 Clip: Why

0:29:38 Thomas: No, it's actually the op, that's actually the opposite of true, because I mean, there's, okay, just speaking, obviously this guy's full shit in every different way, but like speaking mathematically, just for fun, to entertain this stupid thing, you could argue that, like, if you have to open something up to more people, hypothetically, you could, there's an intuitive sense in which you're like, oh, that would mean you're reducing, reducing standards. If the candidate pool overwhelms the number of positions you have, then opening your position, which it does, obviously, like, how many professors are we talking about? Like, how many job openings are we talking about here? I mean, a

0:29:39 Lydia: Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's

0:30:17 Thomas: Dozen.

0:30:17 Lydia: A handful. Mm-hmm.

0:30:17 Thomas: Yeah, maybe at most. So in the end, if you're, let's say right now, I don't know what it is. Let's say it's fucking, it can't be that many, right? Because there aren't that many majors. So let's say there's fucking five professors and it's four men and one woman, like, you know, and so do you really expect me to believe, Mr. Idiot, that changing that from a say, like, a five, let's say it's six and a five and one, changing that to a three and three, is you're going to have to dramatically to have two additional professors that that are women, you're gonna have, because there was only one qualified woman in the whole world, and now you're going to have to go down to the next tier to get two more. And if I'm wrong, it's not by much, let's say it's 20, like what, it's nothing, I mean, if you count like I don't know, every different kind of position within the department or something, let's stay, for example, what could you have, 20, 30 it's like nothing.

0:30:46 Lydia: Yeah.

0:31:15 Lydia: No. I yeah, I looked at their faculty roster. It's definitely not 30.

0:31:19 Thomas: So the idea that you can't get, these are, these are very exclusive places, and so you're already getting the best of the best, there, there isn't a perfect mathematical linear model of quote-unquote how qualified professors are that goes in number order and you have to dip down to a different, no, it's a bunch of people at this level, the Harvard level, it's a bunch of people who are 10 out of 10, so you just, instead of only gatekeeping being out, the 10 out of 10s who are women, you get the 10 out of tens who are woman. And then you don't get some of the maybe 10 out 10s, although I don't think they're sending their best for as evidenced by this. I hate even saying that with this guy, but yeah, it's, it'S, it's elitely qualified people. It's the same thing with like the president where it's like, they're like, we're going to have to reduce our standards to let's like what it's one person. Like you can have the highest standards ever.

0:31:57 Lydia: Yeah.

0:32:33 Thomas: Yeah.

0:32:33 Lydia: Scholarship. Those who took the opposite view were branded as sexists. I was myself identified as a sexist when I opposed quotas as a member of the faculty council and on history department committees.

0:32:42 Thomas: Wait, who is that?

0:32:43 Lydia: This is James Hankins still. So one of the things that I think is interesting to discuss here, too, is that actually a new study that came out last week. And there is is research demonstrating that scientific papers by women take longer to publish. There is bias against female authorship. So when a woman is listed as the first author on a scientific paper, and granted, you know, I'm not talking history here, but we see the same issues in publishing as well. It takes longer for that paper to move through peer review and reach publication than when a man is listed as the first author. And they looked at millions of biomedical research articles to come to this conclusion. And they said it's not just that it like delays your paper from being published. It ends up having a compounding effect over time where it slows your ability to put out more research. Um, so your production slows now and now your CV is slowing down, right? You have fewer, um, articles that you're able to say published on, on your ability to seek jobs.

0:32:45 Thomas: Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah, it compounds. It's harder to publish as well. I was just going to say that already. Like there's fewer women that in the field itself, there's fewer, it's harder. You know, often it's like you have to get coauthors. It going to be harder for the women to get the, you know, to do all that stuff. It just going compound. It doesn't take much in those kinds of systems, like a little bit of bias and there might be a lot of bias, but like, it only takes a little bit to, to over time, like really offset that because it compounds on itself. Like it makes it harder on one stage, which makes it hard around the next stage, which makes it harder on the next stage and multiply that by 30 years. And it's like, yeah, okay. There's women have way less published. Wow. That's crazy.

0:34:35 Lydia: Um, For women publications, women-led publications

0:34:39 Thomas: And that's just isolating the variable of like, it's a woman on it or the name.

0:34:39 Lydia: Over men. It is a woman as a first author. It says first author, corresponding author, or both. And that was the median time difference there. And as James Hankins would agree, publication output is a way to measure success in academia, for better or for worse, right? And they make decisions about funding, they make decision about hiring, about promotion, about access to tenure, all depending on how frequently you're publishing. So it's like that one paper, we're talking about entire careers, not to mention just what women experience in the workplace anyway, which is a lot of women leave the workplace when they're trying to start families or they have older family members that need a caregiver. That disproportionately falls on women, and it is impossible to do all of those things. So women often have to make those tough decisions, and that's the same thing in academia as well.

0:34:45 Thomas: Jeez. Yeah.

0:35:36 Thomas: Yeah. Obviously.

0:35:39 Lydia: I want to go back a little bit because he decides he's going to quote Ibram X. Kendi.

0:35:44 Thomas: Oh, great.

0:35:45 Lydia: He's talking about, issue of discrimination and him as a white man.

0:35:49 Thomas: Dude, look at the graph, man. Look at the, how could you look at the graph of, of all the different, like of how overwhelmingly white male this is and start complaining about how unfair it is to you as a white man. Like it's just, it's psychotic. These people, never going to get through this thing and play it in slow motion, please.

0:36:02 Lydia: Mm hmm.

0:36:15 Clip: Wasn't he let in? And everyone's humming and hawing and saying, well, you know, it's a difficult year. It's George Floyd and restorative justice. I mean, restorative justice is this idea, totally crazy idea that since certain protected minorities were discriminated against 100 years ago or 50 years ago, we have to make things good by discriminating against other people today. So we're going to discriminate against white males because the white males were responsible for the sufferings of black people 100 years ago, which is my idea.

0:36:40 Thomas: Currently, now no, no, part of that is true, you're not even representing the problem correctly, even if you disagreed

0:37:00 Clip: It means being unjust in the present to balance out injustice of the past. And I'm sorry, injustice plus injustice does not make justice, but that's the way people think. It's even actually quite explicit. You know who Ibram Kendi is, right? Ibran X. Kendi? Yeah.

0:37:00 Thomas: With the solution, no, yeah.

0:37:06 Lydia: So he's history professor.

0:37:17 Thomas: I know who that is. I don't know the fuck you are. Yeah, all of these, you know, all these anti-racism books. Yes.

0:37:18 Clip: Yeah, he's the author of all these anti-racism books. So I was talking about this on X on Twitter, And somebody actually sent me a screenshot shot from his book where he says exactly that we must discriminate against white people now in the present because we were discriminated against or you know of the people who are described

0:37:36 Thomas: No, no, no, he's getting the... like, I can't even let him finish it. Again, it's not like it just goes to show how little mental effort these racists put into understanding black people's arguments, or women's arguments, or people of color's argument, any minorities' arguments, essentially, because they don't, they have to care, they don't have to put any effort into it, they can just smear it, and and all of their fellow white jackoff professors are going to, and these people with money and power, you making these fake universities and all this stuff, they, they're just going to give them nothing but rounds of applause and money and deals and whatever, and they don't have to even look into it.

0:38:18 Thomas: It's absolutely true that in order to remedy the current situation, you would have to, in a sense, take away some of the privilege of white people, but to present it as though like it's a tit for tat, like revenge.

0:37:51 Lydia: Right. Oh, yeah. Right, right. Exactly.

0:38:33 Thomas: That's what he's saying. Like, oh, in order for me to make up, like you got to hit me, so I get to hit you. It's like, no, it's that there's no people of color and women in these fields because they weren't let in, so you'd have to let them in, like, that's what you have to do with, like, there's this old thing from one of these, you know, one of those anti-racism books, there's no, this was actually from a, uh, feminism book I read 10 fucking years ago. Now that I think about it, maybe it was, God, it was around, man, I read a lot of, such really good books around the first time Trump was elected, like really good, like feminist books, and I'm realizing it's been so long that I, like, really can't remember which is what, but it's just a lot of really good thoughts. And one of the things that they talked about was, you know, Harvard, at one point, or I think it was Harvard, it was either Harvard or something like that, was, for a long time, was all men.

0:38:44 Lydia: Yeah. Hmm.

0:39:27 Thomas: Yale, one of those things, like whatever it is, it's one of these elite schools.

0:39:27 Lydia: Right? Right. Professorships? Yeah.

0:39:31 Thomas: No, attendance.

0:39:32 Lydia: Oh attendance.

0:39:32 Thomas: Only men were allowed to attend these colleges. And the whole argument was, well, if you're going to, because like the Supreme Supreme Court or something. Someone made them do it. Like you have to let women in. Something that I think even these, well, we're regressing quickly, but even these assholes would at least acknowledge that you shouldn't ban women from attending.

0:39:33 Lydia: Sorry. Yes. Right right. Right.

0:39:54 Lydia: Mm-hmm.

0:39:55 Thomas: And once that happened, what they said was, well what are we going to tell the men who now don't get to get, you're going to have to not let in in so many men who had these spots. Yeah. You're going to have to screw over. You have to discriminate against men who did have all these slots.

0:40:04 Lydia: So many mediocre men. Yeah.

0:40:12 Thomas: And now what are you going to tell them?

0:40:13 Lydia: Well, because the pond is actually bigger than the way that you've artificially made it. And so now you have to actually compete, compete more than.

0:40:23 Thomas: It, it it's, It's absurd, but it highlighted the absurdity of it, which is like, Oh yeah, those aren't their spots. You know, you think of them as their spots because because that's been the injustice, yeah, in

0:40:28 Lydia: Mm mm. Mm hm. Yeah, historically they have sat in those seats.

0:40:35 Thomas: The same way that we compensated fucking slave owners and not slaves for, you know, taking away their property. You think of it as that, but it's like, if if Harvard was all people named Jeff, and you're like, hey, Supreme Court says we have to let in other students that aren't named Jeoff, there'd be a bunch of Jeffs who are like, what about all the Jeff's who are gonna take away their spot.

0:40:56 Thomas: It's like, yeah, whatever you have, you think is you're entitled to forever.

0:40:35 Lydia: Yeah yeah. Yeah before we move on from this. I do want to just say the actual quote from How to Be an Antiracist from, oh, no, that's pretty much where that bit ends. But Kendi says, quote, the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.

0:41:05 Thomas: Oh, I can keep playing if you want. Oh. Yep.

0:41:15 Lydia: The only remedy for past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, He ain't wrong.

0:41:38 Thomas: Yep, yep, yep. Yeah. It's so obvious. You can't set up the monopoly board with someone owning all the properties and say, okay, but now the rules are equal. It is like, okay. Well, now I have the opportunity to land on every single property I don't own and lose the game instantly. Oh! But but it's equal rules. If I, if I also land on something, then it's also bad for me. Someone who owns everything. Like it's just, it's so fucking obvious, but we we're to the point again, these, these assholes have won. Um, it doesn't, it's not temporary either, unless we pack the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court has decided this idiot's view is the view. This idiot, this fucking moron's view. Is what is the law of the land right now? The law of the land is you can't discriminate on the way to end discrimination on the basis of the race is to end discrimination on the basis of race. And that means continuing the status quo, which is not good and is racist. And so that's the history. That's the law that has won because we fucking let this happen.

0:42:03 Lydia: Mm-hmm.

0:42:41 Lydia: Mm-huh. Yeah.

0:42:55 Lydia: I want to skip down in his essay here for a bit just to do a quick fact check, and then I think we're going to end focusing on this idea of Western civilization as a study. It should by now be evident why Harvard and its peer institutions in the Ivy Plus category do not offer fertile ground for a new flowering of courses in the Western tradition. This was already the case back in 1991 when the Bass Family Foundation offered $20 million to Yale to support the study of Western civilization. The gift would have supported seven senior professors and four juniors plus graduate assistants and administrative costs.

0:43:05 Thomas: Yeah.

0:43:28 Thomas: All they would have had to do is wear these white sheets when they teach.

0:43:30 Lydia: Return the gift rather than commit the enormity of teaching students about their own civilization.

0:43:38 Thomas: Oh, come on.

0:43:39 Lydia: Yeah, so I was like, I don't think that's true. Just quick little fact check here. So it was a $20 million donation. But were delays in setting it up and disagreements about faculty appointments because Liam Bass, who was, you know, the alumnus from Yale, said that he would get to pick the professors. And Yale was like, I don't think so. So they went back and forth.

0:44:05 Thomas: Yeah, they don't just let you do that.

0:44:08 Lydia: Right. And this— this is like per the Los Angeles Times and they're reporting on it and they couldn't come to an agreement about it. And so then they decided to give it back, and then he redirected it to other charitable causes.

0:44:16 Thomas: Yeah? They're not hurting for for money. Yeah. They those, these institutions have plenty of money.

0:44:22 Lydia: It also seemed to not really bother him that much. They continue to support the university. I mean, they often are donating quite a lot of money to Yale. So it was just a specific disagreement about this particular curriculum and the faculty that would be there. And wouldn't you know it, it's not exactly how James Hankins has portrayed it in his essay.

0:44:26 Thomas: Yeah.

0:44:42 Thomas: Right. You should study some history.

0:44:44 Lydia: Okay, I don't think we've ever talked about Western civ on this show, have we?

0:44:50 Thomas: Uh, I know that I have prepped it for something before and we didn't do it. I'm pretty sure, but it's always worth talking about.

0:44:56 Lydia: Um, and it's such like a, a big conversation that I don t think we're going to, you know, start and finish it here. I think we'll probably carry on this conversation in plenty of other episodes. But this is obviously a big thorn in James Hankins' side.

0:45:00 Thomas: Yeah.

0:45:09 Thomas: Dog whistle. It's all I hear now is dog Whistle. When I hear that, like, I can't even, you know, and, and maybe my, my woke ass is too, you know, woke, but like, whenever I hear anyone say Western Civ, it's just like, I, I look, I don't know. I'm not good at this stuff, but I don't what that means. Like, it doesn't mean the cardinal direction because Western doesn't include a whole bunch bunch stuff that's in the west.

0:45:13 Lydia: Yes. Mm-hmm. Correct.

0:45:34 Thomas: What is it you're gonna tell me?

0:45:36 Lydia: Yeah. Well, want to set I it up with some of his misgivings about, you the direction that history has gone, um, he says in, in the hands of hyper progressive or woke practitioners, Western global history is often indeed actively anti-Western. Older Western societies are presented as inherently illiberal, to be contrasted unfavorably with the perfectly liberal society promised by the prophets of the progressive future, a popular project. A Popular project among global historians is, quote, "decentering the West," where Western countries are literally put in their place as an ugly growth on the backside of Eurasia. In this absurdist rendering of world history, Central Asian peoples, formerly known as barbarians, are presented as the drivers of cultural innovation, spreading their benign influence east and west via the Silk Road.

0:46:03 Thomas: Such A hysterical idiot, oh, Wow, okay, wow. God. Damn, I need a degree to tell how many ways that's racist, like, I don't even know, you know what I mean, like, I need some help, like, yeah.

0:46:40 Lydia: It I don't even know what to say about some of this stuff. Now, this skipping down, uh, towards the end a bit, uh, "It is now more than half a century since Western Civ courses have been regularly required of high school and college students. Few students or teachers have retained a sense that they are inheritors of a great legacy handed down via the classical and Christian traditions. Few Westerners today understand where our civilizational commitments to free debate and rational argument, self-government, citizenship, citizenship," constitutionalism, the rule of law, the idea of human dignity and our love of personal freedoms come

0:46:42 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. They don't have, have human dignity over in those barbarian lands.

0:47:15 Lydia: From. Yep. Yep. And that's such a common thing, too. I have a video. I don't know if we'll get to, but I'll share it in the show notes for sure. We're trying to define Western civilization and Western values is nonsense. It's nonsense. And our love of personal freedoms come from and why people in our past and worked and fought to preserve those things. Thanks to the pall of negativity that has settled on all things Western, fewer and fewer in the younger generation are able to appreciate Western arts and architecture, music, literature, and philosophy. Many now believe that our civilization is on the point of collapse, but few seem willing to take the steps necessary to preserve it. Civilizations are not automatically self-replicating. They need to be studied and cultivated. Few remember that Western civilizations have apparently been on the point of collapse before and have been reborn before.

0:47:18 Thomas: Yeah. Huh.

0:48:04 Thomas: I

0:48:04 Lydia: To hope for a change in sentiment in our leading universities is by no means absurd. Even now, there are some liberal academics who accept what used to be a matter of common sense, that the young, whatever their ethnic roots, should learn about the civilization that made them, the Western traditions that created the beliefs and institutions among which, sightless, they now live. For those like myself, however, who have lived through the decline of higher education in elite, in quotes, universities, that would be a triumph hope over of experience, as Johnson said, of remarriage. For now, a better hope lies in building new institutions unencumbered by the corruption and self-hatred that infect the old. And that's how he ends it. So is so interesting to me that is not a new debate in history. The idea that we need to expand beyond the classics, right, and Western civilization, what even is Western civilization is a pretty spirited debate among professors and academics.

0:49:03 Lydia: Academics, uh, found this piece from 1996 where this author, again, this is through historians.org, uh, and let me give him credit, Thomas W. Davis. "I write this essay with all the zeal of a recent convert to world history who has been academically energized by his newfound devotion to the subject. I also write with at least some awareness of the problems was involved in teaching the subject." And he says he began his career in 1972. He specialized in British history. He loved it. And then he could have continued with Western Civ until retirement once he got tenure. "But something kept troubling me about the course. In particular, I wondered occasionally if the rumblings about world history within the profession were worth further consideration."

Not because because of political correctness, a desire to attack Western civ, demands for multiculturalism, or the ethnic diversity in my classrooms, but simply because of what I considered to be more easy, educationally correct. It came down to a question, yeah, it came down to a questions J.H. Hexter once posed, "Which of the two courses is more beneficial for our students?" He, "For today's students, who will be spending most of their adult lives in the 21st century, I came increasingly to see the advantages of world history." And then he did a faculty exchange and just, I mean, I think any common sense, and maybe this is really hard for people who are like so deep in their world of what they know and what they've learned and what they, you know, really care about. It's almost like identity for them. But it's

0:50:03 Thomas: Supposed to PC, I was like, Yeah, yeah.

0:50:38 Lydia: Not part of my identity.

0:50:39 Thomas: You're So close it's almost like a white identity for them, yeah.

0:50:43 Lydia: Yeah. But I think, like, this common sense idea is like, why, why would I want to limit my understanding of history based off of something that is like centered on, you the people with power in a lot of those situations, in the same way that, like, like, understanding of maps. The map that we've seen is not necessarily the best representation. It's not necessarily the most accurate because it was drawn to center, Western civilization, basically.

0:51:12 Thomas: And then all of a sudden Trump wants Greenland because of a map being centered weird and the projection of, of it being skewed, yeah.

0:51:21 Lydia: I think that it's just really interesting that he is decrying all of these things that have have long been issues in history departments. And he has just been so insulated by his power, by the institutional status of Harvard, by his privilege, that he hasn't ever had to engage in it truthfully. I mean, I feel like that's the big piece of this essay is he's decrying all of these things that are not new.

0:51:48 Thomas: They never do that. He's never had to think about, yeah.

0:51:54 Lydia: Right, right. The diversity issues in history, the gender the gender issues and history, the within history itself about what do we want to teach? How do we want to set up our courses? I want to end with just looking at what is Western civilization and And what are Western values?

0:52:12 Thomas: No idea, we didn't coordinate on this. I just made that point, like, I don't, I every time I hear it I'm like, what does that mean, what does it mean?

0:52:21 Lydia: Yeah. And I think this is kind of a fun video where someone is trying to also define what it means.

0:52:27 Thomas: Mr.

0:52:29 Clip: I'm Mr. Beat. I'm here in the western world where we do western things and we have western values. You know what western values are, right? Wait, what? Oh, is that why you clicked on this video to watch? Very well then, let's try to define what western values are. I think I'm gonna go grab my old trusty dictionary.

0:52:32 Thomas: Beat.

0:52:55 Thomas: Yeah.

0:52:55 Clip: Hey, while I'm doing that, Ellie, can you play that clip I have pulled up on my computer for the audience? Great, she's gonna put, yeah, that one right there, she's gonna play that while I find my dictionary to assert the superiority of western values is to state the obvious. It's to have faith in ourselves and it's to have faith and other people. Thank you. That was from a wonderful debate from 2013 hosted by Intelligence Squared, in which they spoke about whether or not the West should be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values.

0:53:06 Lydia: That's his cat, not ours.

0:53:34 Clip: I'll be showing more clips of it later in this video, just hold on to your butts for that. Now wait a second. I got my dictionary here, but before we define To what Western values are, we should probably back up and define first what the West is.

0:53:50 Thomas: My God. Yeah.

0:53:52 Clip: West. The direction toward the point of the horizon where the sun sets at the equinoxes on the left hand side of a person facing north, or the part of the horizon lying in this direction.

0:54:06 Clip: Well that's not terribly helpful at all, is it? Now you may be thinking, Mr. Beat, you should already know what the West is, we all know what the West is, right? After all, I spent at least hundreds of hours studying for overpriced Western Civilization classes I took in college, and yet years later I still found myself googling what the west actually was. Is it a reference to the Western Hemisphere? No, not really. It basically is a reference Europe or any part of the world that has historically been heavily heavily influenced by Europe. For that reason, the West is often expanded to the Americas.

0:54:25 Thomas: Yeah.

0:54:45 Lydia: Right. Right so We can skip ahead a little bit.

0:54:48 Thomas: Yeah, I should just make the video I want to make that's this.

0:54:49 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Um, but, but if you skip ahead to, let's, 4:10, we'll talk about western values.

0:55:00 Clip: Ok, so now that we've gone over what the West IS, now let's attempt to define Western values. Are they simply the values that people who live in the West have?

0:55:17 Clip: No, not really. More on why that is in a bit, but know that Western values are rooted in Western civilization civilization itself. Western civilization is the heritage of customs, belief systems, social norms, political systems, economic systems, and technologies of the West. Basically, the values attached to Western civilization are Western values. More than anything, Western values have been most influenced by the Big Three, Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Judeo-Christian Christian culture, but to assume those three influences didn't overlap with other influences outside of the West is silly. For example, there are quite a bit of similarities when

0:56:02 Thomas: Why did Adam Scott do the voiceover for that quick few seconds? Oh, now you have to hear it again.

0:56:05 Lydia: Values. Yeah.

0:56:11 Thomas: Ready? No, it's after this.

0:56:07 Clip: It comes to

0:56:23 Thomas: That's Adam Scott.

0:56:17 Lydia: Oh, yeah. Yeah,

0:56:26 Clip: Western and Eastern religions. And here's another thing. When I researched examples of so-called Western values, I began to realize that these are values that most human beings have, whether they live in the West or not. Is there something, is there a set of ideas that Western civilization is predicated on that are more than just bloody opinion? Western values, as we understand them, we know what they are. They are liberal democracy, they are a culture

0:56:40 Lydia: Nice, don't steal, help people. Oh that was a Jordan Peterson jump scare.

0:56:39 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. This isn't Christopher Hitchens. I just want to explain.

0:56:58 Lydia: Yeah, just

0:57:00 Clip: Of human rights, they are, and this is very important, freedom of expression, they are freedom of worship, and they are secular government. Well, the proposition that underlies Western culture is that there's a transcendent morality. Western civilization offers liberating doubt, which leads to the methodological principles of scientific skepticism. The individual has intrinsic value in Western societies. Western values, individual liberty, privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion. Western values including democracy, the rule of law, and equality between citizens regardless of their gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality.

0:57:46 Clip: We entered into treaties to codify Western values of freedom and human rights. Western values like we like, at least I like them, free trade, human rights, all that kind of stuff. And what distinguishes the West from all other cultures are the institutions of democracy, capitalism, and science. Religious tolerance, abolition of slavery, universal human rights. The development of the scientific method. By the way, here's a list I compiled of examples of what folks called Western values.

0:57:59 Thomas: All that kind of, oh God, it's getting convicted of Yeah.

0:58:09 Lydia: Fascinating. Shapiro, jump scare. Yeah. So, we can stop there. It's basically a, a screen of just a ton of different things, which it's a little or a lot racist to assume that those aren't values that are present in other cultures as well. Again, West is not a culture either, so what this really comes down to is, like, people who so deeply want us to be covering Western civilization, they can't agree on what it is, what, what it's centered around. And they are.

0:58:32 Thomas: Right. Very Silly. Yeah.

0:58:52 Thomas: They Can? It just, they can't say it because it's racist. It, I don't think everyone who says western civilization is outwardly specifically racist, racist, but it is racist, it means white people, it means Europe.

0:58:56 Lydia: Yeah, it is. I agree. And so I have this this piece that was when Steve King was running for Congress over in Iowa and he I quoted in the New York Times asking white nationalists, white supremacists, Western civilization, how did that language become offensive? And yeah, yeah, this guy.

0:59:26 Thomas: The Wait, how did white nationalists become offensive? Seriously?

0:59:31 Lydia: And yeah, exactly.

0:59:32 Thomas: Where did the Ku Klux Klan become? What are you talking? White nationalists. How did that? It's inherently offensive.

0:59:41 Lydia: I think that white nationalist, white supremacy, what are you talking about? But Western civilization, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott responded, I'm unsure who was offended by the term Western civilization on its own. However, this article I was looking at links and says he would find hyperlink many, hyperlink different, hyperlink people, hyper link including classical scholars, all those things hyperlinked, arguing that Western civilization is coded language for white supremacy.

1:00:08 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, that's because it is.

1:00:10 Lydia: Here's an example of that. If you go to American Renaissance, A neo-Nazi magazine that's online. Here's an article they wrote. Western civilization is white civilization. Okay, there you go. Figured it out. That is what it is.

1:00:30 Thomas: The racists sure think it's racist.

1:00:32 Lydia: Right. Right. And so he's talking, the person who wrote this is talking about that same exact situation with Steve King being quoted in the New York Times about white nationalists, white supremacists, Western civilization. How did that language become offensive? And from American Renaissance's perspective, they're like, yeah, it's not offensive because, you know, none of that stuff's offensive because white people are, you you know, we're awesome, I guess, is what their position is. So anyway, there's so much that we can talk about with Western civilization, but James Hankins is, accidentally obtuse, purposefully obtuse? I don't know. I don't know, but never really had to grapple with this stuff.

I'm sure he would push back on all of this stuff, yeah, that Western civilization is something that is inherently racist, but that's not to say you can't, it's not that like we shouldn't study history of ancient Greece, we shouldn't study history ancient Rome, like yeah, we should, we should study why, I would love to study the history of everything, literally everything in the world from all countries, but I think what's valuable is then also recognizing the perspective of the history that you're learning from and that it might be flawed, it might might be biased to whatever culture, whatever country, whatever ethnic group or anything,

1:01:03 Thomas: No. He's an old, sexist piece of shit.

1:01:28 Thomas: Yeah.

1:01:47 Lydia: Like that is presenting it.

1:01:48 Thomas: Well, it's just being the default. White people get to always be the default,

1:01:50 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, and so from my perspective, I think that these are good reckonings for higher institutions to have. I'm sure James Hankins will be very happy in Florida. He donated to DeSantis's campaign when he ran for president. He's been, you know, 100% on board with that guy. I don't know where he stands with Trump exactly. Later in the PragerU video, he said, you Like Trump calling this stuff out is hurting more than it's helping because it's making people have their guard up more because it is coming from Trump when it is, you know, going after institutions like Harvard and Columbia and stuff. Um, anyway, I just thought it'd be fun to kind of go down this guy's position, this history professor, and how, you know, poor, poor Western civ scholars are being, um, cast in the in the rubbish bin, um, and he's fleeing to Florida in order to avoid it.

1:02:09 Thomas: Wow.

1:02:49 Thomas: Uh, what did you learn in the end? Yet another whiny crybaby racist old white man is full of shit. Is that, is that what we learned? That's the name of the show, so that's What we came here to learn every time. And I love too how, much you brought up from, you know, 1990 fucking one, where they always try to sell themselves as like, wow, this is, it's it's worse, it's worst than it's ever been. I used to be, and he didn't really do this directly, but they always try to give you the indication that like this is a new thing that's crazy kids are doing and it's just, it's so bad now, I can't even. It's like, dude, you've been the same conservative piece of shit since before I have memories, you know, like it's It's not new. You've always been a piece of, you're one of the dinosaurs holding women and people of color out of your fucking field. And you should go retire and die soon.

1:03:01 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah.

1:03:42 Lydia: Hopefully

1:03:42 Thomas: That's what I think.

1:03:43 Lydia: He Will And he's, you know, moving to Florida where most folks go to retire and die soon, so yeah.

1:03:49 Thomas: Not soon enough for some of the Trump voters. All right. Well, that was fun. I love a good debunk an anti-woke of bullshit. Good times. Thanks, hon.

1:03:58 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Of course.

1:04:20 Thomas: Wife's been sexually exploited a ton