Countering Contemporary Criticism of America's Founding Principles

Michael McConnell: Our next session is going to feature a talk by our colleague Peter Berkowitz who is the Tad and Diana, Diane Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution stationed in in Washington, DC. He’s a former head of policy and planning at the State Department has lectured widely both in the United States and in a number of of foreign countries about the principles of American constitutionalism.

Former used to teach political philosophy and government at Harvard University. And along with Peter is Professor Steven Haber. He is a– he basically, W- we don’t need multip- multidisciplinary studies when you have Steve Haber on the podium because he teaches political science, history and economics.

And so I’d like to welcome Peter Berkowitz and Steve Haber to the podium. I see Steve. Where is Peter? There he is. Yes. So please please join me in welcoming Peter Berkowitz and Steve Haber. And they’re going to be, they’re going to be addressing an interesting problem in rec- And i- for much of American history, I think it could be said that there was broad consensus that they at least got the principles right at the beginning, and the question is: how do we live up to them?

The question was application. But more recently, on both the left and the right, there is at least a more noticeable, maybe more strident criticism that the– we– maybe the founding principles were wrong from the beginning. And that is the topic that Peter and Steve are going to be addressing for us.

Peter Berkowitz: Thank you, Michael, for for the opportunity to talk about the Declaration what new can be said. My short answer to the question is new things have to be said in response to new criticisms. Here’s my longer answer. With the signing of the Declaration of Independence two hundred and fifty years ago, America’s founders accomplished something new under the sun They brought into existence a nation-state based on the belief that human beings are equal- equally endowed with unalienable rights, the rights inherent in all human beings.

This year marks another achievement for the Declaration. Never before has a nation dedicated to unalienable rights endured for two hundred and fifty years. And not only has the United States endured, notwithstanding the social and political turbulence roiling the nation, no multi-religious, multiracial, multi-ethnic nation-state in human history has more successfully secured for its citizens freedom and equality under law, economic prosperity, and the ability to defend itself by projecting military power abroad.

No small credit for the nation’s enduring and flourishing, I think, goes to America’s enduring principles. Yet in recent years, critics on both left and right have suggest– have subjugate– have excuse me, have subjected the Declaration’s central principles to harsh and strangely overlapping criticisms.

Eminent figures associated with the postmodern progressive left accuse the Declaration’s principles, the principles of freedom and equality, of obscuring, if not empowering, the evil institution of slavery. Meanwhile, preeminent– prominent members of the post-liberal right charge that the self-evident truths set forth in the Declaration are neither true nor beneficial, but rather constitute the chief source of the multifari- multifarious maladies afflicting the nation.

Postmodern progressives bla- blame those principles for the perpetuation of systemic racism. Post-liberal detractors condemn them for the systemic degradation of men and women of all races and ethnicities who live in the United States. Both find in the Declaration’s affirmation of universal rights a pretext for colonizing other countries, suppressing foreign cultures, and imposing America’s ways and rules on other peoples and nations.

And both ex– both indulge extravagant speculations about founding new forms of government untait- untainted by the basic rights and fundamental freedoms promised by the Declaration. Let’s take a step back. The American journey from seventeen seventy-six to twenty twenty-six has been marked by the struggle, almost defined by it, to honor more fully the Declaration’s promise of equality and fundamental rights.

America’s benefited from a common language, abundant natural resources, the protection afforded by vast oceans to the east and to the west, by peaceful and stable borders to the north and south for much of our history, and a moral and political heritage entwining biblical faith, classical thought, and the modern tradition of freedom.

At the same time, America’s been compelled to grapple with the legal institution of slavery at its founding and, despite the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, slavery’s poisonous legacy, to wage war abroad repeatedly and to reckon with the churn and turbulence generated by a free people and free markets.

American citizens’ appreciation of this complex and inspiring journey is waning. The nation’s educational system bears heavy responsibility for the diminished understanding of the American experiment in ordered liberty, for the loss of perspective concerning the merits and shortcomings, its merits and shortcomings, and for the popularity of extreme criticism emerging from both sides of the political spectrum.

All levels of the American educational system have been derelict in their educational duties, but colleges and universities are especially to blame. They train K through 12 teachers. American colleges and universities should advance the public interest. Do– Sorry, sh-say do advance the public interest in a variety of ways.

They furnish pre-professional and professional education. They provide a credentialing service for employers. They train scholars. They conduct vital scientific research, and not least, they offer liberal education, the education for free citizens. Liberal education, however, is the least successful part of higher education these days.

In recent years, reformers have justly given more attention to colleges’ and universities’ impairment of free speech and the need to improve viewpoint diversity on campus. The disrepair of the curriculum also deserves attention. In most cases, colleges and universities believe themselves to comply with the imperative of liberal education by requiring students to fulfill distribution requirements.

Rarely do the nation’s leading institutions for higher education mandate courses that all students must complete or identify substantive bo-bodies of knowledge that all students must master. Instead, students meet their obligations by taking a few courses in the humanities, a few in the social sciences, and a few in the sciences, often in, often picking and choosing among dozens of offerings.

Two students can fulfill their distribution requirem-requirements without reading a single book in common. This, from our colleges’ and universities’ point of view, is not a problem, but rather a source of pride. They believe that they demonstrate their confer– concern for students’ individuality and uniqueness by allowing them to choose their own courses and design their own curricula.

At the same time, by exposing students to d- to a variety of disciplines and approaches to knowledge, institutions of higher education claim to produce open-minded and well-rounded graduates ex-expertly trained to lead once they graduate in changing the world. Far from exemplifying liberal education at its finest, colleges’ and universities’ failure to impose structure on and give content, give coherent content to the curriculum betrays it, betrays Liberal education’s traditional aim is to cultivate students capable of exercising the rights and discharging the responsibilities of freedom.

Such an education involves the organized introduction to array of vital topics. Liberal education in America should be rooted in the study of American ideas and institutions, the nation’s founding principles, constitutional traditions, cultural crosscurrents, economic arrangements, and diplomatic and national security requirements.

Since the nation was not born out of nothing, liberal education in America must also concentrate on study of the great books and seminal events of the larger Western civilization from which the United States has emerged, and to which it has made a decisive contribution. And since all serious moral and political study must be comparative, liberal education in America should include study of other peoples and nations, their language, their culture, their economic rela- relations their religious beliefs, and more.

America’s colleges and universities, though, have abandoned liberal education under the compulsion of three ideals. One is political, a second is methodological, a third is professional. When suitably refined, each of these ideals is a worthy ideal. However, contemporary academic life has radicalized all three to the great detriment of liberal education.

First, contrary to liberal education’s imperatives, many faculty members believe that their job is to instill correct views about the pursuit of social justice in America and enlist students in the cause of progressive transformation of politics and society Liberal education in America, of course, should not be neutral toward fundamental political principles.

It assumes, after all, the goodness of individual freedom and human equality. But to prepare students for freedom and democratic self-government, liberal education must exclude partisan politics from the classroom while appreciating– while fostering appreciation of contending views on fundamental moral and political questions.

Yet many of today’s classroom crus-crusaders recognize no pedagogic-pedagogical duty to present fairly the other side of the argument. Some even believe themselves obliged, since classroom time is short, to ignore views, regardless of their historical significance and relevance to contemporary politics that they deem distasteful, demeaning, or destructive.

They’re unaware of or unmoved by John Stuart Mill’s indispensable observation in On Liberty that a person who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. Second, contrary to liberal education’s imperatives, many faculty members in the social sciences believe that the scientific method represents the one true approach to knowledge.

While the application of the scientific method to the nat-natural world has produced astounding increases in knowledge and know-how, the application of a method designed to account for matter and motion has been decidedly less successful when applied to the world of self-interpreting human beings.

The conduct of social and political animals, that is our conduct, whose beliefs are formed in part by inherited custom and opinion, and whose actions are motivated by fallible human judgment about right and wrong This conduct cannot be fully captured by methods designed to describe matter and motion.

Nevertheless, setbacks in illuminating morality, politics, and society have driven many social scientists to double down on the study of method. Their bewitchment by techniques for counting, measuring, and weighing at the expense of the substance and texture of human affairs has produced disciplines that have less and less to say to citizens about self-government and justice, even as they elaborate more and more intricate methods for studying politics and society.

Third, contrary to the imperatives of liberal education, many professors operate on the assumption that the purpose of undergraduate education is to train the next generation of scholars. Instead of drawing on their expertise to transmit to students the knowledge about America, the West, and the world needed for good citizenship, these professors provide intellectual tools and socialization into the sensibility and behavior required to succeed in the professoriate Curricula that answer to the imperatives of liberal education would put the Declaration of Independence at the core.

The Declaration states in lofty language the principles of freedom on which the United States was founded. The ideas, the principles that human beings are by nature free and equal. They are endowed with inalienable rights. The chief purpose of government is to secure these rights, and that among these is the right to alter or abolish governments that undertake to systematically deprive them of their basic rights and fundamental freedoms.

Rare today, though, is the graduate of the nation’s most selective colleges and universities who has been exposed to serious study of America’s founding principles, the Constitution that institutionalized these principles, and the political struggles throughout our history to realize them. Few of these students will be conversant with the major eyes– major ideas and defining events of Western civilization, out of which emerged the American experiment in ordered liberty, and only a small number will have studied the culture, languages, economic systems, politics, and religious beliefs of another civilization, without which a well-rounded assessment of the United States is impossible.

Not least among the costs of colleges’ and universities’ betrayal of liberalcation– liberal education is it produces graduates ignorant of the principles and legacy of the Declaration and oblivious to the costs of that ignorance to themselves and the nation. I wanna talk now about, and specifically about new criticisms of the declaration.

But first, a few remarks about critical thinking, which we specialize here at, in, here at the university. Humanities and social sciences professors tend to regard critical thinking as the highest part of thinking, or even equate critical thinking with thinking itself. The apothe- apotheosis of critical thinking has spawned a rage to criticize.

Among other deleterious effects of the rage to criticize are the comprehensive attacks from the postmodern progressive left and the post-liberal right on America’s founding principles affirmed in the Declaration of Independence. All worthy thinking about ethics and politics, of course, involves a critical component.

The conviction that critical thinking represents the exercise of thinking, however, induces professors to concentrate exclusively on the defects of inherited beliefs, cu- customary practice, practices, and established institutions. It is one thing, though, to recognize that human beings are self-interested and fallible, that language is imprecise, ambiguous, and always open to interpretation, contestation, and that laws, institutions, and policies routinely fall sho- short and rarely work as promised.

It is quite another to insist that the principal task of thinking is to pinpoint people’s and institutions’ shortcomings, and that the supreme intellectual accomplishment is to expose the wickedness of the civilization of which one is a part Critical thinking should be combined with, there are terms for it, I prefer the term generous thinking.

Grasping the needs met and purposes served by inherited beliefs, customary practices, and established institutions is also essential to understanding ethics and politics. Plato and John Stuart Mill, two great pioneers of liberal education, understood that comprehending the merits of ideas and institutions is no less important than assessing their deficiencies.

Some examples quickly. In book one of The Republic, Plato’s Socrates exposes the limitations of three familiar opinions about justice. Some say that it consists in keeping promises. Others that it revolves around helping friends and harming ena- enemies, and others still maintain that in practice, justin- justice consists of nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.

Justice really means might makes right. Someone does… So- Socrates does not, as is commonly supposed, refute these opinions. Rather, he shows that each is inadequate, capturing aspect of justice, but misleading by purporting to state the whole truth about justice. To understand justice in its complexity and fullness, Plato’s Republic teaches it’s necessary to understand why the most common opinions about it are partly true and partly false.

For example, it is usually just to keep promises, but sometimes returning what is owed would harm the recipient. Especially in war, justice requires helping friends and harming enemies, but we make errors about who are our friends and enemies, and harming people leaves them less just. And although some of what goes by the name of justice in any given society serves the selfish interests of the powerful, the very notion of selfish interest reflects a conception of fairness and appropriateness that transcends short-term goals and love of dominion John Stuart Mill showed a similar appreciation of the need for moral and political thinking to combine criticism and generosity.

In his tribute to the progressive rationalist Jeremy Bentham, this was published in 1838, and in his tribute to conservative poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published in 1840, Mill argues that both thinkers, the progressive and the conservative, provided lessons crucial to understanding human affairs in modern society.

Mill observed in his tribute to Bentham that to him, to Bentham, it was gi– I quote now, “It was given to discern more particularly those truths with which existing doctrines and institutions were at variance to Coleridge, the neglected truths which lay in them.” In his tribute to Coleridge, Mill adds that both deserve the title Great Questioner of Things Established.

Great Questioner of Things Established, but for questioning different aspects of established things. Quote, “By Bentham, beyond all others, men have been led to ask themselves in regard to any ancient or received opinion, is it true? And by Coleridge, what is the meaning of it?” wrote Mill. He continues, “The one, Bentham, took his stand outside the received opinion and surveyed it as an entire stranger to it.

The other looked at it from within and endeavored to see it with the eyes of a believer in it, to discover by what apparent effects it was at first suggested and by what appearances it has ever since been rendered,” excuse me, “continually cred-credible, has seemed to a succession of persons to be a faithful interpretation of their experience.”

Leading postmodern progressive and post-liberal critics of America’s founding principles do actually know how to think critically like Bentham and generously like Coleridge, but not as applied to the same set of beliefs, practices, and institutions. When it comes to America’s founding principles, they discern nothing but intellectual fraud and political injustice.

Concerning their preferred blueprints for fashioning novel institutional arrangements or for restoring past glories, however, they see faithful expression of human emancipation and flourishing. The postmodern progressive critique of America’s founding principles derives in large measure from Karl Marx and his 20th century Frank- Frankfurt School acolytes.

This is not to say that the postmodern progressives have studied Marx or learned or heard of the Fra- Frankfurt School, or to deny the often subterranean influence of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt, along with Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault. But with its characteristic conviction that ideological blinders hide the nation’s systemic indus- justices, its telltale terminology of oppressor and oppressed, and its utopian version of fundamental moral and political transformation that overcomes injustice and ends oppression, postmodern progressivism betrays its debt to Marx’s enormously influential repudiation of political and economic freedom.

Like Marx, postmodern progressives overlook the self-correcting powers of rights-protecting democracies, the benefits of limited government, and the disadvantages of concentrated state power. The postmodern progressive tre– critique comes in several versions. Here at the law school people will be especially aware with– aware of critical legal studies theorists who argue that far from serving freedom and equality, the American system of equal rights under law rationalizes and insulates from scruti- scrutiny an unjust status quo in which the wealthy oppress the poor.

Law Professor Catharine MacKinnon championed a radical feminism according to which the fundamental bel- the fundamental divide in America stemmed not from class, but from sex. This created a, her term, male supremacist society that afflicted women physically and psychologically, leaving it doubtful whether women could meaningfully consent to sex.

And critical race theorists contended that the American political tradition sustains and is sustained by a structuralist or systemic racism that so thoroughly permeates the nation’s norms and which is so deeply inscribed in its laws and institutions that only measures that discriminate based on race today can overcome the nation’s systemic racism.

Meanwhile, on the other side, the post-liberal critique of Americans’ founding principles takes its bearing from pre-modern thinking, particularly Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, or I really should insist, a certain interpretation of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. The post-liberal right embraces the idea that the highest aim of politics is to care for souls by fostering virtues and guiding people towards salvation.

At the same time, it overlooks the warnings advanced by both classical philosophy and Christian thinking that while the best regime should serve as a standard, it is for all practical purposes unattainable, and therefore, politics consists for the most part in preserving and improving imperfect regimes.

The post-liberal critique of America’s founding principles also comes in several versions. The two most influential have been developed by University of Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen and Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule In a twenty eighteen book, Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen argues that the fatal flaws of the principles of freedom that undergird American constitutional government should now be visible to all reasonable people.

The fundamental flaws of the principles on which our nation is based. Foremost among those principles is the Lockean contention central to the American Declaration that human beings are by nature free and equally endowed with fundamental rights. In Deneen’s view, notwithstanding Locke’s insistence on the distinction between liberty and license, the belief in equality in basic rights and fundamental freedoms entails a pure or tot-total freedom that is impossible to achieve even as it is dehumanizing to pursue.

To escape the corruption and decadence of contemporary society, Deneen constructs a retreat– Sorry, Deneen counsels a retreat into small, tight-knit, self-governing communities. He does not notice that his counsel embodies the found– embodies founding American i– the founding American idea of a nation of small, tight-knit, self-governing communities protected from despotism by a limited constitutional government.

Subsequently, Deneen performs an unexplained about-face and regime change in twenty twenty-three, arguing that the proper response to the failure of the American constitutional order is the creation of a new regime which marries aristocracy and populism in order to promote virtue and care for the soul.

In Common Good Constitutionalism, Vermeule agrees with Deneen The classical liberal principles deform our politics and damage our humanity. In contrast to Deneen, Vermeule argues that America was not founded on those principles, on Lockean principles, but rather on classical legal principles deriving from Aristotle, Cicero, and Thomas Aquinas.

Accordingly, Vermeule would have the legislative branch make law, the executive branch execute the law, and the judicial branch decide cases of incontr- and controversy that arise under the law, all with the view not to the principles of individual freedom and human equality, but rather with a view to the highest truths of moral excellence and human salvation.

But that is to deny, contrary to the stark evidence of the Declaration, that Lockean principles played a decisive role in the thinking of America’s founding generation, and is to suppose contrary to experience that those who govern will be well endowed with the wisdom to discern, the prudence to fashion and enact, and the piety to implement laws that minister to the needs of citizens’ souls.

For the post-liberal right, as for the postmodern progressive left, little if anything good deserves to be said about America’s founding principles, while neither sees in its own ideal and, in its own ideal imperfections and downsides. Both fail to consider conscientiously the neg- neglected truths within America’s founding principles and to explore the reasons why so many have found them not merely credible, but choice-worthy, and as the earlier session indicated, not only in the United States, but around the world.

And both overlook the disadvantages of their schemes for transforming America and the dangers endemic to radical change, be it by the left or by the right. In sum, one-sided thinking blinds the postmodern progressive left and the post-liberal right to the dependence of improving America on conserving the principles the nation’s Declaration of Independence set forth two hundred and fifty years ago.

And I want to conclude with the third section on the Declaration and advancing US diplomacy

Respectable political opinion and all salutary reform in the United States give concrete expression to truths that the US Declaration of Independence held to be self-evident. In an 1825 letter, Jefferson maintained that these self-evident truths reflected, I quote him, “The in, the common sense of the subject,” close quote, at the time of the founding.

First among them, these self-evident truths, is that human beings are equally endowed with unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The declaration also affirms as self-evident that go- government’s first responsibility is to secure those rights, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that the people have a right to alter or abolish government that destroys the conditions that make possible the enjoyment of their unalienable rights Neither American conservatives nor American progressives routinely put matters in these terms, the ones I just mentioned, or acknowledge their debt to the nation’s founding principles.

They also, conservatives and progressives, politically specialize in different matters. Conservatives focus on preserving tradition and respecting order grounded in the rule of law, while progressives concentrate on rectifying injustice and improving inherited arrangements. Yet at their most thoughtful, both will typically have recourse to the equality and rights in which the United States is rooted.

Thoughtful American conservatives recognize that tradition and order grounded in the rule of law sustain the effective exercise of individual rights. They also appreciate that a system of individual rights creates conditions favorable to citizens maintaining their traditions and preserving the good life as they understand it.

Thoughtful American progressives recognize that rectifying injustice and improving inherited arrangements consist in significant measure in enabling the excluded to claim and enjoy their individual rights. Progressives also– Thoughtful progressives also appreciate that a system of individual rights creates conditions favorable to reformers mobilizing democratic majorities to enact legislation that ensures fair treatment for all.

That conservatives and progressives do not always operate thoughtfully is one reason that it is useful to return regularly to the study of the truths that the nation’s founders held to be self-evident. Another reason for careful reconsider of the dec- reconsideration of the Declaration’s teachings about freedom, equality, and self-government today is that prominent postmodern progressives and post-liberal representatives, po-post-liberal conservatives are inclined to repudiate the nation’s founding principles.

A third reason for re-reexamining and restating the Declaration’s main ideas is the failure of colleges and universities to ensure that college students gain an understanding of America’s founding principles and constitutional traditions As America celebrates its 250th birthday, the two– 2020 report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights can assist in the proper re-examination and restatement.

Some history about that report. In July 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo established the Commission on Unalienable Rights. Pompeo cherished human rights as an essential comp-component of the American heritage. He worried that the pol-politicization of the great post-World War II human rights project movement by diplomats, professors, journalists, international organizations, and NGOs endangered that heritage of human rights.

With a special interest in the place of human rights in a responsible U.S. foreign policy, Pompeo asked the commission to reground human rights in America’s founding principles in the best in the nation’s constitutional traditions and in the obligations that the United States had taken on in 1948 in voting to adopt in the UN General Assembly the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Pompeo appointed his Harvard Law School mentor, Professor Mary Ann Glendon, to chair the commission. Glendon’s unusual combination of accomplishments and qualities made her just right for the job. She possesses wide learning in law and the humanities. She has authored a major book criticizing the proliferation of rights claims in democratic discourse and another explaining the UDH- UDHR’s origins, aims, aims and structure, and celebrating its influence on world affairs.

She served as Vatican representative to the UN’s 1995 Beijing Conference on Women and as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, 2008 and 2009. And Mary Ann possesses an abundance– in abundance the rare ability to both generously interpret diverse views and subject them to rigorous analysis. In my own capacity as then director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, I served as the commission’s executive secretary.

I joined Glendon in assembling a small group of distinguished men and women to work on the report. They brought to our task expertise in international law, ethics, political philosophy, sociology, African American studies, and religion, backgrounds in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, conservative and progressive political opinions, and experience in scholarship, law, and the promotion of human rights.

Within that diversity of expertise, ideas, and ex– and experience, and notwithstanding disagreements on public policy and law, commissioners shared a crucial conviction. All agreed that America’s founding principle– principles were essential to preserving and improving the nation. The report consists of a pref- prefatory note and five parts.

The prefatory note addresses the civic in- unrest and social convulsions that rocked the nation following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis city police officers. As it prepared the report for the public, the commissioners recognized, explained in the prefatory note, that the tumult sweeping the nation testified to America’s unfinished business in overcoming the nation’s long history of racial injustice.

At the same time, the report insisted on the fundamental distinction between rights-protecting democracies that fall short of their principles. And authoritarian regimes that reject those principles. The note also stressed that despite the nation’s imperfections, America has been and should remain a beacon to those around the world struggling for their rights, their human rights.

Part one of the report introduces the undertaking. It emphasizes the erosion of the post-World War II human rights project owing to the resurgence of authoritarianism, disappointing performances of international institutions, and abuse of rights language to advance partisan goals. It stresses the report’s focus on the principle– on principles that should inform policy rather than taking stands on hard policy questions.

It highlights the report’s ambition to assist diplomats in giving human rights their due. It underscores the report’s intention to encourage Americans to renew their dedication to America’s rights tradition. And it encourages friends of freedom around the world to look to their own moral, political, and religious traditions for resources within their own traditions to elaborate and sustain the rights all human beings share.

Part two concentrates on the Declaration of Independence. It discusses the roots of America’s founding principles in three traditions, biblical faith, classical civic republicanism, and the modern tradition of freedom. It examines the declaration’s ground-baking, ground break-breaking promise of equality and fundamental rights, the nation’s grievous departures from that promise, and throughout American history, the recurring repeal– appeal to the declaration by seminal reformers.

It explores how constitutional structure and formal guarantees in the Constitution safeguard basic rights and fundamental freedoms, and it reviews the implications for fo-foreign policy of the nation’s founding in human rights. Part three deals with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It recounts America’s leading role in drafting the UDHR and winning approval in nineteen forty-eight in the UN General Assembly.

It discusses the aim, structure, and content, and logic of this crucially carefully constructed document, and it provides answers to persistent questions about the UA– UDHR, questions concerning national sovereignty, the hierarchy of rights, the relation between civil and political rights and social and economic rights, states’ obligations, democracy, positive law, and the emergence of new rights.

Part four takes up human rights and UN’s foreign policy. It observes that securing American freedom has been at the core of American diplomacy from Washington’s warning to the vulnerable new nation in his seventeen ninety-six farewell address to, to steer clear of, quote, “permanent alliances,” close quote, to America’s dependence in 2026 as a great power in a deeply interconnected world on a m-multiplicity of alliances and partnerships.

It argues that as U.S. power grew, as the world b-became smaller and more interconnected, and as American freedom became more dependent on events around the world, Americans were compelled to give more thought to the proper place of human rights in a responsible U.S. foreign policy. That is a foreign policy that must balance a variety of competing principles and interests.

This section also examines the constitutional stat-statutory bases of American human rights policy and the nation’s treaty obligations to honor human rights, and it reviews new challenges to human rights, including the decline of human rights culture and the corruption of international institutions, resurgent authority– authoritarianism led by the Chinese Communist Party, large-scale migration, global health and pandemics, the growing menace presented by non-state actors, and new technologies, particularly AI.

Part five offers concluding observations. Among the most important are that sovereign nation-states are the fundamental political entity charged with securing human rights. Free and democratic regimes are the forms of government best suited to safeguarding them, and respect for human rights begins with education and must be nurtured by families, schools, and associations of civil society.

The commission’s report, as I should acknowledge, was very controversial. Don’t have time to discuss that now, but we enjoyed one dramatic diplomatic success. In the summer of twenty twenty, a few weeks after the report’s publication, Nahdlatul Ulama reached out to me at the State Department. Headquartered in Indonesia, NU is the world’s largest independent Muslim organization.

It has an estimated one hundred million followers. One hundred million followers. A representative of the NU general secretary conveyed the organization’s enthusiastic agreement with the report’s understanding of human rights both in domestic politics and human rights in foreign affairs.

In late October twenty-twenty, Secretary Pompeo visited Jakarta as NU’s guest to present the report and discuss its significance. Again, effectively a civil society organization with a hundred million followers. In twenty-twenty-two, Glendon and I continued the commission’s work by discussing the commission’s report at the inaugural meeting of the G20 Religious Forum in Bali.

This was organized by Nahdlatul Ulama as part of Indonesia’s hosting of that year’s twenty G2020. And in the summer of twenty-twenty-five, Glendon and I conducted several seminars on Western political thought as part of NU’s launch in Jakarta of an educational program for its senior leadership, combining the best of Islamic civilization and Western ideas.

In other words, this is example of the sort that Condoleezza Rice was speaking about in the previous session, the power, the ability and the power of the Declarat- of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence to speak to peoples around the world. To close, every generation in America faces challenges, some perennial, some distinctive, in bringing to life the moral and political principles affirmed in the nation’s Declaration of Independence, and in holding America at home and abroad to the Declaration’s founding promise.

The laziness and forgetfulness that plague both sides of the political spectrum are perennial vices. The broadsides from the postmodern progressive left and the poli- and the post-liberal right are distinctive to the moment. The laziness and the forgetfulness, as well as the broadsides, have been e-exacerbated by an education establishment that tends to d- that tends to neglect, where it does not o-outright deny its responsibility to educate about America On the nation’s 250th anniversary, recovery of and rededication to the principles of the US Declaration of Independence depend on reclaiming liberal edu- liberal education in America.

Stephen Haber: Thank you, Peter, for that wonderful presentation. I’m very honored to be here. I’m a great admirer of Peter, and I was very honored to be invited by Michael McConnell because he is someone I admire very much. So I’m very flattered to have this opportunity. Let me say by way of introduction to a discussion of this paper that it, it has all the ha- hallmarks of a Peter Berkowitz paper.

It’s learned it’s deep and it’s provocative. So I’d like to, in the spirit of provocativeness, I’d like to focus on one particular thread of thought that runs through the paper and maybe pull a bit on that thread. And the purpose of my pulling on this thread is not simply to be provocative, but to actually offer a bit of hope.

Now, for those who may know me well, I’m rarely thought of as a man who is hopeful. I’m originally from New York. In fact, I’m not a native speaker of English. I’m a native speaker of New Yorkese. And we’re not a people known for our Pollyanna, Pollyannish views. However, when it comes to the future of liberal education at universities, I want to I wanna give a hopeful note.

Okay. The core of Peter’s p- or the core of this thread of Peter’s paper is that what’s happened at universities is that liberalism as it’s taught as the liberalism of the Declaration of Independence, is basically taught and therefore understood by Americans as a set of abstract ideas that much like any set of abstract ideas is nothing more than that.

Rather than liberalism as e- embodied in the Constitution as a call to active participation in citizenship, and this is a great failing of according to the paper, of our educational system. I’m gonna quote Peter here, the nation’s educational system bears heavy responsibility for the diminished understanding of the American experiment into ordered liberty, for the loss of perspective concerning its merits and shortcomings, and for the popularity of extreme criticism emerging from both sides of the political spectrum.

While all levels of the American educational system bear responsibility for this diminished understanding, loss of perspective, and taste for the extreme, our colleges and universities are especially to blame because they train K to 12 teachers.” I am not going to argue with that view. I think that he’s largely…

That’s largely right. Where I am going to pull on a thread is on why this happened. So in Peter’s view this is about the professoriate. And he provides a three-part explanation for why the professoriate sort of led American universities towards, if I can be a bit dramatic, illiberalism. One is political.

That i- One is methodological, and the third is professional. So again, I’ll quote Peter, the political dimension. “Contrary to liberal education’s imperatives, many faculty members believe that their job is to instill correct views about the pu- pursuit of social justice in America and enlist students in the cause of progressive transformation of society.”

Close quote. Then there’s the methodological dimension. Again, I’m quoting, “Contrary to liberal education’s imperatives, many faculty members, especially in the social sciences,” plead guilty believe that the scientific method represents the one true approach to knowledge.” We can actually debate about what political scientists mean by scientific method because, in fact, there’s a big part of science that is not s- as used by political scientists, that it’s actually not scientific, but we won’t get into those weeds here.

Finally, there’s the professional dimension. Contrary to the imperatives of liberal education, many professors operate on the assumption that the purpose of undergraduate education is to train the next generation of scholars. Okay, so what all three of these diagnoses of the problem of why we’re not good at teaching liberal education as active citizen engagement what they all do is point to the professoriate.

That is, liberal education has been failing at American universities because the faculty have been engaged in three projects that, in combination, work against liberal education. Okay, so now I wanna advance a hypothesis. I wanna underline that it’s a hypothesis, not a statement of fact. That the professoriate is a proximate rather than a fundamental cause of the drift from liberal education.

And the key to this is that somebody ultimately chooses the professoriate and supports them. Now, it’s true enough that delegate… that the selection and promotion of the faculty is in large part delegated to the faculty But the key word is delegated, which is not synonymous with devolved. As both a legal and as a practical matter at virtually all universities, decisions of the faculty about hiring and promotion are non-binding recommendations to the dean, who makes a non-binding recommendation to a provost, who makes a non-binding recommendation to a president, who makes a non-binding recommendation to a board of trustees.

The board of trustees is the only entity in this chain that has fiduciary authority and duty. For those of us who work for Stanford, this is why if you look at your check every two weeks, it says that it’s being paid to you by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Now, the first time I received one of these checks when I started here as an assistant professor back in the days when dinosaurs and people walked the earth at the same time, I was appalled to see that I was working for a junior university I thought for a few moments that I had made some terrible mistake by leaving the faculty at Columbia, which I- was a senior university, to come to a junior university.

But it did teach me that it’s the board of trustees that has the fiduciary responsibility to watch out for the long-run interest of the university as an institution, especially when the university receives very generous subsidies and privileges from taxpayers

So the board of trustees, or at a public university, a board of regents, chooses the president, who chooses the provost, who chooses the deans, who allocate resources to departments Because they set the incentive structures, they are far from innocent bystanders in the direction of the schools and departments.

Moreover, the president and provost choose a management team that goes beyond the academic deans. They choose a dean of admissions, who decide which students are going to get in, and the basis on which they’re going to get in. They ser- they choose a dean of education, res- edu- residential education, and a dean of students.

Okay. In short, I wanna suggest, as an hypothesis for discussion, that the drift at American universities away from teaching about liberalism as active citizenship is not a product of the faculty alone. It is the product of the growth of progressive ideology within boards of trustees and the presidents and provosts they select.

Now, then I wanna be clear here. I am not suggesting that boards of trustees are dominated by, wild progressive thought. But what I am gonna show you in a f- in a few minutes I have remaining, is that if you look at the evolution of boards of trustees over the last forty years at American universities, there’s been a growth within boards of a group that one would identify as in Peter’s terminology, in a progressive, and a simultaneous dim- diminui- dimi- diminution.

My New York accent fighting with me. A simultaneous decline – … in conservative members of boards. I s- now, I did something that Peter cautions against in his paper when he says, there’s too much emphasis on measuring and weighing, and this is good-spirited. We’re friends. But so with several colleagues Amit Saru from the GSB, Dan Kessler from the law school and I, along with a team of student co-authors, Jiwon Yoo, Will Weigel, and Junyon Yoo we st- we did the heretical, we gathered data.

And so we put together a data set of every trustee or member of a board of regents at every American university over the last forty years, so that’s about seventy-two thousand independent observations, and then the presidents and provosts of all those institutions And then we matched it to a database that our colleague Adam Bonica in the political science department has produced, c- that…

So you may not know this, but every time you give money to a political campaign of over $200, it’s recorded. It’s a public record. And what Bonica, he’s a genius, did, was that he took these and he created a matrix. And so he links individuals and candidates, so you can see who I gave money to, and then you can generate a ideology score for me based on my pattern of giving. And you’ll see that I, gave a lot of money to AOC.

Okay, so I won’t bore you with the details of what we did and the matching problems, although I could go on and on forever. Here’s basically what we find. Circa 1980, the median trustee at a private university was slightly to the right of center. On average, most boards were moderately conservative.

Since 1980, the composition of university boards of trustees has shifted left, such that the median trustee is now a centrist. The shift is more pronounced at elite private universities Where the median trustee is now slightly left of center, and the median, and this is important, the median has shifted because the share of trustees who are strongly conservative has fallen relative to the share who are strongly progressive.

That is the left tail of the distribution, the group that would be, ca- would call themselves progressive or be categorized as progressive, has grown fatter, while the right tail of the distribution has become flatter. This pattern holds even when we control for changes in the racial, gender, and ethnic composition of boards.

This is not a story about boards becoming more diverse in other dimensions and that’s what’s driving a drift to the left. It’s a story that’s more general than that. More interesting still, we don’t find this pattern at public universities. On average, public universities are flat.

And incidentally we didn’t do this work, but others have done it, you don’t see this pattern for federal judges or corporate CEOs or members of corporate boards private corporation boards. The other thing that we find, and here I’m gonna wrap up ’cause we wanna have time for Q&A, the other thing we find is that liberal boards tend to pick presidents who are more liberal than the boards.

And so there’s been a, especially amongst elite private universities, a move towards progressivism amongst presidents. And those presidents pick provosts who are more to the left than they are. And so part of what’s going on, or what has been going on at American universities, has been a loss of a lack of ideological balance, not just among the faculty, but among the people that govern the university.

Okay. Now this is where things get hopeful, because we’re talking about small numbers of people. A typical board’s got about thirty-five members on it. Restoring balance to a board therefore means, is a small numbers issue it also means that because this is a small numbers issue that attempts or programs that are bringing liberal education back to universities ha- can gain quite a lot of traction if there’s a willingness by boards to support them.

And so here I’m gonna end with a an advertisement, not for myself, but for our colleague Josh Ober, who leads the Stanford Civics Initiative who’s managed to bring civic education back to the undergraduate experience at Stanford. He should actually get the Nobel Prize for political genius because he somehow has convinced the Stanford Faculty Senate this is a good thing.

It’s a joke, but it’s a tough audience. And so I wanna end on this hopeful note, right? Which is that, yes, I agree with Peter, things have drifted away from liberal education. I’ve had pr- unfortunate personal experience with it in teaching Poli Sci 1, where at one point when I was explaining that one of the advantages of democracies is that you actually know the opinions of everybody around you, and you can openly disagree with them, and they can disagree with you.

When I said this, all hell broke out in my classroom. And in fact, some students went to the provost to complain about me. I’m a big boy, I didn’t mind. So I… It’s not that I cared, right? But what struck me about it was the idea that they found that threatening, and that they thought that the right avenue for for disagreeing with me was to go complain to my superior, who would punish me for my my heresy of thought.

So let me close by thanking again Michael, and thanking Peter, and looking forward to your discussion of of Peter’s paper and for listening to my hopeful intervention. Thank you.

Peter Berkowitz: I wanna thank Steve and I wanna note for the record that I can’t remember what I regard as a more friendly amendment to to a paper position I’ve given. I em- … embrace s- Steve’s analysis. There’s a lot of responsibility to go around here, and yes, the corporations, the boards have the final say.

Two other quick points. One I like data, and I’m a fan of counting, measuring, and weighing. The point I wasn’t careful enough to say the problem is not science but what Hayek called scientism, the belief that everything should be a matter of of of scientific approach. And third, I am still less optimistic than Steve that at any time soon the declaration, constitutional traditions, larger Western civilization will really be placed at the center of the curriculum because the sensibility that’s opposed to all that is deeply entrenched at the university.

And even though the buck does stop, as Steve said, above the president with the boards my, my sense is that that much of the university still does not wish to be reformed. But I welcome I, I agree with Steve where ultimately change has to come from.