The promise offered by the Liberal Arts—to expose young minds to the enduring questions and lasting ideals that have made possible society’s greatest achievements—has today been brought into doubt by a generation of students too young even to know what they repudiate. Motivated not by experienced consideration, but by ideologically based social trends, our once-stalwart models of greatness are being deposed and discarded eagerly, angrily, and promiscuously by a student class uninterested in learning from whom and from what kinds of thinking came the very liberties that make possible their freedom to reject them. 

As symbols of these jettisoned values, the artworks that honor or memorialize the people and events that brought us what amount to all of Western Civilization are being eradicated from the public sphere, and from the halls and campuses of academia they served to establish.   

In a sad irony, what is exalted in their stead is not art at all. It is rather agitprop and idol-making, expressing none of the goodness, truth, or beauty that redeems even the most problematic—because human—of great ideas. 

If “interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art,” as Susan Sontag said, the destruction now rampant is a profligate retribution of the incurious upon creativity itself.     

—Benjamin Marcus

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”

—Ernest Benn

NOW CANCELED ON CAMPUS:

Christopher Columbus mural at Trumbull Elementary School, Chicago
Jacobson-Boyhan murals depicting the founding of Tufts University
Founder and minister
George Whitefield statue at
University of Pennsylvania
Robert E. Lee statue at Duke University
Captain William Clark Monument at
University of Portland
Thomas Jefferson statue at Hofstra University
Cecil Rhodes statue at Oxford University
“Life of George Washington” mural at George Washington High School, San Francisco
Christopher Columbus Statue at Columbus State Community College
Bust of George Washington at George Washington University

NOW DEPLOYED ON CAMPUS:

“Mama” by Kelly Latimore,
Catholic University of America
Unnamed mural
by Shepard Fairey at Tufts University
“White America Supremacy, Nationalism and Patriotism” by Emma Quintana, University of Tampa
“Murda-Malc”
by Will Porter, Kean University
“Trayvon Shattered Dreams”
by Sean Hasset, Kean University
“Sandy Hook Shooting and Do Nothing Congress”
Joel Lopez, Kean University