Our Center, Our Revolution
The winter of 1777–78 was bitterly cold. To celebrate its end at Valley Forge, General Washington ordered the performance of a popular British play about the Roman Revolution: Cato. Congress had recently prohibited theatrical productions, but Washington hoped to inspire his men with the republican zeal of the Roman statesman. Just as Washington was fighting King George, who had tyrannized the colonies, Cato had resisted Julius Caesar, who would soon declare himself Dictator for Life. Like many of the American statesmen of his generation—Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Wilson—Washington modeled himself on the ancient Greeks and Romans.
More than any other ancient hero, they admired Cincinnatus. Summoned from his farm to save a Roman army, Cincinnatus was made Dictator—not for life, but for a limited term. When the Republic functioned well, the Romans reserved this temporary title for national emergencies, knowing that a city in peril needed decisive leadership. With the power this gave him, Cincinnatus defeated the enemy in only 16 days. That alone made him a Roman hero. What he did next made him immortal. He surrendered his title immediately and returned to his plow. This was Roman virtue: service to country ahead of all personal ambition.
Washington had two opportunities to imitate Cincinnatus: first when he retired from the Continental Army after he’d led it to victory against the British in 1783; then again when he refused to seek a third term as president of the United States in 1797. Such a precedent kept the young republic from becoming the sort of monarchy he and his men had fought so hard to defeat. In between those two famous occasions, Washington had served quietly as the first president of an association of Revolutionary War veterans: The Society of the Cincinnati.
Drawing in such ways upon their knowledge of history and philosophy, both ancient and modern, the Founding Fathers gave us not only the U.S. Constitution but new models of statesmanship: themselves. Like them, today’s leaders can study the Greeks and Romans, but also the Founding Fathers, as well as the many contributors to American freedom who have followed them: explorers, entrepreneurs, generals. After two and a half centuries we have no shortage of native heroes. Today, like the Founding Fathers, we look backward to move forward and restore that freedom.
Like Washington’s army, we have endured a cold winter of sorts. There are no foreign troops on our soil, but our national crisis is in a way more serious than the Revolutionary War. The threat is more insidious, worsened by the thinkers who should have been vigilant against it. It is more far-reaching, spread by now throughout our culture and civic life. Our invaders have not been soldiers in a foreign army but falsehoods of a destructive ideology. It has gone by many names, but lately it has come to be known as “Woke.” It has turned our universities—whose original task was to pursue the truth and teach it to new generations—into seminaries of a new religion, producing activists rather than scholars, dogmatists rather than thinkers, nihilists rather than builders.
Examples of this failure are ample in every field, but let’s consider only the study of our Founding Fathers themselves. Instead of approaching them as models of civics, culture, and statesmanship, professors today prefer to show how they were racists, sexists, homophobes, and colonizers. The opportunity to appreciate their wisdom is lost. The opportunity to use them as models for a new generation of statesmen is lost. The opportunity to adapt their wisdom to our national crisis is lost. What is gained instead is an incantation of Woke pieties: that our culture is systemically racist, its land stolen from indigenous peoples, its leaders misogynists trapped in the gender binary. Anyone who has been to college in the last decade knows the liturgy … and the costs of heresy.
These are not random critiques, but a sustained effort to demoralize us as a nation. Woke professors may believe they are acting alone, as free thinkers, but isn’t it odd how everywhere you go they sing from the same hymnal? This is because their ideology doesn’t wake anyone up; it puts reason to sleep. It doesn’t enlighten anyone; it forces us to stumble in the dark. Students who should be asking questions become commissars of cancel culture. Rather than preparing West Virginians to become free citizens of a free republic, Woke produces obedient cogs in a social machine that is grinding them down. Our young are becoming sicker, sadder, and less curious. They’re becoming hostile to diverse ideas, enemies of justice, and inclusive only of those who kneel before their false god: DEI.
To become a leader in our society—whether in government, the military, or the corporations, not to mention the universities themselves—one must spend at least four years in such seminaries, inhaling bromides about race and sex. Students learn how to conform to rules invented the day before yesterday rather than how to lead free citizens into an uncertain tomorrow. How would George Washington have fared in college nowadays? Imagine if his resolve to be like Cincinnatus had been relentlessly criticized as “co-operation with whiteness”? Imagine if his admiration of Cato had been scorned as “toxic masculinity”? What if his whole education had been supervised by a DEI officer whose task was to ensure the university remained a seminary of Woke religion rather than a home for free inquiry?
After being elected by the people of West Virginia, Governor Morrisey eliminated the unjust DEI regime at WVU. That was one side of his policy to renew higher education. He took apart something destructive. This was necessary to restore freedom of speech to our campuses. Students and professors alike should have this freedom, even when they are wrong, and even when they offend. But free speech is not an end in itself. Its purpose is not to offend. Our Founding Fathers didn’t fight a revolution in order to allow pornographers and provocateurs to publish whatever they like. Free speech is valuable because it permits the pursuit of truth, and that has always been the true purpose of universities. Now we’re witnessing another side of our state government’s policy, the side that builds up something new: The Washington Center for Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship. My hope is that it will be that home for free inquiry, setting an example for others, both in West Virginia and across the country.
Our nation has serious problems that demand serious leadership. We are living in an economy that is being revolutionized by artificial intelligence. White-collar workers will soon know the pain of unemployment that our blue-collar workers have suffered for decades. We are living in a country that has been flooded with immigrants to bolster corporate profits, establish a client class for our elites, and hide the fact that our young people are not starting families. Finally, we are living in a multipolar world of dangerous rivals who care more about winning wars than winning the “oppression Olympics.” These are not problems that can be resolved with a new tax policy, a new regulation, or a new government program. This is a crisis that threatens not just West Virginia or the United States, but Western civilization.
In this battle, where the enemy is not a foreign army but a false ideology, we need professors more than generals. They must be thinkers who understand the American ideals of our Founding Fathers. They must know the deep roots of these ideals in ancient Greece and Rome. They must teach how these ideals grew through European and colonial history. They must show how they evolved through Christianity, industrialization, world wars. These professors must therefore be learned in philosophy as well as history, economics as well as law, religion as well as psychology, biology as well as military science. Each will have a different specialty, but all must share a commitment to truth, freedom, and American ideals.
This Center will support and unite such professors, giving students at WVU an opportunity to learn American ideals from teachers who believe in them. They will strive to discover the truth, not deconstruct it. Their students will learn to defend American freedom, not undermine it. Together they will be fighting an intellectual revolution with similar Centers that have opened across the nation—in Ohio, Mississippi, and many other states. For instance, the University of Florida’s Hamilton School has over 40 faculty, and the University of Texas’s School for Civic Leadership received $100 million and immediately hired 20 professors. But this is West Virginia, not Florida or Texas, so we’re starting small, with a faculty of 4. Remember: mighty sycamore trees begin from small seed-pods. What matters is the soil and the climate. I believe that WVU is the best place to grow a forest of such trees.
Our Center will train students in our Western and American traditions so that they can understand our present and its crisis. They will learn who we are as a people, what our strengths and weaknesses are, and most importantly: what we must do to survive and even flourish in this brave new world. In this difficult task they will be following Washington and the other Founding Fathers. They too started small, prevailing against the mightiest global empire thanks to their native willpower, virtue, and wisdom. They drew upon ancient examples and eternal principles, but their genius was to apply them in new circumstances to restore freedom in the modern world. The Washington Center will join them in this noble mission, more urgent now than ever.