Read Aloud · Premium
Listen to any dispatch in the Grok vocal voices — a benefit of membership.
Stephen H. Balch has spent decades as founder of the National Association of Scholars confronting the ideological capture of higher education, where once-great institutions now serve as engines of cultural dispossession rather than preservers of inherited wisdom. His persistent defense of the Western canon against the leveling doctrines of the present age marks him as a solitary sentinel amid the ruins of the old academy.
The universities of Christendom arose from the synthesis of classical learning and Christian revelation, ordered toward the pursuit of truth under the sovereignty of God. From the founding of Bologna and Paris to the Reformation's insistence on the recovery of original texts, the Western mind always understood itself as a steward of objective reality rather than a constructor of fashionable narratives.
Today that inheritance lies besieged by the managerial priesthood of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which reduces every discipline to a weapon in the service of the earthly city. Balch's long campaign demonstrates that this capture did not occur by accident but through the deliberate subversion of faculty governance and the abandonment of rigorous standards in favor of political loyalty.
The governing principle at stake is the Augustinian distinction between the City of God and the City of Man: the university must remain ordered toward eternal truth or it becomes merely another instrument of temporal power. When institutions reject this hierarchy, they dissolve the very conditions under which genuine inquiry can flourish.
Balch's record testifies that the faithful remnant must now cease pleading for reform within captured structures and instead erect parallel centers of learning that restore the authority of what has been handed down. The alternative is continued surrender of the next generation to the dispossessors who regard Western civilization itself as the enemy.
The hour demands that men of principle follow Balch's example by withdrawing support from the corrupted academy and building institutions loyal to place, people, and the creedal inheritance. Only such deliberate separation can preserve the intellectual architecture upon which ordered liberty and Christian culture still depend.
