Conservative Scholar Warns Classroom Literacy Crisis Threatens America

Victor Davis Hanson walked away from a long teaching career because America’s campuses stopped teaching the basics and started prioritizing ideology and administrative quotas over literacy and merit. This article lays out his experience, the decline he described in student preparedness, and the administrative pressures that pushed a respected conservative scholar to quit.

Hanson says he began teaching in 1984 and that his early classes covered heavy-hitting classics like Homer, Sophocles, and Plato. He taught Introduction to the Humanities with a syllabus that assumed students could read, interpret, and discuss complex texts. Over two decades he watched those expectations evaporate as students arrived unready to decode simple words or handle basic grammar, which is a problem for any society that expects to remain literate and self-governing.

By the end of his 21-year run, Hanson said the course had been pared down to just two readings because students could not handle more. He recounted an encounter with a student who wanted to drop the class because he was failing and could not keep up. Hanson brought him into his office to see whether the issue was effort or basic comprehension, and the result was stark and unsettling.

I taught for 21 years at a California State University campus. And when I started, Jack, in 1984, I taught a course called Introduction to the Humanities. I had nine readings. And it started out with Homer’s Iliad, Homer’s Odyssey … Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Euripides’ Bacchae, Aeschylus’ Orestia, selections from Thucydides and Herodotus. This was the ancient part of the first semester. And I ended with Plato’s Apology and Crito. I might have had Aristotle.

Hanson timed the student reading a page of Homer and watched him struggle through a single page for ten minutes. The student could not define basic words that most middle-schoolers should know, like wrath or active. Hanson described trying to explain what a verb is, and the scene paints a damning picture of where parts of higher education have drifted.

So he came in. And I gave him the Iliad. And I said, “Can you read?” Sing maiden, the wrath of Achilles. He said, “What does wrath mean, honestly?” And he said, “What does sing mean?” And I said, “It means to sing a song. It’s an active verb.” “Well, what’s an active mean? What’s a verb mean?”… I said, “‘Could you read this out loud? And I’m going to time you to see how long it takes you to read.” Well, it took him 10 minutes to read the whole one page. So I said, “Well, we’ll say half, five minutes it will take you to read these short pages of hexameter translated by Richmond Latimore.”

This is not just one bad day in a classroom; it’s a symptom. Hanson points to institutional pressures that reward enrollment numbers and protect certain student groups rather than enforcing a standard of competence. When the system treats literacy as optional and ideology as central, teachers who expect standards face a losing battle.

Hanson also mentioned directives he received from campus programs that intervened on behalf of students in certain categories, like athletes or first-generation college attendees. Those directives sometimes implied consequences for students if they failed, which created moral and professional conflicts for instructors who wanted to maintain academic rigor. That combination of administrative pressure and declining student skills led Hanson to conclude he could no longer teach under those conditions.

The broader concern for conservatives is clear: if literacy and basic comprehension are slipping, the intellectual foundation needed for civic life erodes. When universities shift their focus toward social engineering and identity narratives, the basics of reading, writing, and critical thinking suffer. Hanson’s account is a warning that academic decline is not merely theoretical; it costs teachers, students, and ultimately the culture itself.

Watching a once-respected campus tradition of serious reading get reduced because students lack fundamental skills is alarming. If classic texts are removed or marginalized, generations lose access to the ideas and language that shaped Western thought. Those losses are not neutral; they change how young people understand citizenship, history, and the skills necessary for a functioning republic.

The problem Hanson describes is both educational and administrative. Poor preparation in earlier schooling feeds into college, and university policies that emphasize retention over readiness compound the issue. The result is a churn of frustrated faculty and graduates who may emerge without the tools to read, think, or participate fully in civic life.

The choice Hanson made to leave teaching was personal and principled. He refused to be complicit in a system that admitted students who could not engage with required texts while institutions insulated those same students from academic consequences. His story is a direct critique of a higher education model that prioritizes ideology and numbers over core educational tasks.