FREE SPEECH ISN’T ENOUGH: To rescue the American academic community from itself, that is, according to Hillsdale Professor Wilfred McClay, writing in City Journal. Yes, winning legal and other battles to protect and reinvigorate the First Amendment on college campuses is vital, but there is much more to this struggle:

“But the restoration of free speech, as well as the ethos that supports its flourishing, is not the full cure to what ails higher education in America. Yes, a university is a community of inquiry. But it also is something more than that: a community of shared memory, the chief instrument by which the achievements of the past are transmitted to the present as a body of knowledge upon which future knowledge can be built.

“Without the prior existence of that body of shared knowledge to build upon, the concept of progress is empty. This is what it means to be a civilization: a social formation in which such transmission takes place continuously and reliably, forming the basis of a rich and enduring common life.”

So much wisdom in that statement, and more from McClay in an invaluable look at the basics of what the restoration of Western civilization entails.