Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of Thursday’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Jack Fowler: I mentioned a couple of episodes ago our friend Bill Jacobson with Legal Insurrection. He has some efforts aimed at ferreting out that stuff. Yeah, it’s not only, let’s just say, racism in schools, which could be in hiring. This could be in scholarships. Here’s a scholarship: blacks only need apply.
Or teachers, you’re going to get this bonus, but only if you’re a minority. So, he has a legal arm there that goes after that. There are efforts to …
Victor Davis Hanson: You know, I had a student tell me, “You don’t know what it’s like to be Latino.” And I said, “I do,” because I came of age when this started.
In those days, 4.0 was the top, and I had a 3.99. I had two Bs. I did pretty well for a country boy on the SAT, so I applied to UC Santa Cruz. It was a new campus. It was harder to get in than Stanford. I was on the waiting list at Stanford and UC, so I might not have gone away to college. They let me into both, I think, much later at Stanford, but I got into Santa Cruz from the waiting list.
So, I went there, and there were two students from my high school who were C students, and they were there already. They had been there all summer long. They were Latino. I never said anything, but they could not believe that I had, you know … There were three students who had the top grades.
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It’s a long story, but there was a valedictorian. I wasn’t that, but we were all one-tenth of a point apart. I was, I think, the third highest. But the point I’m making is that when I went to graduate school, this was in 1975, Mark Edwards was a great guy. He called us in, and there were four white males. He said, “I want to tell you right now, we’re hearing of lawsuits.”
This was kind of like the [Allan] Bakke era. “None of you are going to get a job. I’ve been to the American Philological Association, and everybody’s told me they’re going to hire women and minorities no matter what. We have to at Stanford.”
We said, “Well, you have three or four women here, and you have an African American.”
I said, “How about all you guys? Why don’t you all resign and then give up your places? You’re all in your 60s.”
When you’re that age, 21 years old, you don’t believe it. So, you think, “Well, I’ll be fine.” I told my adviser. He said, “Well, if you’re good, you’ll make it. I did.”
I said, “Yeah, but you were in a different generation.”
So I finished all my exams in two and a half years. That’s all I did. I studied 20 hours a day and slept about five hours. I wrote my thesis in my third year. I went to the American School of Classical Studies for a whole year. I did all of that.
When I applied to seventeen jobs at age twenty-five, I got one interview at the Naval Academy. They said, “That was a great interview.”
They interviewed me on everything. “Can you tell us who Jomini was?” and things outside classics. Then they said, “But you’re not going to get the job. We have to hire a woman.”
I said, “Well, you guys are kind of old. Why don’t you resign and hire her?” Because they have a civilian system at the Naval Academy, not like West Point.
So, I came back, and I’d farmed for five years. I was unemployable. When I went to Fresno, Cal State Fresno, they said, “We’re not going to hire you. We’ll have you part-time.”
I said, “I published a book.”
They said, “Well, let me see. You have a Ph.D. from Stanford and you’ve published a book, but we’re going to hire a woman and a minority.”
These were all white guys telling me this.
Finally, I gave a lecture, and a person from the McClatchy Foundation heard me speak. She said, “That was a great talk. Why aren’t you teaching?”
I said, “I only have one class.”
So, she gave a gift for me to teach for one year. I did pretty well, and I doubled the enrollment.
But my point is that there’s a whole generation of people born in the 1950s who came of age during this whole racial preference system, and that’s all they’ve known. So, when people say discrimination, there has been discrimination, but when I saw it institutionally, I’m not talking about what people thought. Institutionally, it was all one way, and people are tired of it.
So, when I got a job and I got tenure, I had a guy from the philosophy department come to me and say, “They’re not going to hire me. I’m a white male. I’ve been a part-time teacher for eleven years, and I make one-third of what a professor does. I drive all over to community colleges. Can you help me?”
So, I went to the chairman, and I did that for about five people. I got all five hired.
But it was very strange how amoral it was. It was just blatant. You know what I mean? Blatant racism. It would have been much better if, when people thought there was inequality, and there was, they had started at K-12.
You could have gone down to the kindergarten level and said, “These are the types of schools in minority districts in the forties, fifties, and sixties that educated people well, and we’re going to restore them. We’re going to make them academies. Anybody can go, but they’ll be located in poorer areas to make sure that when you come out of there … ”
It was holistic, and that’s what I grew up with in a Hispanic district.
So, when I had students, I would always say to them, “You’re going to give a lecture, your class report, and you can have no notes. You’re going to memorize it, and you’re going to talk to me. I don’t want you reading it off a page. And you’re going to have perfect English.”
I corrected their syntax and their grammar. The whole point, I thought, was to make sure that Mexican American, Black, and Southeast Asian students spoke perfect English and were better educated than anybody.
Fowler: Right.
Hanson: And to do all that work, that’s why I retired.
One day I walked into my office area, and this guy had a big Land Rover. It must have cost $60,000. His office was next to mine, and he had a sign that said, “No blood for oil.”
Then I walked down the hall, and a student came into the office after me. This guy who had been up for tenure was terrible. I was on the tenure committee.
He was telling the student, “Don’t worry about grammar. You don’t need grammar. You’ve grown up in a disadvantaged household. I don’t correct grammar.”
He was an English professor.
I saw that and I thought, “I’m so glad that I don’t have to deal with these people.” I had wonderful colleagues, Bruce Thornton, etc., and I had wonderful students.
Then one of the students I liked a lot, a guy who was really good, came up to me and said, “Well, I’m applying to Ph.D. programs.”
I said, “Yeah, but it’s going to be very competitive because we have two or three people this year with master’s degrees, perfect GRE scores, and they know French and German.”
He said, “Yeah, but they’re not minorities like I am.”
At that point, I said, “I’m done.”
So, I turned around and walked to the California PERS retirement office and said, “I want to retire.”
They said, “Mr. Hanson, you’re 51 years old, and you’ve only been here 21 years.”
They showed me the actuarial tables.
“We are notorious for having the best-defined benefits, and you would be getting $110,000 in those future dollars when you complete 35 years.”
I said, “I can’t take it. What would it be right now?”
At that time they said, “$18,000 a year when you’re 65.”
They’ve inflated it a little because of the cost of living, but I said, “I quit.”
The president called me up and said, “You can’t quit.”
I said, “Why?”
He said, “Because you get more hits on your website than the entire school.”
I don’t know what he meant by that.
And I said, “But I’ve had enough.”
Fowler: But you also had heavily populated classes, right?
Hanson: Yeah, I had 200 students, and I had been there for 21 years. I’d written 16 books. I’d won a National Endowment award. All of those things they count, though I didn’t care much about them. I had been a visiting professor at Stanford and a visiting professor at the Naval Academy.
But I was done. Done.
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