Fittingly, Thomas delivered the address at the University of Texas at Austin, praising Dean Justin Dyer’s new School of Civic Leadership for its mission to revitalize Western civilization and constitutional tradition in American higher education.

A study by a Rutgers professor underscores Thomas’s point. It is a ground-breaking working paper containing the only large-scale survey in a decade showing beyond doubt that hardcore leftist professors have captured the university almost completely. 

This trend started half a century ago and is at its peak now, with professors who espouse progressivism controlling about 75% of the faculty while their conservative colleagues hover around 10%. 

If you wonder how a smarmy communist with dangerous economic ideas like Zohran Mamdani could be elected mayor of New York, look no further than this phenomenon and the warnings of Thomas.

Sarah Lawrence professor Samuel Abrams put it this way in the Wall Street Journal (also last week): “After nearly two decades of teaching American politics, I’ve noticed a striking shift among my students. They’re arriving to campus not only skeptical of free markets, but openly embracing democratic socialist ideas.”

Thomas, a national treasure, is right that these socialist ideas cannot be squared with American principles. And the Left’s Long March Through the Institutions has been so successful that he warned, “As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure.”

Thomas traces the introduction of socialist ideas into the United States to intellectuals who a century ago disdained the American Founding’s emphasis on natural rights, and instead preferred the foreign idea that government, not God or nature, bestowed rights on people.

The chief introducer was an academic and former president of Princeton University who turned to politics, became governor of New Jersey, and then entered the White House in 1913.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the 28th president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism,” Thomas told his hosts in Austin, itself a progressive redoubt in ruby-red Texas.

“Since Wilson’s presidency,” he added, “progressivism has made many inroads into our system of government and our way of life. It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.”

Progressivism was not native to American soil, he noted. It came from a place where both of the 20th century’s worst scourges (communism and fascism) came from: Germany. “Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, whose state-centric society they admired,” said Thomas.

Progressives such as Wilson did not like Madisonian ideas of limited government, nor indeed did they much like the U.S., just like the progressives of today.

Added Thomas: “Wilson argued that America needed to leave behind the principles of the founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated people of Europe,” and called Germany’s system of relatively unimpeded state power “nearly perfected.” He acknowledged that it was “a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle,” which “offers none but what are to our minds alien ideas.”

Thomas is right. Wilson indeed held our founding in very low regard. In 1911, a year before he ran for president, he said, “We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence: We are as free as they were to make and unmake governments. We are not here to worship men or a document.” 

Then, the year he entered the White House, Wilson said in another address, “Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence. … The Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day. It is of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms into examples of the present day.”

To Thomas, this must appear as heresy. The 77-year-old grew up in Jim Crow Georgia and, as he told his Austin audience, he learned firsthand that his rights did not come from government, because the local and state governments were, at the time, emphatic about taking away his God-given rights.

“When you lived in a segregated world with palpable discrimination, and the governments nearest to you enforced laws and customs that promoted unequal treatment, it was obvious that your rights or your dignity did not come from those governments, but rather from God,” said Thomas. “Though not a literate man, my grandfather often spoke of our rights and obligations coming from God, not from architects of segregation and discrimination.”

When a man of Thomas’s life experience and achievement puts the importance of the declaration’s second paragraph — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” — in such personal terms, you have no choice but to listen.

“Those truths were self-evident to the adults in our lives and were taught to us as indelible, undeniable truths. those around us would endure or could endure the insults of segregation, uh, with dignity because they knew that in God’s eyes they were equal.”

Small wonder then that this great American speaks of the need for something we began to lose with Wilson and have lost sight of again in 21st-century America: a blind devotion (a word he repeated 17 times in his remarks) to the founding principles.

“To Wilson, the unalienable rights of the individual were, quote, a lot of nonsense,” said Thomas — yet, “that devotion has driven the great achievements and heroism of Americans in the 250 years since.”

This, then, was the heart of Thomas’s warning: “It is that devotion that we are missing today and that we must find in our hearts if this nation is to endure.”

The time is propitious, of course, to try to instill that devotion again. This is, after all, the year of the nation’s semiquincentennial. As Thomas told Dean Dyer, “Your plans could not come at a more important moment for our nation, when, as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the very values announced in it have fallen out of favor.”

The road will be made harder when one takes into account the findings of Nathan Honeycutt of the University of Arkansas and Rutgers University. It is the first snapshot of faculty politics since the 2016-17 HERI faculty study.

As Honeycutt points out, in the U.S., conservatives have outnumbered liberals for the past 30 years, or as far back as data from Gallup is available. Gallup’s most recent numbers indicate that 36% of Americans identify as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 26% as liberal.

Not so at the faculty lounge, where Honeycutt finds from a survey sample of 8,167 tenured/tenure-track faculty participants that 74.24% identify as liberal, 14.91% as middle-of-the-road, and 10.85% as conservative.

The fields that were most lopsided were, as can be expected, the humanities and social sciences, and the most balanced (if that’s a word that can be used for 60% to 17% splits) came in engineering and business schools. In the humanities, 14% of faculty described themselves as Marxists, 38% as socialists (one may wonder what the difference here is), 28% as radical, and 25% as political activists.

For the purposely obtuse who may ask what any of this has to do with Thomas’s call for renewed devotion to the founding principles of America, my Heritage Foundation colleague Anna Gustafson points me to another Gallup poll, which in 2025, showed that among Republicans, 92% were extremely or very proud to be American, while among Democrats that number was 36%.

And that’s “Democrats,” not self-described socialists, Marxists, radicals, and other political Bad Hombres.

Translation: We are not going to get the devotion that we need to the founding values as long as this lot continues to pour Marxist rot into the brains of our college students. 

THE TRUE SHAPE OF THE BABY BUST

President Donald Trump has demanded that universities that take the public dime (nearly all of them) must create real diversity in the faculty lounge — not racial diversity, but diversity of viewpoint.

This is not a fight that Trump can abandon, as one of his favorite justices can tell him.