As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, a prominent university leader is calling on American higher education to reclaim a role it has largely abandoned: teaching students to love their country.
Jim Gash, president of Pepperdine University, argues that patriotism is not blind worship or uncritical support for every government action. Instead, he frames it as a commitment to the nation's founding principles—a commitment that can include dissent when those principles are betrayed. But he warns that too many campuses have crossed from constructive criticism into outright rejection of American ideals, fueling a broader crisis of national pride.
Recent Gallup data underscores the generational divide Gash cites: only 30% of Americans aged 18 to 34 say they are extremely or very proud to be American, compared with 53% of those 35 to 54 and 69% of those 55 and older. This collapse in pride, he argues, is no accident—it reflects what students are (or are not) taught.
Gash invokes the Declaration of Independence's assertion of God-given rights as the nation's foundational vision, noting that reformers from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. didn't reject that vision—they held it up and demanded the nation live up to it. The same challenge faces today's students, he says.
"Will we continue to steward the vision the founding generation passed down to us, or will we abandon ship?" Gash writes. "Will we continue to carry the torch of liberty for the next 250 years, or will ours be the generation that allows freedom to go extinct once and for all?"
He points to the founders' insistence that a republic depends on virtuous citizens, quoting Benjamin Franklin: "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom." That civic formation, Gash insists, is as essential as job training—and it requires a return to the great texts and values that shaped American society.
At Pepperdine, Gash has introduced a seminar on the "Roots of American Order" to model this approach. He calls for a broader shift across higher education toward character formation and whole-person development, not just career preparation.
The stakes, he argues, are existential. Eroding trust between generations and threats to core American values make the task more urgent. Gash echoes Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, hoping for "a new birth of freedom" so that government of, by, and for the people shall not perish.
"It will look like training the next generation to love their country well enough to lead it," he concludes.
