The Quiet Erosion of Educational Standards | Allen Mendenhall

On this episode of Anchored, Soren is joined by Allen Mendenhall, the associate dean and Grady Rosier professor for the Sorell College of Business at Troy University, where he also directs the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy. Mendenhall recently published an article in 1819 News entitled “Alabama Needs the Classic Learning Test.” The two discuss the problems with American education today, highlighting how educational vandalism and social engineering confuse the moral aims and core objectives of schooling. They dive into the College Board’s contribution to eroding educational standards. They conclude by talking about some of the hopeful changes and initiatives that they are seeing on the academic landscape.

Transcript

Soren Schwab - CLT (00:00.674)
Welcome back to the Anchored Podcast, the official podcast of the Classic Learning Test. My name is Soren Schwab, VP of Partnerships here at CLT, and today we're joined by Dr. Ellen Mendenhall. Dr. Mendenhall is the Associate Dean and Grady Rozier Professor in the Sorel College of Business at Troy University, where he also directs the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy. He's currently a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He's the published author of both fiction and nonfiction books, including a gloomy piece this morning,

and The Three Ps of Liberty, Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Polycentricity. And I just love me a good alliteration. Dr. Mendenhall's television show, Success Stories, airs on local television throughout Alabama. And his segment, Word to the Wise, appears on Troy Public Radio. He holds a BA in English from Furman University, an MA in English from West Virginia University, a JD from West Virginia University College of Law, LLM in Transnational Law from Temple University Beasley School of Law,

and a PhD in English from Auburn University. Dr. Mendenhall recently penned an opinion piece in the 1890 news titled Alabama Needs the Classic Learning Test. And I'm so delighted to have him on the show today. Dr. Mendenhall, welcome.

Allen Mendenhall (01:14.429)
Thank you for having me.

Soren Schwab - CLT (01:15.854)
Absolutely. It's a true pleasure. And as we always do, we start the Anchored Podcast by talking about our guests own educational background. So could you tell us a little bit about your upbringing? What kind of schools did you attend at K-12?

Allen Mendenhall (01:28.199)
Well, you sort of listed the higher education background, but I'm actually a product of public schools, but I had a somewhat unusual and fortunate public school experience. When I was young, my mom was trying to decide whether to send me to a private school or to a public school. And she opened the Bible and just sort of put her finger down. And as skeptical as I am of stories like this, this actually occurred and she pointed to Bethel and the word Bethel and Mount Bethel was the public school.

down the road and so that's how I ended up going to public school. But at high school, I pursued Latin. When I got to choose my foreign language, I chose Latin and I did AP English and was always sort of interested in literature because my grandmother, when I was young, read poetry to me. My mom read books to me. When I was in, I don't know, second or third grade, there were these expurgated versions of the classics that were

can, you they were, they were designed for people roughly my age. And although they were 300 pages, they had big pictures. And I remember reading several of the classics then and falling in love with them. And in those days, you could actually get some sorts of introductions to the classics through television. remember seeing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a cartoon. Who knows what, what company produced that. But I remember seeing that and being inspired by it.

And so a lot of my education was self-directed. I was always a reader. I can recall being in fifth grade and getting in trouble because I was hiding a book under my desk as the teacher was teaching, who knows what she was teaching. She was teaching something, but I was reading the book beneath my desk and I actually got in trouble for that. But I think later teachers probably recognized my love of reading and tried to nurture it rather than suppress it.

Soren Schwab - CLT (03:24.856)
Wow, that is fascinating. That's not a bad way to get in trouble, I suppose. Did you know at that point that what you received and what you pursued was maybe not the norm for a lot of public school students in the country? Or did you kind of later learn about this liberal arts education or classical education? Well, I kind of got a variation of that.

Allen Mendenhall (03:29.33)
Ha

Allen Mendenhall (03:48.711)
Well, I don't think I had any awareness of those types of distinctions when I was that age, but I went through certain phases in development and certain periods of elementary school when I loved to read, certain periods of middle school when I loved to read. My dad took me to DC in middle school and I was inspired by the museums I saw and I...

or fell in love with the founding generation and would read about the founding generation and try to conduct myself properly the way someone like George Washington might do. you know, then I probably, when I first got to high school, I was in a phase where I was more interested in making friends. And then I had a high school girlfriend who was very academic and very serious about her studies. And she rubbed off on me in a good way. And I studied hard.

I always knew my strengths. I was never a strong math science guy, but I loved literature. I loved history. I loved philosophy, basically any of the humanities. And so it was clear to me where I needed to direct my focus. And I did all the AP classes in sort of those subjects I just mentioned and tried when I got to college.

a few classes toward the business core and realized this is not what I want out of my liberal arts education. went to Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, which was far less woke in those days than it is today. And I recognized early on that I wanted to major in English. I wanted to study literature. I wanted to read the best that had been written over the course of centuries. And that was how I

built my curriculum.

Soren Schwab - CLT (05:41.346)
Well, I had to chuckle a little bit when you commented on Furman, which by the way, not yet a CLT partner college. Shocking to some, probably not so much to you who knows more about that. But come around. So you already alluded to, you know, there's been some change in education. I love your writing. You're such a keen observer of educational trends, cultural trends. So I'm going to start with a very simple, mean, very simple, straightforward question. What's wrong in American education today?

Allen Mendenhall (06:11.559)
Well, there's a long list, but I guess I'll start with saying sort of the catastrophe in American education stems from abandoning aesthetic and intellectual difficulty in favor of resentment, activism, grievance, identity politics. You know, we've replaced the sublime challenge of wrestling with Shakespeare and Milton and Dante with a parade of ideological simplicities.

Soren Schwab - CLT (06:13.342)
Ha ha.

Allen Mendenhall (06:41.061)
And the true purpose of reading, let alone education, but just reading itself is to strengthen the self, to commune with the dead, to achieve cognitive and imaginative enrichment. And we've sort of sacrificed all these things on the altar of social engineering. Our students aren't taught to read as solitary thinkers as I was. And I mentioned I had some teachers who encouraged me to.

to read independently. Instead, they're conscripted into various political causes and told that the humanities exist to confirm their predetermined social views or the social views of whoever is teaching a particular class. And this is a profound spiritual and intellectual loss. If we reduce Hamlet or Lear to a lesson about patriarchy or we read

Emily Dickinson or Wala Stevens through the narrow lens of gender politics, we're committing an act of educational vandalism. I think education is actually fundamentally meritocratic, not like aristocratic in terms of social class, but meritocratic in the sense that it needs to demand intellectual rigor and it needs to recognize that some books are better than others. Some texts are more important than others.

I think that our tendency to celebrate democracy has led to a bad form of educational democracy where all texts are considered equal and interchangeable, where you can study rap lyrics or Buffy the Vampire Slayer along Keats and Coleridge and Wordsworth, where you can flatten the distinctions between Taylor Smith and the Divine Comedy. And that's problematic. mean, certain works just flat out contain more aesthetic

value and more cognitive complexity, more wisdom than other works. And we have to have the courage to say that and to make those kinds of judgments to say this book is better than another book and to be able to explain why we think that. We need to subject our students to difficult texts and to make them wrestle with difficulty. Otherwise,

Allen Mendenhall (09:01.181)
We're just going to continue our decline.

Soren Schwab - CLT (09:05.378)
Wow, there are so many quotable parts in what you just said. Absolutely incredible. And you probably could get canceled for any of these. But I I could not agree more. I I went to Hillsdale and the professors that shared these treasures with me, know, I was able to stand on the shoulder of giants and I feel very privileged in that because maybe...

hadn't gotten to Hillsdale but to, I don't know, Michigan State then maybe the whole purpose would be to take down the joints, right? And only fight fault, find fault in them. I think what you're getting to though as well is, in your opinion piece that I reference, Alabama Needs the Classic Learning Test, you talked about, you refer to, and I quote, the quiet erosion of educational standards and cultural understanding. I know you alluded to that a little bit, but speak a bit more about what you mean by that.

Allen Mendenhall (10:05.139)
Okay, well, I guess there are a lot of things I could say. I one is I think we focus so much on the technical aspect of education where even liberal arts colleges like Furman rebrand themselves as career preparation centers and English departments or philosophy departments or humanities departments have to justify their existence through practical applications. What use is this?

subject matter to your career. Writing courses, you know, I've taught many, many writing courses, including composition courses at Auburn, and they're focused on, you know, business communications rather than analytical thinking. And critical thinking is reduced to bullet point sort of skill sets rather than a way of being a way of seeking knowledge. And a lot of it goes back to what I talked

talked about earlier is in particular in the English departments. Again, my background, my PhD is in English, so I spent a lot of time in English departments as a student and a teacher. And the emphasis on activism just gets the cart before the horse because students are encouraged to take these political stances before they actually know anything, before they've developed foundational knowledge. They don't know what they need to be activists about yet because, you know, they haven't wrestled with the complex histories and philosophical underpinnings.

of the social movements that their professors or whoever else are advocating. And I think, ironically, given sort of the triumph of postmodernism and other schools of thought where we emphasize contingency and contextualism and chance and arbitrariness, ironically, in light of that background, moral certainty seems to have replaced intellectual curiosity. You would think that in that

post-modernist background that we would see sort of epistemic humility. If people are doubtful about truth as a meaningful category of discourse, then maybe they're gonna be seekers, maybe they're gonna be searchers. But no, we actually get a weird form of moral certainty and superiority coming out of these English departments. And we also get a lot of sort of quick hot takes, know, the Twitter version of argumentation.

Allen Mendenhall (12:30.339)
over measured, well researched arguments. I mean, there's so many other things I could talk about, grade inflation, know, emphasis on the present at the expense of the past. I mean, I think that's a big issue. I have students that really know nothing before the 1960s. It's as though the 1960s were the founding generation of America and students don't know anything about

American history in particular, let alone British history, European history, Western history. And so they arrive in their classes just unable to grasp historical context or cultural references. And yet they feel equipped to judge these past works and past people by contemporary standards. And they treat these historical figures and events with these just sort of...

know just these shorter, again I'll use the Twitter length anecdotes rather than complex narratives that require deep understanding and deep engagement and classical texts also a big problem with those is if they're taught at all they're taught you know in snippets or you'll read okay instead of reading the Odyssey we'll read just this one you know this one piece of it or

you know, we'll read just an abridged version. And part of that is just because the cultural frameworks and the textual difficulty is just too much for students today. We just have lost the ability to read. And I'll confess, even myself, I struggle to read the way I used to to get find that time to get the deep reading in where I, I I remember in graduate school, I would read at least a book a day.

because I had the time to do it and I wasn't distracted by cell phones back then. And I wasn't just obsessed with checking email and I could sit down in the library for hours on end and read without distraction. And today, you know, my work life's busy, my travel life's busy. I actually get to read a lot on plane, so I won't complain about the train. It's hard to find the time to get that deep engagement with important texts.

Soren Schwab - CLT (14:31.95)
you

Soren Schwab - CLT (14:39.367)
Yeah.

Soren Schwab - CLT (14:45.358)
I do that too, the reading on the plane. it's almost I'm looking forward to the Southwest plane, the internet not working, because if the internet is working, I feel obliged to get the internet and check my emails. And so it's all about that celebrate. There's so much to unpack, Alan. I think I want to focus a little bit on you mentioned the moral certainty or even superiority. Right. But if we're looking at

Allen Mendenhall (14:53.831)
you

Allen Mendenhall (14:59.259)
Yeah, sure.

Soren Schwab - CLT (15:15.65)
just the recent kind of political moment, and you think about October 7th and kind of the response, especially on college campuses, there also seems to be such moral confusion, right? When you have students that are going on the streets with Queers for Palestine signs and can't really, again, think through kind of all the implications of these

signs or you mentioned like little tweets, sound bites. In your piece you mentioned that education has eliminated moral and ethical considerations or that we have eliminated those considerations from education. So can you maybe speak to that on the one hand? Maybe students are presented with like this moral certainty while at the same time just being sometimes utterly confused.

Allen Mendenhall (16:11.719)
Sure, yeah, there's a lot to unpack there as well. I mean, it would have been incomprehensible to the ancients to separate knowledge from virtue. And I don't want what I said earlier to make it sound as if all students are somehow like dumb or something. They're not, they're very intelligent. We have students that can, you know, maybe split atoms, but they just can't define the good, you know, they...

they can code algorithms, but they can't comprehend human nature. And some of this is because of the, I guess, diminishing standards. And some of it's because of the sort of dismissal of morality as a legitimate category of education. But if you divorce education from moral considerations, what you get really is just mere instruction and

technique. And we're producing a lot of brilliant technicians, a lot of people that can do things very well, but they may not notice ethical problems in their work. So we might get some kind of skilled financier or bureaucrat or whatever who may be very efficient, may be very good at their tasks, but they mistake

their strengths for virtue, if they even think about it in terms of virtue. And if they had that moral education, what Burke and Kirk called the moral imagination, if they had some sort of awareness of it, the capacity to understand human nature, to grasp the permanent things that make civilization possible, then we could get, I think, builders, people that

don't just deconstruct or demolish or attack, but can build, can construct, who can affirm things. you know, civilization is not really an okay term anymore. It's considered, you know, actually bad to use the word civilization because it harkens back to colonialism and civilizing inferior societies or something like that. But civilization ought to be a real goal.

Allen Mendenhall (18:40.243)
And we ought to think of ourselves as part of a society, you know, that we're all contributing to something. So if I'm a lawyer too, you know, if I'm a lawyer, I don't want to mistake legality for justice. I don't want to conflate change with progress. You know, I want to know about the formation of character and how to train the intellect and how

how to unite knowledge and wisdom rather than to separate them. I mean, these are all important things to deal with and they're things we've lost. One thing I didn't say earlier when you were talking about sort of the erosion of educational standards is the death of kind of intimacy in the classroom. And what I mean is I teach all these classes in large lecture halls.

But I've done, I don't know how many Liberty Fund Colloquia over the years. My classes in graduate school were seminar style and genuine dialogue flourishes in those environments. That seminar format is just so good. We just have a few people and a professor and you're talking over a text. But the one thing I've found lately, I I record my own lectures because

There's always a fear of litigation or policy violations and these prevent mentorship. These prevent real dialogue from happening. Office hours are formal documented interactions rather than genuine intellectual exchanges. And there's just a professional distance that's replaced kind of that historic scholarly apprenticeship model. And so it's not as fun to be a professor anymore, I'll be honest.

It used to be a lot of fun, but now it's almost, there's almost a paralysis. You know, I feel like we have to document all these procedures and there are always liability concerns and institutional protocols and standardized approaches. And it's hard to just teach for the love of teaching and for students to learn for the love of learning. I'll stop. That was a very long-winded answer.

Soren Schwab - CLT (20:59.52)
No, was, yeah, no, I really appreciate your sharing and sharing so passionately because clearly you care about this, right? You've dedicated your life, your life to this and to education. And I think so often when I have guests on the podcast, many of them were not trained in liberal arts or in classical education. And then, you know, maybe in their 20s or 30s or when they had kids and they kind of, you know, surveyed the landscape, they feel like they were they were robbed. They were robbed of something.

Allen Mendenhall (21:25.448)
Yeah.

Soren Schwab - CLT (21:27.442)
And I think what this recovery, some people call it classical renewal, liberal arts renewal, is trying to do is bring that back. I think you mentioned earlier, it's not like the students are not intelligent, right? Or not capable of the CLT. Our mission statement actually starts with CLT exists to reconnect knowledge and virtue. And you talked about that, right? Because we don't want to produce more clever devils, right? But this divorce is problematic.

Allen Mendenhall (21:52.883)
right.

Soren Schwab - CLT (21:57.248)
And I look at these students and I feel bad for them, but I'm not blaming them. I'm sure there's some bad actors, right? But it's really the system. Well, the piece that you wrote, and it was very kind about Alabama needs the classic learning test, and I encourage everyone to read it. But what you won't find is Alan just talking about how amazing standardized testing is. And that's all we care about, right? It's really kind of what CLT stands for.

Allen Mendenhall (22:02.536)
Right.

Soren Schwab - CLT (22:26.274)
When we're talking about some of the things that have gone wrong, we can also talk about a lot of the things that have gone well. You mentioned a classical charter school now in Alabama. There's a lot of Christian schools, a lot of Christian schools are returning to a more liberal arts approach because they've also realized that something is wrong. Can you speak a little bit to the hope that you have on the K-12 side and what you've been seeing?

Allen Mendenhall (22:52.403)
Well, my children go to a classical Christian school, an ACCS accredited school about 15 minutes from my house. And I am very encouraged by the education that they're getting there and very encouraged by just sort of the spread of classical education more broadly, whether it's specifically Christian or not. Obviously as a person of faith, I favor the Christian approach because it informs my entire worldview.

I would much rather even secularize education, get exposure to the classics, which would necessarily require the study of Christianity. You can't understand Western civilization or indeed the world we live in without some sort of deep immersion in Christian teachings. And so that's important to me. On the higher education level, I actually think that following enrollment numbers,

may not be a crisis the way the media reports it, but it may be a necessary correction. This might be the market finally rejecting the false promise of universal college education and allowing us to see some new and stronger forms of education. We've got these, like the Hamilton Institute, or is it the Hamilton Center? can't remember if it's the Institute Center at University of Florida.

Soren Schwab - CLT (24:09.806)
and listen to it.

Allen Mendenhall (24:13.043)
But we've got them now at Tennessee, Texas, Arizona State, there are five new ones springing up in Ohio. And these efforts to restore classical general education curriculum, one that emphasizes Western Civ, American principles and the founding, great books, these all align with the CLT's vision of education as cultural transmission rather than social engineering. And so I celebrate these movements as well. And I think school choice,

that we're seeing, just have a school choice act here in Alabama that passed and this is our first year into it. And I think this will enable people from sort of disadvantaged backgrounds to have an opportunity to move to places to get the type of education that they've been deprived of in public schools. So there are a lot of things to be excited about, I think.

Soren Schwab - CLT (25:01.55)
Yeah, no, absolutely. We want to stand for something, right? We don't just want to criticize and dismiss, but cast a positive vision. And I think Jeremy and the CLT team, we've been trying to do that, right? But we also, of course, have to point out that our competitors, the reason why we exist is because there are some disagreements. And I think you...

You summarized some of those so well with the College Board. Can you speak to that a little bit, how maybe the College Board has contributed to this kind of educational crisis that we talked about earlier?

Allen Mendenhall (25:41.091)
Sure, and I'm not exactly an expert in the College Board. I don't just monitor their everyday goings on, but I'd say if they're representative of something, it's the triumph of sort of bureaucratic quantification over genuine intellectual assessment. To go a little bit negative, I might be a little bit more negative than you are. I guess I have that prerogative as your guess is. I think they make the mediocre measurable

while rendering the sublime, the magnificent, the interesting, invisible. It's those latter things that make people curious, that make people want to learn. And I think the SAT is really devolved into sort of an exercise in tactical test taking. It's not a measure of how much you know or what your capacity is for knowing or learning. It's more of a test of how do you...

a test of test taking basically, your knowledge, your value as an educator or as a student, your test of intellectual promise is not really in your ability to just sort of cross out wrong answers, A, B, C, D, E, but really in your capacity to wrestle with questions that have no clear answers at all. And it's tough.

It's tough to scale and standardize that. I know the CLT has worked to do that. It's tough to reduce Lear to a series of multiple choice questions. But there has to be some type of measure, I think, but with the recognition that certain forms of knowledge really truly are immeasurable.

Soren Schwab - CLT (27:18.583)
Absolutely.

Soren Schwab - CLT (27:30.798)
And you mentioned earlier the wrestling with something that is difficult. I think, is it in the coddling of the American mind where Haidt talks about some of the lies that we've bought into and dismissing what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, that we're kind of trying to avoid now. Our students should not even be exposed to anything that could challenge them. Maybe even read something with which they could disagree, Lord forbid.

Allen Mendenhall (27:36.711)
bright.

Allen Mendenhall (27:55.123)
Well, yeah.

Allen Mendenhall (27:59.335)
Well, and it's hard to, like when you start what I called earlier, like the democratization of education where all texts are equal, then therefore all students writing have to be equal. And I believe the SAT has abandoned the essay portion. And that to me is just a surrender to the zeitgeist hostility towards sustained analytical writing. And, you know, with the rise of AI and stuff, I'm sure there are ways to get around that and test administration where you, you know, I know when we, for example, took the bar exam, when you

when you're in the essay portion, you're locked out of anything but your word document or whatever document you're writing in. So there are ways to curb against cheating. But at any rate, there has to be some form of ranking writing. Some writing is better than other writing. And it's not just the ideas. It's the way ideas are articulated. One thing I dislike about legal writing is that it's really reduced to efficiency. You want to say as much as you can.

in as little as you can. If that were the case, if that were the overarching standard, we would never have a Montaigne. You know, we'd never have these great essayists who really take you on a meandering journey through their thought process. And that to me is so much more fun and so much more edifying than say legal writing.

Soren Schwab - CLT (29:19.224)
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think what had bothered me so much about whether it's College Board or ACT is just the power that they have over curriculum. And so when they make these changes, inevitably the schools follow. And so the vision that they cast for education, like you said earlier, the vision now is don't read any longer passage. So I think the new SAT is it's essentially reading a tweet, the length of a tweet.

Allen Mendenhall (29:33.202)
Yeah.

Allen Mendenhall (29:37.927)
Yes.

Soren Schwab - CLT (29:49.27)
and then answer a quick question. And you yourself mentioned, even for you, it has become harder to focus for a longer time, right? And so I think what we're trying to say is there's value in reading a longer paragraph that it that that it, you know, you have to apply yourself in a different way. And that that's important. And so we're trying to bring that back while some of our other tests are saying, no, we're we're just kind of giving into the cultural moment and students can't focus anyway. So let's just have them read kind of a little snippet and answer a question.

That has tremendous impact on American education, right?

Allen Mendenhall (30:22.983)
When people teach to the test, that's the phrase, people teach to the test because students' entire lives depend on it. They've got to get into the college they want to get into. And then once you get into that college, then you've got to get the best grades. I really have noticed that a lot of students that I have taught, and there are some exceptional students, but a lot of them don't really know why they're in college. They're just there because that's what people do.

Soren Schwab - CLT (30:30.453)
Yeah.

Allen Mendenhall (30:52.135)
And so they have no direction and it's a sad thing really because what they're looking for out of their education is merely a credential and that's not about human formation. I think you mentioned Hillsdale and I love Hillsdale and it's such an exceptional institution and so different from what most students are getting and I wish we had thousand Hillsdale's.

Soren Schwab - CLT (31:08.738)
Yeah. thank you.

Soren Schwab - CLT (31:21.506)
Me too, even though with the flight kind of my degree, right? I'm glad that there's right now only one, it's small and there's not that many alumni. But I think I grew up in Germany and the German word for education is Bildung, which actually translates to formation. And I think to me, that is one of the key differences. And by all means, Germany has forsaken that. But the word itself, right? That I think places like Hillsdale,

Allen Mendenhall (31:23.514)
Hahaha

Soren Schwab - CLT (31:50.99)
just fundamentally have a different tell us on why are we doing this? It's not about credentialing, it's about forming human beings. And that impacts curricular choices, pedagogical choices, all these different things. I think you mentioned some of these classical schools, right? And what's the name of the classical Christian school that you're?

Allen Mendenhall (32:08.341)
Trinity Christian School in Opelika. That's where my kids go.

Soren Schwab - CLT (32:11.266)
There you go. If you ask them, why are we doing this? They probably have a very different answer and it will include the cultivation of wisdom and virtue and their formation. And yes, there are skills that they will learn. And so I think that we're trying to recover. I hope the state of Alabama does. We certainly appreciate all your support in that. I do want to... and we talked about books and you have an extensive collection of books behind you.

I want to ask you one more question, before I do, I mentioned earlier that you are a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and you recently announced that you are joining the team at Heritage full-time. Can you share with us what your work is going to entail there?

Allen Mendenhall (33:00.563)
Well, my role and title are to be determined. We have a few things in the works that might define what those are. so I'll leave that, I'll kind of leave you hanging on that. But I'm a visiting fellow now and I'll be joining full time in May and the particular capacity is sort of yet to be announced and yet to be determined.

Soren Schwab - CLT (33:12.429)
That's right.

Soren Schwab - CLT (33:21.486)
Follow Ellen on Twitter and LinkedIn. I'm sure you're gonna make that announcement, but we love Kevin Roberts and all the good folks at Heritage. Last question, the hardest. If there's one book or one text that you can point to that you would say has kind of had the most impact on your life or maybe the trajectory of your life, what would it be and why?

Allen Mendenhall (33:28.871)
great.

Allen Mendenhall (33:42.427)
Yeah, it's the one book part that makes that such a difficult question because the cop-out answer is you just say the Bible or whatever because it's the foundation of my worldview. you know, if you're just leaving aside that, I really, first of all, I don't think I can actually name just one because I have a lot of different works and each one marked a distinct phase in my development and altered the way I see the world. But in my high school years,

I loved reading the British Romantics. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, they opened my eyes to the transcendent power of poetry and nature. When I went to college, I wanted to be a poet and I just wrote bad poetry. So I never became a poet. I guess I was like William Faulkner. I wanted to be a poet, but I wasn't good at it. And so I went with other things that I was better at.

But reading the agony and the ecstasy before I went to Italy at age 18 was transformative. know, Michelangelo's works became not just masterpieces, but expressions of a profound human struggle. And then I got to go to Italy and see the products of that struggle. To Kill a Mockingbird was really important to me. My grandfather grew up in Monroeville, Alabama with Harper Lee and Truman Capote and had all these stories to tell me about those experiences.

Soren Schwab - CLT (34:59.117)
head.

Allen Mendenhall (35:04.079)
In college, reading Les Mis after seeing the musical was inspiring. I can't really explain to you exactly why, other than I loved how these characters lived a life of purpose and made me want to live a life of purpose. In economics, I discovered Mises and Hayek way too late. As an undergraduate, I had horrible economic views and I discovered Hayek and Mises when I was living in Japan and they were eye-opening and I realized

Soren Schwab - CLT (35:21.635)
Yeah.

Allen Mendenhall (35:32.957)
that everything I wanted to do economically as an undergraduate would have harmed the very people I had hoped to help. So those were important figures in my development. So in short, I don't have just one. Those are all just examples of people that were formative for me.

Soren Schwab - CLT (35:50.444)
You know, when it comes to books, think cheating is OK when it comes to naming kind of the one the one book, Dr. Mendenhall, that's OK. I asked it did to kill a mockingbird. Did that make you want to become a lawyer? Did that have any impact on that?

Allen Mendenhall (35:53.201)
Hahaha

Allen Mendenhall (35:57.491)
Okay.

Allen Mendenhall (36:02.883)
It did. to be honest, I probably wouldn't have become a lawyer were it not for that book. I, you know, I'm a Southerner and I liked the idea of Atticus Finch and being a Southern lawyer in his seersucker suit and going out and, you know, ensuring justice and domestic tranquility and all the rest. But, you know, the reality of legal practice wasn't quite the same. I enjoyed my experiences in private practice to an extent, but I

was very happy to get back in. I worked for the Alabama Supreme Court for a while. I worked at Alabama attorney general's office, but getting back into education and sort of a full-time capacity was a wonderful move for me. And I'll always be trafficking in ideas as people say, sometimes people ask me like, what do you do? Cause your job, you know, got this title, but it doesn't seem like what you do. And I say, well, I'm...

kind of a professional conservative and what that means is I just traffic and ideas.

Soren Schwab - CLT (37:02.614)
I it. I love it. I love it. Well, I appreciate you this conversation and all the work that you do. was great. Again, we're here with Dr. Ellen Mendenhall, professor at Troy University and soon full time at the Heritage Foundation. Ellen, I appreciate you and God bless you.

Allen Mendenhall (37:21.755)
Yes, you too. Thank you very much for having me.