Did you know John Hanson of Maryland was the first American president? Well, maybe not exactly, since he was under the Articles of Confederation. You knew about them, right? Sure, you’re lawyers, you’re interested and knowledgeable. Of course you did. But your children might not. As George Santayana famously said, “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Harvard has decided to eliminate the pilgrims from its school song.

For decades, Harvard students and alumni have sung an alma mater that calls on them to be heralds of light and bearers of love “till the stock of the Puritans die.”

University officials teach the refrain to freshmen on arrival and sing it again when the students graduate years later.

But this week, a university steeped in tradition said the time had come for a change.

To affirm Harvard’s commitment to inclusion in a time when college campuses are routinely finding themselves at the center of national debates on race and identity, university officials said they are seeking suggested rewrites of that disquieting final line.

Why would that line be “disquieting”? You know the answer. The flip side of the positives of inclusion is the elimination of the vestiges of “white colonialism.” Under the complaint that America failed to do justice to the societal contributions of African culture, or of the contribution of women to society, there are a couple of nouveaux movements afoot to correct matters.

First, “correct” our understanding of history by viewing it through the current lens of social justice. Second, eliminate the vestiges of American (and Western European) history and tradition that perpetuate it. Or, recreate a history that never existed because actual history hurts people’s feelings.

This is playing out not only in petty ways, like changing the Harvard school song, but in pedagogical ways that will have a very different impact.

The ongoing saga of University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson’s opposition to calling students by gender neutral pronouns should never have become much of a story in the first place.

But the social justice brigade couldn’t help themselves and took a hard run at him, ensuring thanks to the attention their hysterics drew that a star was born in a lone academic taking a firm stand against political correctness.

The latest chapter is that Peterson’s been denied a grant that funds his research interests. The reason is unknown but the timing is suspicious, given that he’s currently public enemy No. 1 for squishy progressives in the Canadian academy.

Peterson has been largely ignored here, despite so many readers sending links to his escapades. There’s a smell to his milking his contrarian position for fame. And his position just isn’t all that fascinating, particularly since many of us were there before him. But if his research has been defunded because he refuses to be politically correct, that’s a problem.

Peterson’s story came to mind while I was reading a recent lecture by historian Niall Ferguson titled The Decline and Fall of History. It’s not history itself that the Scottish author of Civilization: The West and the Rest says is on the outs.

What’s the connection? Just as some would fundamentally undermine language for the sake of feelings, so too do they undermine history.

“History, in short, is in trouble,” Ferguson observes after looking at how the enrolment numbers and courses on offer have changed over the decades. “History departments neglect the defining events of modern world history in favor of topics that are either arcane or agitprop, sometimes both. The result has been a sustained decline in history enrolments. The long-term effects on the elite who are educated at top American universities are unlikely to be positive. The ‘United States of Amnesia’ will get no better at learning from history if the people who end up running the republic know next to no history at all.”

The share of history and social science degrees has dropped from 18% of all undergraduate degrees at U.S. schools in 1971 to 9% in 2014. This doesn’t tell the full story either. Because the type of history being studied has changed alongside these declining numbers.

“The data reveal a very big increase in the number of historians who specialize in women and gender, which has risen from 1% of the total to almost 10%,” Ferguson notes. “As a result, gender is now the single most important subfield in the academy.”

Having discussed variations of this with academics and lawyers inclined toward social justice, the best answers received is that it does no harm to accommodate the complaints and demands of the marginalized, and that equality and fairness are inherent virtues worthy of change. Both answers are “disquieting.”

It may well be unfair that history is written by the victors, but it has to be written by someone. Does it make better sense that it be written by the losers? The simplistic response is that it shouldn’t matter, history is what it is, except that’s not how history happens. History looks entirely different according to whose lens it’s viewed through, what biases are brought to bear.

If American history is built upon what seem to be white male myths from a minority or feminist perspective, is the solution to replace one distorted myopic view of history with another? So it would seem, as traditional American history has fallen out of favor, to be replaced with the false narrative that extols a politically correct view regardless of whether it’s any more accurate.

“Today, in a turbulent and chaotic world, students need a solid background in the attributes of Western civilization to be able to place events and ideas in context,” Hirsi Ali said. “Yet, at a time when a rigorous formation is needed the most, the American campus today seems beset by a protracted intellectual malaise.”

What’s the harm of political correctness? It’s the eradication of a common tradition, a common understanding of culture, society and experience. Academics have decided they don’t like the one they have, so they will replace it with the one they prefer. But the longer term impact is that there will be no next generation to teach history because they’ve been taught a false history that meets the politically correct preferences of the current crop of teachers who believe they’re entitled to construct a narrative that promotes their agenda, facts be damned.

Harvard is the quintessential WASP college, and created to reflect the sensibilities of the Pilgrims. The impact of the Puritans on American society is undeniable. Eliminating the Pilgrims from the song doesn’t change Harvard’s, or America’s, history. Whether you see American history as glorious or horrible, it is what it is, and pretending it never happened illuminates nothing. It makes us stupider.

Maybe it doesn’t matter if you know who John Hanson was, but he’s more relevant to American history than Menelik, King of Axum, or Boudicca, ruler of the Iceni.