As always, I find this myth of the liberal university, that somehow
needs more "balance," amazing. It's completely out of touch with any
reality I've heard about and experienced at universities.
Unfortunately, people dueling with these windmills may well have an
effect of making universities even more monolithic and less free-
thinking than they already are.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/education/22conservative.html?pagewanted=all
The New York Times
September 22, 2008
By PATRICIA COHEN
COLORADO SPRINGS — Acknowledging that 20 years and millions of dollars
spent loudly and bitterly attacking the liberal leanings of American
campuses have failed to make much of a dent in the way undergraduates
are educated, some conservatives have decided to try a new strategy.
They are finding like-minded tenured professors and helping them
establish academic beachheads for their ideas.
These initiatives, like the Program in Western Civilization and
American Institutions at the University of Texas, Austin, or a project
at the University of Colorado here in Colorado Springs, to publish a
book of classic texts, are mostly financed by conservative
organizations and donors, run by conservative professors. But they
have a decidedly nonpartisan and nonideological face.
Their goal is to restore what conservative and other critics see as
leading casualties of the campus culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s:
the teaching of Western culture and a triumphal interpretation of
American history.
“These are not ideological courses,” said James Piereson, a senior
fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, which created the
Veritas Fund for Higher Education to funnel donations to these sorts
of projects. The initiatives are only political insofar as they “work
against the thrust of programs and courses in gender, race and class
studies, and postmodernism in general,” he said.
The programs and centers differ in emphasis, with some concentrating
on American democratic and capitalist institutions and others on the
Western canon, the great books often derided during the culture wars
as the history of “dead white men.” They sponsor colloquia, seminars,
courses, visiting lecturers and postdoctoral students. At Brown, the
Political Theory Project even put on a play by the capitalist heroine
Ayn Rand.
Some, like the effort in Colorado Springs and the Program for
Constitutionalism and Democracy at the University of Virginia focus
solely on exposing freshmen to classical thinkers. Others favor a
return to a more traditional teaching of America’s past, featuring its
greatest accomplishments instead of the history of repression and
exploitation that had been the trend.
And this week, Cornell is negotiating the final details of a $50,000
grant from Veritas that will be used to create a Program on Freedom
and Free Societies.
According to a list drawn up by the National Association of Scholars,
a group created in 1987 to preserve the “Western intellectual
heritage,” 37 of these academic centers exist; 20 were created in the
past three years.
Many of them have received donations from a handful of relatively new
organizations, including Veritas, which was created in 2006, and the
Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and
History. Mr. Miller, a Chicago entrepreneur, established the center as
an independent nonprofit last fall after first collaborating with the
55-year-old Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which promotes
conservative thought on campus.
Now, thanks in part to years of intensive lobbying by the National
Association for Scholars, these projects may soon receive federal
money as well. The new Higher Education Act, signed into law last
month, provides grants for “academic programs or centers” devoted to
“traditional American history, free institutions or Western
civilization.”
The provision was “fashioned with this movement in mind,” Stephen
Balch, a Republican and the founder and president of the association,
said after the bill passed Congress, and “will help it gain even
greater momentum.”
It is up to Congress to decide whether to finance the effort, and how
much to put toward it.
Mr. Piereson previously served for 20 years as the executive director
of the John M. Olin Foundation, one of the largest financiers of the
intellectual right before it closed. “I would have to say in all that
time, from 1985 and 2005, when we wound down, I’m not sure we made a
lot of progress” on the undergraduate level, he said.
Decades of money from Olin and similar foundations helped create a
kind of shadow university of private research institutes on the
assumption that conservatives could not find a berth in an academic
system dominated by liberals. They have been so successful, though,
that they might have helped siphon like-minded thinkers off campus,
creating a kind of right-wing brain drain.
Now, Mr. Piereson said, “what we’re trying to do is actually go onto
the campus and fund professors who have the support of their deans,
provosts and colleagues and try to influence the undergraduate
curriculum.”
That may be easier to do now, since the fevered pitch of ideological
battles on campus has quieted in recent years. Supporters have still
tried to keep a low profile, though, to avoid arousing potential
liberal opponents, Mr. Piereson added.
Veritas has spent $2.5 million to support existing centers or create
new ones on 10 campuses. In April, it received a $1 million matching
grant — the final donation Olin made before zeroing out its bank
balance.
Colorado Springs used its $50,000 grant to publish “A Free Society and
Its Challenges,” a collection of classic writings including Plato’s
“Apology” and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a
Birmingham Jail.” Every incoming freshman last fall and this fall was
assigned readings from it.
Amid the get-to-know-one-another barbecues and field trips to Pike’s
Peak during orientation last month, the college organized freshman
seminars devoted to the readings.
At first some faculty members were suspicious of where the idea and
financing had come from, said Robert Sackett, a history professor who
publicly voiced his concern. Yet he added, whatever the back story,
who could object to teaching Dr. King or Plato?
“An assignment that I initially had some doubts about has turned out
better than I expected,” said Mr. Sackett, who points out that he is
not a conservative. “I could see using it again.”
Although a few critics have accused these programs of having a right-
wing agenda, many administrators and faculty have embraced the extra
resources.
“The kind of thing that we’re proposing and developing transcends all
those political differences whether you’re right, left or center,”
said Robert Koons, the director of Texas’ program, who describes
himself as a run-of-the-mill Republican. “It’s not the answers, but
the questions” about ethics, justice and civic duty that are being
discussed, he said.
Ideas for the new strategy began percolating in 2005 when the
Philanthropy Roundtable, an association of foundation officials and
big donors, met and shared their complaints about higher education. A
few months earlier, Mr. Piereson wrote an article in the roundtable’s
magazine warning donors not to endow university programs or faculty
chairs. “Once the endowment check is written, the donor loses all
control over the program he has funded,” he advised.
Conservatives have begun to realize, said Peter Wood, the executive
director of the scholars’ association, that their contributions to
colleges and universities frequently pay for what they see as left-
leaning academic programs that run counter to their world views.
Instead of making no-strings-attached donations, he said,
conservatives started asking “ought there not be some way that we
could reach the donors and convince them that their donations to
higher education could be more wisely spent?”
Although there are no formal links between the organizations, an
informal network of advisers and activists work to bolster each
other’s efforts. The Jack Miller Center spent $3.6 million in the past
year to create, among other things, a civics center at Florida
Atlantic University and summer programs at two other colleges for
professors. Several summer attendees, like Michael Poliakoff, the vice
president for academic affairs for the University of Colorado system,
also received grants from Veritas.
The Thomas W. Smith Foundation, dedicated to supporting free markets,
has started paying for scholarly centers on campuses as well, said Mr.
Piereson, who is on its board of trustees. Last year the foundation
gave $1 million to the Political Theory Project at Brown, which also
received money from Veritas and the Jack Miller center.
“There’s a network of institutions out there” that know the academic
landscape, said David DesRosiers, the executive director of Veritas.
“We came in as venture capitalists, and they picked the stocks we
invested in.”
Peg Bacon, the provost at Colorado Springs, said she was already
interested in having the entire campus read the same book when Mr.
Poliakoff suggested using the “Free Society” collection. Ms. Bacon
said she first checked out the Center for American Universities at the
Manhattan Institute, which runs Veritas.
“I saw it does a lot of things around civil rights,” she said. “It
looked like they had a variety of perspectives,” and “they weren’t
controlling” the specific assignment, which was decided by the
faculty. She asked a handful of professors to review the book, which
also included the United States Constitution and writings from Alexis
de Tocqueville and Frederick Douglass. None detected any particular
bias.
The faculty was so pleased with the way the program turned out in
2007, Ms. Bacon said, that they unanimously agreed to repeat it this
year.
Asked about the possibility of establishing a center at Colorado
Springs, Mr. Poliakoff said, “I have no set road map.” As for other
plans within the university system, like endowing a chair in
conservative thought on the Boulder campus, Mr. Poliakoff said there
was no connection. “There is no vast right-wing conspiracy,” he said
with a smile.
Elsewhere, proponents have had a bumpier road.
In 2006, at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., opposition from the
faculty forced the administration to withdraw its support of an alumni-
financed center focused on capitalism, natural law and the role of
religion in politics. Many faculty members questioned if Hamilton
would have sufficient oversight of it. At the time, the chairman of
the faculty assembly, John O’Neil, was quoted as saying, “There are
people on the faculty who think this center has an explicit, right
tendency.”
The alumni donors and professors ended up opening the Alexander
Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization as an
independent entity in 2007.
E. Christian Kopff, a professor who helped found the Center for
Western Civilization at Boulder in 2005, said the initial reaction on
campus had “ranged from enthusiastic agreement to critical
questioning.” But the splits were more likely to be between those in
engineering or science and those in the humanities, or between
traditionalists and postmodernists, rather than between left and
right, he said.
The Veritas Web site states the goal of the fund is not to topple the
“Left University” and replace it with a “Right University,” but to
“encourage universities to embrace a broader range of thought.”
Yet whatever unspoken message some advocates might hope to send, what
transpires in a classroom is never predictable. During a freshman
orientation seminar run by Harriet Napierkowski at Colorado Springs —
which Mr. Poliakoff, the Colorado system vice president, was observing
— she pointed to a section in Plato’s “Apology” where Socrates
describes himself as a gadfly, whose role is “to sting people and whip
them into a fury, all in the service of truth.”
Who is a contemporary gadfly, she asked, someone who questions the
established order even if he is unpopular? The students stared back
silently.
After a few moments, she asked, “What about Ralph Nader?” the longtime
consumer advocate and third-party presidential candidate who has
infuriated both liberals and conservatives.
At the mention of Mr. Nader, a puzzled look swept across Mr.
Poliakoff’s face, but he did not say a word.
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