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Who’s Paying for the Culture Wars?
Conservative critiques of higher education rely on liberal doses of cash.
By Steven Selden
Behind the conservative critique of U.S. higher education is a fervent commitment to ideals, to be sure—but there’s also a sizable amount of conservative cash. The Bradley, Earhart, Castle Rock, and John M. Olin foundations have contributed lavishly to guidebooks aimed at steering young Americans away from certain colleges and universities. Choosing the Right College, The Common Sense Guide to American Colleges, The Shakespeare File, and Defending Civilization charge these institutions and their faculty with poorly serving the needs of the nation.1 Unlike other college guidebooks, which are mostly descriptive, the right-wing guides mount an ideological assault on American higher education reflecting a broader conservative moral, social, and political agenda.2
This agenda joins support for economic privatization and conservative values in the public sphere to the Western canon and resistance to affirmative action in the academy. It is de-signed specifically to achieve a conservative reconstruction of the public’s understanding of social justice, market economics, and the role and responsibilities of the polity in a democracy. The guides are thus an important weapon in the culture wars.
Through them, conservative activists use faculty and academic programs as proxies for a larger enemy: the national consensus that produced such programs as the New Deal and the Great Society and an accord regarding religion, markets, and the role of government in American life. Conservative organizations focusing on higher education include the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the now-defunct Madison Center for Educational Affairs, and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.3
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
In 1953, a $1,000 contribution from J. Howard Pew launched the libertarian oriented Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI). Its first president was William F. Buckley, who had lamented the influence of secular humanism on his alma mater, Yale University, in God and Man at Yale, published in 1951. The ISI, renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 1963, has received more than $13 million from conservative foundations since its beginning.
Although conservatives’ anxiety about secular humanism has now been eclipsed by concerns about multiculturalism and postmodernism, the ISI remains committed to “limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, free enterprise, and Judeo-Christian moral standards,” according to its Web site. Over the past five decades, conservative activists have tried, without substantive evidence, to persuade the public that most university professors are somehow hostile to such values.
The ISI has concentrated much of its energies on the undergraduate curriculum. In the mid-1990s, at the urging of ISI president T. Kenneth Cribb, Texas oil billionaire Lee Bass withdrew a promise of $20 million to Yale for a program in Western civilization. Bass was originally moved to make his gift after hearing Yale historian Donald Kagan bemoan liberalism’s destructive impact on the university’s academic standards. In 1995, Newt Gingrich, who was then Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, wrote in To Renew America that the funding was withdrawn because no one at Yale was willing to teach Western civilization. The problem, however, had more to do with budget than ideology. In a time of fiscal retrenchment, the university wanted to reassign faculty from other programs to Western civilization. Yale did not want to make new hires. As the negotiations dragged on, Cribb flew to Texas, persuading Bass to demand the right to veto new faculty. Faced with this clear threat to its academic independence, Yale returned the money. There is real irony here. Tenured radicals did not reject Western civilization at Yale. It was stymied by a well-funded conservative activist organization.
Despite this setback, the ISI continued its focus on the undergraduate curriculum. In 1998, it published Choosing the Right College : The Whole Truth About America ’s Top 100 Schools. Those introducing the guide include Roger Kimball, author of the 1990 book Tenured Radicals: How Politics Corrupted Our Higher Education, and conservative activist and author William Bennett, both recipients of Olin Foundation largesse.
Bennett, an articulate and principled conservative, received more than $900,000 through his associations with the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, and Empower America between 1990 and 2000 to help popularize his views on American culture and education. He warns the guide’s readers that U.S. higher education suffers from a “widespread abandonment of academic standards and moral discipline, the politicization of all aspects of campus life, and the deconstruction of academic disciplines.”
Although the guide maintains that these forces have “devastated the traditional mission of the liberal arts curriculum,” it says that some colleges and universities still stand against the tide. It cites Saint John’s College in Annapolis and its rejection of “politically correct” policies as a prime example. Saint John’s “doesn’t have to deal with speech codes, hiring or student body quotas, and the desire of a misguided administration to teach the latest ideological trends in order to rank high on someone else’s ill conceived list,” the guide asserts. Despite these protestations, Saint John’s cannot be credited for reaching the moral high ground by rejecting quotas; the Supreme Court had made quotas in hiring and college admissions illegal two decades before the guide was published.
Michigan’s Hillsdale College is also honored for its willingness to steer clear of federal funding and avoid “politically correct” initiatives. At the time of the guide’s publication, Hillsdale had received more than $7 million in external support from conservative funders, including the Grewcock, Earhart, F. M. Kirby, and Olin foundations. To its credit, the 2005 edition of the guide describes a widely publicized scandal that led to the resignation of Hillsdale president George Roche III in 1999. But it fails to mention that Hillsdale’s administration is under censure by the AAUP for violations of academic freedom and due process. In the end, the ISI’s guide makes a caricature of the ongoing struggle of America’s centers for higher learning to prepare students for a rapidly changing world through curricular innovations and diversification of student bodies and faculty.
Madison Center
The ISI was not the first group to put a strongly political spin on college evaluations. In 1990, the Madison Center, previously directed by William Bennett and Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, reconstituted itself as the Madison Center for Educational Affairs (MCEA). The MCEA developed its own plan to influence college-bound high school students, including publication in 1991 of The Common Sense Guide to American Colleges. The guide offers reviews that quickly conflate pedagogy with patriotism. “We have a generally high opinion of our civilization, our culture, and our country,” the guide’s editors opine, “[and] we think that one important measure of any college or university—though surely not the only measure—is whether it values them, too.” Nevertheless, without significant empirical data, the guide asserts that a “left-of-center politically correct outlook now infects almost every aspect of higher education from investment decisions to hiring practices to the selection—and reception—of guest speakers.”
According to the guide, the situation is so dire that even students choosing the University of Chicago, where one can receive “perhaps the best education available,” must be careful to avoid particular departments and faculty. “Segments of English and the humanities have been co-opted by ‘tenured radicals,’” the guide cautions. But “with some effort [the knowledgeable student] can still receive an excellent education even in these departments.” Without identifying the co-opted segments, the guide moves on to praise Saint John’s on the same grounds as the ISI guide: its Western civilization curriculum and its lack of speech codes and “racial set-asides.”
The way these conservative publications frame the issue of race is deeply unsettling. After all, race in America historically has been linked not only to housing, employment, marriage, and mortality, but also, centrally, to education. However, when it comes to the vexing challenge of achieving racial justice, conservative activists seem to disregard that history, evincing hostility to proactive policies. For example, the Olin Foundation, in addition to supporting the MCEA’s and ISI’s initiatives, also funds the Pacific Legal Foundation, which mirrored the college guides’ antagonism toward affirmative action in the amicus brief it submitted to the Supreme Court in 2003 urging rejection of the University of Michigan’s affirmative action plan. Olin, the MCEA, and the ISI argue that when it comes to contemporary U.S. social policy, race should not matter.
The University of Michigan and many other colleges and universities disagree. In contrast to the Olin-funded activists’ rejection of diversity, these institutions are attempting to deal constructively with the fact that race does matter in the United States. In representing universities as somehow un-American and driven by quotas, conservative activists offer few principled solutions to racial injustice, and they limit the possibility for reasoned discourse.
Trustees and Alumni
As chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities during the Reagan administration, Lynne Cheney used her bully pulpit to put forward caustic critiques of the undergraduate curriculum. In her 1994 book, Telling the Truth: A Report on the State of the Humanities in Higher Education, Cheney charged that the liberal arts had been taken over by a cabal of radical feminist Marxists. These scholars rejected objectivity and the notion of truth, and they used the university as a platform for political beliefs, she asserted. With the goal of disseminating propaganda, they threatened higher education from within. According to Cheney, the only hope for conservative activists was to bring external pressure on the university.
In 1994, with assistance from the ISI, the National Alumni Forum was created, with Cheney as its head, to accomplish this task. In 1998, the forum became the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), maintaining its rhetorical position of defending Western canonical literature and history against the supposed liberal threats to the university. It warns on its Web site that “the main threat to academic freedom is from political intolerance on campus.” Alumni, it asserts, “want to support their colleges, but they are often shut out of the discussion. This organization will serve as a voice for interested and concerned alums.”
To promote the claim that leftist faculty threaten the openness of the academic community, the group has created, marketed, and distributed well-funded publications. The Shakespeare File: What English Majors Are Really Studying was written in 1996 as a broadside against curriculum revisions undertaken by Georgetown University’s English department. A Washington Post reviewer concluded after reading it that “the lunatics are running the academic asylum” if Shakespeare is no longer required for English majors at American universities.
The real story is quite different. As it turns out, Shakespeare had never been required at Georgetown. Yet, as progressive author John K. Wilson pointed out in a 1999 article in American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political, and Economic Changes, Georgetown’s English department had “increased its Shakespeare offerings by 300 percent” in the previous fifteen years. Shakespeare is alive and well at Georgetown.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, ACTA replayed the conservative jeremiad of linking pedagogy to patriotism. With financial support from the Randolph Foundation and others, ACTA published Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It. Without substantive empirical data, the 2001 report charges that “expressions of moral relativism are a staple of academic life in this country and an apparent symptom of an educational system that has increasingly suggested that Western civilization is the primary source of the world’s ills.” The report asserts the university is out of step with a country in which 92 percent of the public favors military force, “even if casualties occur,” and rallies behind the president “wholeheartedly.”
Depicted as a veritable fifth column, faculty members are described as espousing “moral equivocation . . . [and] explicit condemnations of America.” When the topic is terrorism, they “blame America first,” the report claims. The recommended fix for this situation is curriculum revision— redirecting the undergraduate course of study for political purposes. Charging that “we need to know, in a war, exactly what is at stake,” the report demands that “all colleges and universities . . . adopt strong core curricula that include rigorous, broad-based courses on the great works of Western civilization.”
ACTA defines its own position as academic but portrays the posture of university faculty with whom it disagrees as political. Its distortions appear to be aimed at driving a wedge between faculty and alumni in the cause of conservative politics.
Democracy Damaged
Over the past half century, the ISI, the MCEA, and ACTA have received more than $18 million to produce and distribute campus guides and curriculum evaluations designed to influence the public’s perception of university faculty and the undergraduate curriculum. The reports define the liberal arts as content rather than process, they strongly support prescribed curricula based almost exclusively on the Western literary and historical canon, and they portray university faculty as conspiring to destroy the academy from within. When it comes to race, the reports are profoundly ahistorical and deeply hostile toward affirmative action, painting a distorted picture of an academy that disregards “merit” in favor of racial set-asides and quotas. These reports are not designed to engage faculty or the public in a reasoned debate about the meaning of knowledge, the state, or social justice; they aim to elicit an emotional, not an intellectual, response.
But as Harvard’s Israel Scheffler notes, democracy requires citizens who can combine beliefs with reasons. Contrary to the assertion of these guides, the development of reasoned positions on economic, social justice, and moral issues is the focus of today’s liberal arts education. The conservative guides focus on beliefs without substantial reasons. They claim to value national cohesion and patriotism. They claim to serve the cause of merit in all areas of human activity. And they claim to protect the university curriculum from internal threats. Without evidence or reasons, they fail to persuade. Nevertheless, this failure does not diminish their potentially destructive role in today’s ongoing culture wars. Conservative activists have indeed garnered millions for their published assaults on faculty and curriculum. But their anti-intellectual jeremiads, not the professors they vilify, are the real threat to academic freedom today.
Notes
1. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni published Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It (2001) and The Shakespeare File: What English Majors Are Really Studying (1996). The Intercollegiate Studies Institute published Choosing the Right College, 2005: The Whole Truth about America’s Top Schools (2004). Madison Books published The Common Sense Guide to American Colleges, 1991–1992 (1991). Back to text.
2. Among the most popular mainstream college guidebooks are Barron’s, The Fiske Guide, and The Princeton Review. Back to text.
3. Other funded activist centers focus on different areas. For example, the American Enterprise Institute concentrates on markets; the Pacific Legal Foundation concerns itself with affirmative action; and the Family Research Council works to increase the presence of religion in the public sphere, as well as to influence the next appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Back to text.
Steven Selden is professor of education at the University of Maryland College Park. Some data cited in this article also appear in “The Neo-Conservative Assault on the Undergraduate Curriculum” in Reclaiming Universities from a “Runaway World,” published in 2004.
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