The Obama Administration’s claims that it favors local control in education are belied by its actions—for example, coercing states to accept federally approved content standards and to compile and share private student data. But as evidence of federal interference run amok, Exhibit A is the Administration’s campaign to outlaw “bullying” and “harassment” in schools. From the Administration’s standpoint, this campaign offers double benefits: it enables the federal government both to control the minutiae of daily school operations, and to impose its preferred cultural attitudes. This attack is demonstrably inconsistent with constitutional and statutory law, and is yet another troubling transfer of power from families and localities to Washington.

The federal government’s constitutional role in education is basically nonexistent; the education of children is quintessentially a local and familial function. Though Congress long ago inserted itself into education policy despite this lack of authority, the federal government almost certainly does not have the power to enact an outright ban on bullying, under either the Commerce Clause (see U.S. v. Lopez) or the Fourteenth Amendment (see U.S. v. Morrison).

Congress and the federal Department of Education evade this problem through the power of the purse. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and two lesser known statutes prohibit any educational institution that receives federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, or disability. If a school takes our money, says the Department, it must obey our rules. The Supreme Court generally allows this technique under the Spending Clause, Art. I, § 8 (see Davis v. Monroe County Bd. of Ed.). Thus does the federal government assume control in an area the founders left to local authority.

In October 2010, the Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced its intention to aim these civil-rights statutes at schools that mishandle (in its view) student interactions. Decrying a supposed “pandemic” of bullying and harassment, OCR issued what is known in the bureaucracy as a “Dear Colleague Letter” to warn schools about potential civil-rights liability in such cases. Now, every teacher who addresses the everyday complaints of one student about another must fear being second-guessed by a bureaucrat in Washington. It is difficult to imagine a more inappropriate intrusion of federal authority into a manifestly local issue.

The OCR Letter’s Conflict with Current Federal Law

A particularly obvious problem with the Letter is the breadth of its definitions. Harassment, it says, “may take many forms, including verbal acts and name-calling; graphic and written statements, which may include use of cell phones and the Internet; or other conduct that may be physically threatening, harmful, or humiliating.” The government website fleshes this out: bullying includes “name-calling, teasing, spreading rumors, leaving people out on purpose, [and] breaking up friendships.” In other words, the federal definition of bullying includes much of what occurs in every school every day, and has since the advent of schools. The government presumes to hold schools accountable—through the threat of lost funding—if they do not stop it.

Another fundamental problem with the Letter is its inconsistency with Supreme Court authority. In Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, the Court ruled that a student may recover damages from a school under Title IX for sexual harassment by another student, but only under very limited circumstances: school authorities must have been deliberately indifferent to, although they had actual knowledge of, harassment that was so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it deprives the victim of access to educational opportunities or benefits. The Letter’s conflicts with this standard are several:

• The Letter changes the phrase “severe, pervasive, and . . . objectively offensive” to “severe, pervasive, or persistent.” The altered conjunction is significant: whereas the Davis Court required that all three conditions be met before liability would attach, OCR allows liability if any one of the three is present. Thus, as the dissenters to a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights “bullying” report warned, “schools can be in violation of Title IX based on a single student act if the government believes it is sufficiently severe.” This result was never contemplated by Davis.
• The Letter removes the requirement that the conduct be “objectively offensive” to justify liability. This change appears to eliminate the “reasonable person” standard, so that a school could lose federal funding for disregarding conduct that seemed harmless to the objective observer.
• Although Davis allows liability only for harassment that “deprive[s] the victims of access to educational opportunities or benefits,” the Letter  changes “deprives” to the more expansive “interferes with.” This change in terminology broadens schools’ potential liability beyond the Davis limits.

The Letter changes the Davis holding that there is no liability unless a school had “actual knowledge” of the misconduct. OCR says instead that the school may be liable if it “knows or reasonably should have known”—a much broader standard than that applied by Davis. The OCR Letter also expands potential liability beyond school grounds. Davis emphasized that the school could be liable only for harassment that occurred during school hours and on school grounds; other courts have similarly refused to sanction a school based on off-campus misconduct (see Lam v. Curators of the Univ. of Missouri at Kansas City Dental School). But the Letter obviously contemplates holding schools accountable for such behavior, especially in its reference to Internet-based misconduct. Unkind remarks posted on Facebook late at night may be distressing to a student, but is it fair to hold a school accountable for them?

In expanding potential liability so far beyond that allowed in Davis, OCR assumes the authority to reinterpret the governing statutes (primarily Title IX and Title VI). As Professor John Eastman has pointed out, an administrative agency has only limited authority to interpret statutes, especially when the Supreme Court has already done so and has reached different conclusions. So a school targeted by OCR may ultimately prevail in court, but the risk and expense of protracted litigation may (as OCR perhaps intends) force it to submit without a fight.

In addition to the inconsistency with Davis, the OCR Letter expands the coverage of the federal statutes beyond their clear terms. The statutes do not cover discrimination based on sexual orientation or religion, yet the Letter purports to include harassment bases on these nonstatutory characteristics. The legal basis for extending the sanctions to sexual-orientation harassment is at least colorable (by labeling it “sex stereotyping”); this is not true of harassment based on religion. Nevertheless, OCR now appears ready to crack down on schools that allow students to express opinions about, say, the connection between Islam and terrorism.

The OCR Letter’s Conflict with the First Amendment

OCR’s sweeping prohibition of “harassment” and “bullying” carries serious First Amendment implications. May a student express a negative opinion of illegal immigration, or could that be prohibited as harassment toward Latino students? May a boy argue in a public-speaking class that women should not be allowed in combat, or could that be prohibited as harassment toward female students? Troubling hypotheticals abound.

The OCR Letter dismisses the First Amendment problem in a single reference: a two-sentence footnote. That allotment of space crystallizes the level of regard OCR apparently has for freedom of speech.

A school’s regulation of student speech comports with the First Amendment only when (with minimal exceptions) the speech would substantially interfere with or disrupt the work of the school or the rights of other students (Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community Sch. Dist.). “The Supreme Court has held time and again . . . that the mere fact that someone might take offense at the content of speech is not sufficient justification for prohibiting it” (Saxe v. State College Area Sch. Dist.).

Under this standard, OCR’s attack on what it labels harassment or bullying potentially conflicts with the First Amendment. At a Civil Rights Commission hearing held in May 2011, government witnesses insisted that OCR is focusing only on unprotected conduct involving physical threats or creating a reasonable fear of physical harm. But commentators such as Professor Eugene Volokh have refuted this, noting that the Letter’s sweeping language reaches even purely verbal acts well beyond those that can be regulated under Davis and Tinker. At the Commission hearing, no OCR witness denied that the Letter means exactly what it says.

To date, courts have held that even offensive student speech may be protected by the First Amendment. (See Saxe v. State College Area Sch. Dist. and DeJohn v. Temple Univ., both striking down overly broad school “discrimination” or “harassment” policies.) So, a school that defends against OCR action on First Amendment grounds may very well prevail in court. But again, OCR appears to be betting on schools’ unwillingness to risk federal funding and devote extensive time and resources to litigation. First Amendment jurisprudence has a term for this: “chilling effect.”

One aspect of the OCR letter that deeply implicates the First Amendment is the prohibition of “harassment” based on sexual orientation (known as LGBT—lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered). By expressing his belief, based on religious faith, that LGBT conduct is immoral, a student exercises his First Amendment rights both to freedom of speech and to freedom of religion. But if an LGBT student takes offense, would OCR respect the speaker’s First Amendment rights? Unlikely. More likely to prevail is the attitude expressed by U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner (and former Pelosi advisor) Michael Yaki, who argues that “government action to stop bullying in schools, particularly bullying against LGTB or LGTB-identified children, [should] be given substantial deference with regard to competing First Amendment concerns.”

Thus does the Obama Administration achieve two goals: it extends the tentacles of federal control more deeply into the day-to-day operations of schools, and it bans the expression of religious and cultural attitudes disfavored by government elites.

The Practical Effect of the OCR Letter

Instructed that “bullying” may be second-guessed by federal bureaucrats with a political agenda, the most likely response will be similar to the “zero tolerance” overreaches that prevailed after high-profile school shootings. Schools are likely to shut down, to the extent possible, all discussion of controversial topics that might offend, and to overreact to every complained-of slight. Expect also the flowering of additional bureaucracy at every level of educational administration, and, as has already begun, marketing of pricey packages designed to train teachers and administrators to prevent kids from acting like kids. And expect students to view teachers and administrators with diminished respect—since the government has pre-judged them as incompetent.

What effect will this bureaucratization have on children? New York psychotherapist Israel Kalman argues that the governmentalizing of responses to bullying actually harms children—even (perhaps especially) those who are the victims. According to Kalman, children must learn how to handle meanness from others and will suffer later in life if they miss these lessons. The better approach is to teach victims how to parry a bully’s thrusts rather than encourage them to run to the principal (which, as any former child knows, guarantees even more mistreatment from the bully). If they learn how to stand up for themselves, they are less likely to be bullied again and more prepared for the real world.

The Obama Administration justifies its obsession with bullying by claiming that the incidence of such misconduct has reached a “pandemic” level. It cites “research” such as an American Association of University Women study, reporting the percentage of eighth- through twelfth-graders who have been sexually harassed during school at a manifestly preposterous 81 percent. But a study funded by the Justice Department and released in 2010 found a sharp drop in the percentage of students who reported being bullied or harassed. Other researchers have made similar findings. So what is going on here?

The unspoken truth behind OCR’s “bullying” campaign is that it is directed primarily at speech critical of government-favored constituencies, such as homosexuals. The Obama Administration has embraced the mission of radical gay-rights groups to propagate full acceptance and affirmation of LGBT lifestyles. The goal is to delegitimize, and ultimately outlaw expression of, orthodox religious beliefs relating to marriage and sexual behavior. Viewed through this lens, OCR’s anti-bullying campaign is worse than silly—it’s dangerous.

Parents should recognize this new federal takeover for what it is, and insist that their legislators rein in OCR’s assault on freedom of speech and belief. Teachers and principals must be allowed to do their jobs and be accountable to parents—not to distant bureaucrats enforcing a political agenda.

Emmett McGroarty, Esq., is Executive Director of the Preserve Innocence Initiative at the American Principles Project. Jane Robbins, Esq., is a Senior Fellow with the American Principles Project.

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Progressives have carried these attitudes to federal, state, and local governments, and the result has been an unprecedented assault on religious values and religious practice. Governmental authorities embrace the view that access to contraception (and abortion) is a fundamental right vital to sexual freedom. Similarly, homosexual conduct must be completely normalized and accepted. The law must prohibit even private preference for heterosexual norms, and if religion teaches such a preference, religion must yield. These attitudes must be taught to children in the public schools in order to affirm, in the state’s view, the full self-realization of every person—and as shown below, parents who object to the assault on their right to bring up their children according to their religious values have discovered that the courts will not protect their rights in this regard.

Churches and other people of faith have relied on the judicial process to protect their First Amendment freedoms. But litigation takes an enormous toll in time and resources. Even worse, as many disappointed litigants have discovered, courts grant extraordinary leeway to government and government schools in advancing so-called neutral, generally applicable laws. The courts will follow the lead of the people in defining the parameters of religious liberty; if the people abdicate, the courts will not intercede to protect that liberty.

The problem lies in a 1990 Supreme Court case, Employment Division v. Smith, in which the Court held that the First Amendment does not relieve a citizen of the obligation to comply with a neutral law of general applicability, simply because the law “proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes).” Applying Smith, lower courts have rejected almost all challenges to laws and government activities that are based on claims of interference with free exercise of religion. Many of these cases arise in the public-school setting. Courts have found that public-school administrators do not interfere with parents’ First Amendment rights by:

• Teaching kindergartners that same-sex relationships are equivalent to heterosexual ones (Parker v. Hurley);
• Administering surveys to children as young as seven, asking about sexual subjects, personal feelings and experiences, and family relationships (CN v. Ridgewood Board of Education, Fields v. Palmdale School District);
• Presenting a vulgar, sexually explicit program to teenagers as part of AIDS-prevention efforts (Brown v. Hot, Sexy & Safer Productions).

Although older Supreme Court authority acknowledged the fundamental right of parents to control the upbringing and education of their children (Meyer v. Nebraska, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, Wisconsin v. Yoder), the post-Smith courts have severely limited those holdings to their unique facts. Now, courts are more likely to hold that parents relinquish, as a practical matter, their First Amendment right to control their children’s education when they choose public schools over private schools or homeschooling. As one court said, parents “have no constitutional right . . . to prevent a public school from providing its students with whatever information it wishes to provide, sexual or otherwise, when and as the school determines that it is appropriate to do so.”

The denigration of religious freedom extends to areas of purely private, commercial conduct. Governments increasingly apply nondiscrimination statutes to force private individuals and businesses to participate in conduct that violates their religious beliefs. So far, defenses based on the First Amendment have been unavailing. Some examples:

• The New Mexico Human Rights Commission found that a small photography business unlawfully discriminated against a same-sex couple by declining, because of the owners’ religious beliefs, to photograph the couple’s commitment ceremony (Willock v. Elane Photography).
• The California Supreme Court ruled that doctors violated the state nondiscrimination statute by refusing, on religious grounds, to artificially inseminate a woman who was in a lesbian relationship (North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group v. San Diego County Superior Court).
• A federal court in California found that administrators of an Arizona adoption-facilitation website were subject to California’s statute banning discrimination in public accommodations because they refused to post profiles of same-sex couples as potential parents (Butler v. Adoption Media).
• A New Jersey agency found probable cause to believe that a church violated a public-accommodations statute by declining to rent its pavilion for a same-sex wedding (a different agency, enforcing nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, revoked the tax exemption the church had enjoyed under a statute promoting the use of private property as green space) (Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Ass’n of United Methodist Church v. Vespa-Papaleo).
• A federal appeals court found that an employer’s denial of insurance coverage to an employee’s same-sex partner constituted illegal sex discrimination (In Re Levenson).

In none of these cases did the religious defendants discriminate against homosexuals just because of their orientation—i.e., they did not refuse to serve them in a restaurant or work on their cars or give them standard medical care. Rather, they declined to participate in an endeavor, such as same-sex marriage or adoption, which was inconsistent with their religious beliefs. But the courts and agencies found that nondiscrimination trumps religious values. The courts will not protect a for-profit business that wants to operate according to biblical principles.

Another arena in which principles of nondiscrimination are elevated over free exercise of religion is the area of public benefits. Across the country, faith-based charities or social-service organizations such as the Salvation Army and the Boy Scouts have been denied government grants or other benefits because of their religiously grounded refusal to yield to the demands of “nondiscrimination” (see, for example, Boy Scouts of America v. Wyman, Catholic Charities of Maine, Inc. v. City of Portland). These demands have included providing insurance benefits to employees’ same-sex partners, admitting homosexuals to the organizations’ leadership ranks, and placing children with same-sex adoptive parents. This latter demand has forced Catholic agencies to cease adoption facilitations in Massachusetts, Illinois, and the District of Columbia rather than violate their religious beliefs about marriage and the family.

Other victims of progressive attitudes toward sexuality and “discrimination” have been public employees who express their religiously based concerns about homosexual conduct. A Los Angeles police officer who was also a Protestant minister was demoted and, he says, denied benefits because of a sermon he delivered that quoted biblical passages about prohibited sexual conduct. An African-American college administrator was fired after she published an op-ed objecting to the equating of race discrimination and sexual-orientation discrimination. And most recently, a New Jersey teacher has come under verbal assault—including from Gov. Chris Christie, who also called for an investigation of her classroom behavior—for posting on her Facebook page her moral objections to a high school’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender History Month display.

The hostility of courts to such claims of First Amendment violations is unlikely to change, especially in light of the governmental officials’ gravitation toward the European attitude about religion—that it is a divisive influence that must be contained and marginalized. As jurists and legal scholars flirt with the idea of consulting foreign law to evaluate claims under our Constitution, this attitude could take deeper root in American soil.

Progressive to the core, the Obama administration is pursuing even more limitations on religious freedom. One such effort is the proposed mandate of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that health plans cover contraceptives and sterilization, with a religious “exemption” so narrow that (as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has noted) it would not have covered the ministry of Jesus Christ. Another is the Administration’s argument in a case currently before the Supreme Court that the long-established “ministerial exception” to federal employment-discrimination laws be abandoned. This would mean that rather than allow churches to select and control their own ministers, the federal government could dictate results more in keeping with its secular values. Churches have seen this kind of thing before, and it has not ended well.

While religious freedom has been eroding over the last half-century, the faith community has failed to respond effectively—perhaps out of complacency, or fear of being thought dogmatic and uncompassionate, or concern over losing public funding or tax status. Judicial challenges, though necessary, have not stemmed the assault on religious values. In fact, the Smith decision encourages legislative and executive restrictions of free exercise.

So what is to be done? The faith community must awaken to the attacks, insist that state and federal legislatures proactively defend their rights, and resolve to address any problems as soon as they arise. This means defeating proposed legislation and regulations that threaten religious freedom, or at least amending them to include broad and robust religious exemptions and opt-out provisions. It means standing watch over public schools and securing statutes and policies that allow parents’ rights to prevail over progressive values. And it means putting the question to candidates for political office as to whether they will defend religious liberty.

Governmental and cultural progressives preach the “inevitability” of the triumph of their values over religious values. “Get used to the idea of same-sex marriage [or abortion, or whatever the issue is],” they say, “because it’s inevitable.” And if the faithful insist on clinging to their outdated religious precepts, they will be warned to leave their beliefs inside their churches or suffer penalties imposed by the more enlightened.

But if people of faith take a stand, this result is not inevitable. They must remember the place of religious freedom in America. Religion was not a hobby that people were allowed to pursue in private; it was foundational to the American experiment. Protecting the religious beliefs and religiously informed conduct of our citizens is not optional. Religion must not decrease as government increases. To allow that to happen would be to allow the dismantling of the nation as we know it, and as the Founders envisioned it.

Jane Robbins, Esq., is a Senior Fellow with American Principles in Action. Emmett McGroarty, Esq., is Executive Director of the Preserve Innocence Initiative at the American Principles Project.

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The human being, Beneton argues, cannot flourish without authority. He does not have in mind the swaggering of the autocrat, that cartoon parody of authority that egalitarians draw, to frighten simpletons withal. For the exercise of authority is a labor of service and devotion: “The person who takes on a responsibility invests himself, he assumes a burden that obliges himself as a human being.” We bow to the embodied ideal, and not to the mere person, when we show a special respect to those who risk their lives to protect us, or who wear themselves out in seeking the common good. The poet Charles Peguy, says Beneton, felt a profound gratitude for the teachers of his youth, just because “they put themselves in the service of something greater than themselves.” Therefore they could naturally and justly invite their students into that sanctuary. They would no doubt have furrowed their brows to try to make the least sense of the educational patois of our day, which insists that school be “child-centered.” It would be like asking a hymn to be “choir-centered,” when the very purpose of a hymn is to bring the singers out of themselves, in devotion. So too the “child-centered” classroom, if indeed it focuses on the tastes and habits of the children who happen to be there, mistakes both the nature of the child and the purpose of education. It ignores what the child, as a human person, most needs, and that is to give himself in love to what transcends his personality or his class or his age.

If we follow Beneton’s reasoning, we must conclude that no genuinely human reform of education is possible unless we are willing to cast aside an essentially inhuman egalitarianism. The point is not to deny the words of Jefferson, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That ontological equality, however, as it is expressed in the Declaration of Independence, is itself grounded in the hierarchical relationship of creature to Creator, so much so that even if a man should himself desire it, he could not alienate his rights by his own fiat. It is rather to see man as a being who, if he ceases to ask the questions that orient him toward the truly great—such as “How should a good man live?”—ceases to be fully human. The man who does not give honor is but half a man, not merely because he is selfish, but because he is missing one of the sweetest and most human things in life, the reverence that makes him greater than himself because he has learned to rejoice in what is greater than himself. But “where vital questions are concerned,” writes Beneton, modern man “has nothing to learn,” having denied in fact that there is anything to learn. He need not follow the lead of Socrates, because that would be to recognize and honor a real superiority in Socrates, which his egalitarianism forbids him to do. He need not study with love and care the art of Dante, because that would be to submit to the wisdom and genius of the Florentine, rather than seeing in him only a product of his age.

If we are not ontologically equal by virtue of our status as embodied spiritual beings—or however else one wishes to express a truth that even the deist Jefferson admitted—then our equality must be located somewhere else. But the quickest glance at human variety suffices to teach us that we are not equally tall or fast or musically talented or agile with a differential equation. What then? If equality cannot be predicated upon anything that is admitted to exist, then it must be a negation of inequality, an insistence that something real which would render us unequal does not exist or is of no importance. The vision must be one of essential homogeneity.

Where is that vision of homogeneity to be found? Wherever, Beneton suggests, we find the reduction of man to his constituent parts, or to his environment, or to whatever else will replace the mystery of the human person with a general and scientistic “law.” We would then be equal—in our unmeaning. The carbon that makes up my flesh, the calcium that makes up my bones, the iron that gives my blood its energy-delivering properties, are no different from those in anyone else’s body. The encounter with a particular being, the irreplaceable person, yields to indifference, as one lump of flesh is much like another. One family, like a molecule in the economic crystal that surrounds it, is no “better” than another such molecule. What has happened is that, instead of the object of knowledge determining the method of study, the method of study has determined and reduced the object of knowledge. “The great works thus lose their status of great works,” says Beneton, and are reduced to cultural artifacts, to be explained by the technician, the neutral archaeologist, and not honored for their beauty or wisdom.

When we argue, then, about how to improve our wretched schools, we must be clear about what we intend to do. If the object is to produce an elite cadre of technicians (since not everyone, practically speaking, can master the calculus of variations) who unite their facility with the dead and the homogeneous to a complete obliviousness to the great human questions, then I fail to see why people should support schools at all. What would be the point of subjecting the overwhelming majority of young people, those who will not be the elite technicians, to a regimen of denial? How long, after all, can it possibly take, to teach that there are no permanent and objective values in the moral life, or that one culture is as meaningless as another?

There is an alternative. It is what Charles Peguy called “living knowledge,” as opposed to the “dead knowledge” that he believed had conquered the Sorbonne, in the years before the First World War. It is the handing on of culture, against which the mass phenomena of our time, and the facile reductions of scientistic academe, array themselves in enmity. When we read Aristotle with the honor he deserves, when we enter the sanctuary, we enter the sacred conversation of mankind on his pilgrim way. At the least, we celebrate the joys of simple work well done, of the laughter of children, of the peculiar beauty of man and woman; but we may also rejoice in the genius of Homer, the insight of Racine, the broad humanity of Shakespeare. We are exalted by such obedience, such humble listening. We are made great by the acknowledgment of authority.

Forty years ago, a few wise men at the college where I teach, motivated both by that acknowledgment of authority and by their belief in the ontological equality of all mankind, embarked on a brave reform. At the time when the elite colleges were scrapping their curricula, effectively burning the books of three thousand years of our Western heritage, our faculty dedicated themselves to something beyond themselves, deserving of their honor. What if the elites at Harvard no longer honored and studied Dante? The students at our college would do so—the children of ordinary people, not rich, and perhaps not destined for riches, either. What if the technicians of education no longer saw any use for the political wisdom of Aristotle and Plato? The faculty at our school, not exalted technicians with conveniently reductive equations, but rather human beings asking the human questions, would try to recover and hand on something of their wisdom. They welcomed those young people with equal heartiness into a world of glorious inequality. I cannot say we have always succeeded at the task. But it has at least been a human enterprise. And that is more than I can say for most of what goes on in the egalitarian prison house that goes by the name of “school.”

Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, and the author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child and Ironies of Faith. He has translated Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

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Yet alongside this extreme heterogeneity due to faculty specialization, an almost equally extreme homogeneity prevails among the faculty politically. The social sciences and humanities display more ideological conformity than one is apt to find in almost any other workforce in the economy. This ideological unity produces a range of narrow, specialized courses, too many of which ring the familiar changes of “progressive” grievances regarding race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Throw in a commitment to “diversity” that is only skin-deep, and it is increasingly hard to take university faculty—as a group—very seriously as disinterested pursuers of truth.

Turn the university to another angle, and one sees another set of problems: administrative bloat, increasing use of poorly paid adjunct faculty, and empty “mission statements” about “excellence” while instructional quality suffers. Turn it a few more degrees and see over-reliance on student evaluations, rampant grade inflation and pressure to raise graduation rates, plus appeasement of students as “customers” and fierce competition to attract them with increasingly posh residence halls, food courts, recreational facilities, and entertainment opportunities. Turn it yet again and watch costs rising much faster than inflation for those students and their parents, coupled with opaque admission and financial aid systems, and cumbersome bureaucracies that teach unintentional lessons in caprice and contradiction. One more turn to a new angle: now one glimpses the alcohol-fueled “hook-up” culture, a joyless pursuit of joy with hearts and souls in the balance while faculty and administrators ignore what’s going on under their noses, as student affairs staff piously preach a faith consisting of two moral doctrines of surpassing inadequacy, “consent” and “safe sex.”

Over the quarter century since Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind—a book still worth another look—the “higher ed wars” have raged unabated across all these fronts. On some, progress has begun, thanks to off-campus institutions such as the National Association of Scholars and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, academic ventures such as the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton or the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy at Georgetown, and student-led initiatives such as the Love and Fidelity Network. But the high ground is still held by the forces responsible for ideological uniformity, illiberal curricula, rising costs, moral default, and institutional irresponsibility. And seated in the high citadel, secure against almost any siege tactics, are the tenured faculty of the university.

These are the figures in the bull’s-eye of Naomi Schaefer Riley’s criticism in The Faculty Lounges, and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For. Riley, a former Wall Street Journal writer, author of God on the Quad, and the daughter of academics, sees most of the pathologies of the university as traceable to tenure itself. Why are so many academic departments so ideologically homogeneous? Why are assistant professors so hard at work producing so many books and articles, for so few readers, on narrow subjects of such doubtful value? Why are teaching loads so light for so many of the permanent full-time faculty at many universities? Why is it so hard to clear out the “deadwood” of lazy or incompetent teachers in the ranks of senior faculty? Why are so many classes taught by adjunct faculty with no substantial role in the life of the institutions where they teach? Why are curricula, graduation requirements, and available courses chopped up into such a crazy quilt of incoherent academic programs? Why is it so hard for university administrations to reform or shut down underperforming or misdirected academic units, and to reallocate resources? The answer to each of these questions is: tenure. (Riley’s title might be best understood if its third word is taken as a verb, not a noun.)

The case for faculty tenure is that, by protecting professors from arbitrary and willful dismissal for the exercise of their independent judgment, it shields academic freedom and thus ensures the intellectual vitality of the university. Tenure protects freethinking faculty in their research, and in any speech in which they might engage outside the university. And a corps of tenured faculty ensures the governance of the institution according to authentic intellectual norms that guarantee the quality of the curriculum and pedagogy. Or so the argument goes.

But the tenure system makes the faculty themselves the gatekeepers of intellectual life, without much serious constraint on their decisions to hire, tenure, and promote their junior colleagues other than their own sense of what is right and fitting. This is a recipe for power without responsibility, anywhere self-interest conquers ethics, as it all too commonly does. The price is paid by junior faculty, adjuncts, graduate students being trained to be the next generation of professors, and undergraduate students frequently subjected to shabby teaching of obscure courses by inaccessible, uninterested senior faculty who would rather be pursuing their research. And all this without much evidence that academic freedom would seriously suffer if universities jettisoned what is effectively a job-for-life system. The common reassurance that tenure “was never meant” to be protection for incompetent and/or abusive employees is cold comfort when we observe how uncommon it is for the worst of the lot to lose their jobs or suffer any serious consequences. And for conservative professors (like her own father) who believe they would be the first victims of a liberal establishment in the absence of tenure, Riley quotes the sympathetic education scholar Chester Finn: “Protecting 411 conservatives is insufficient reason to retain a tenure system. Because it’s protecting 400,000 liberals too.”

Riley’s short book is a splash of cold water in the face of anyone who has thought of tenure as the crown jewel of American academe. In fact, her argument may be even better than she claims, as the thought keeps recurring, long after one has finished the book, that problem after problem in the university is either partly or wholly caused, or exacerbated, by faculty tenure. Johns Hopkins professor Benjamin Ginsberg argues, in The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, that a proliferation of “deanlets” now eats away at the substance of faculty governance of the university. It is certainly true that administrative staffing and expenses have grown faster than instructional staffing and spending in recent years, and that universities have become more bureaucratically sclerotic, with reaccreditation busywork, program reviews, “assessment” of “learning outcomes,” and “strategic plans” aplenty. But faculty governance of the university has, for the most part, been surrendered to administrations rather than captured by them. Research has overtaken teaching; curricular specialization has overtaken liberal education; senior faculty holding one another accountable has been overtaken by a negligent “live and let live” ethic. Is it any wonder that parents, taxpayers, board members, and legislators doubt the good faith of faculty so insulated from the kind of performance accountability that prevails in the rest of the economy? Is it any wonder that many university administrations have responded to these doubts by ginning up the appearance—albeit seldom the reality—of institutional accountability through endless streams of committee meetings, reports, and “assessments”?

As costs have risen, universities have become more adept at all sorts of flimflam to attract customers, to compete for top billing in the annual U.S. News and World Report ranking, to throw up a smokescreen around their pricing practices that should make airlines envious, and to appeal for more government subsidies for financial aid on the dubious grounds that more and more Americans “need” a college degree. The effect on anxious families of college-bound youngsters is hilariously recounted by Andrew Ferguson in Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College. But why is the modern university presented to prospective students and their parents as four (or five or six) years of fun and games, with the off chance of collecting an actual education on the way to the sheepskin? Probably because the only people permanently part of the institution—the faculty—have done so little to persuade anyone that a coherent education is what it’s all about. They’ve gotten away with that because of tenure. Riley says early in the book that “tenure is not the [only] reason why college costs so much,” but maybe the dots are not all that hard to connect. After all, as she rightly remarks later on, “Tenure has skewed the incentives so that the people who should have the most concern about the economic and educational sustainability of the institution—the people who hope to be there for decades to come—actually have the least.”

Riley’s alternative to tenure is a system of renewable multi-year contracts for faculty. This should not radically alter the lives of good teachers and scholars, but it could set off a cascade of deep changes for the better in institutional life. If such a system were instituted, with the burden on faculty to show they had performed as teachers devoted to the missions of their institution, universities might make their way back to a reinvigorated sense of what they’re supposed to be about. Pay might have to go up for some professors—tenure’s job security is worth a good deal, after all—but so might teaching loads in many fields where research “productivity” is actually productive of very little substance. A lot of the insecure adjuncts might be brought in from the cold and made more fully members of the professoriate, once administrations don’t have to worry any longer about locking in the employment of full-timers for life. The faculty-administration wars might be brought to a peaceful end, with faculty once more rising from within the institution to assume the duties of deans and provosts for short terms, and the class of “deanlets” and “adminicrats” not seeming so distinct and clueless any longer. Grade inflation might be tamed, teaching might be honestly assessed, and high graduation rates might no longer be considered an obviously good thing.

Is there any chance of a revolution against tenure taking place on a large scale? It’s hard to see how. Those who have tenure now cannot be deprived of it without a breach of contract, and moving to a system of renewable contracts with new faculty would entail a long and uncomfortable period of transition until the old guard is fully retired. Moreover, a large number of universities would have to resolve to jump into a partly unknown future together—perhaps all the Ivies together, or the whole California system, could get the ball rolling, but individual institutions would be loath to go first, for obvious reasons. Still, Naomi Riley’s The Faculty Lounges makes a compelling case that “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” is not always a wise proverb.

Matthew J. Franck is Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute. He is Professor Emeritus at Radford University, where he held tenure and chaired the Department of Political Science for fifteen years.

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According to a recent New York Times article, the law is an effort to get schools to “do more,” in response to such tragic incidents as the suicide of eighteen-year-old Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, who was cyber-bullied for being gay. There’s something to that. Bullying has reached new heights of horror, especially with the prevalence of cell-phone and internet technology, which empowers bullies to overwhelm victims.

Even the New York Times coverage, however, conveyed significant doubts about the well-intended New Jersey legislation. But what the Times article did not mention is that New Jersey did not conceive this policy on its own; the push for such anti-bullying policy comes, in fact, straight from President Obama.

Last March, Obama held a White House Conference on Bullying Prevention. As the White House blog promoted it, “Bullying is an issue that affects every young person in America, and we all have a responsibility to do something about it.” The president started the conference, and several White House and other government officials supervised breakout sessions. Obama explained that the goals of the conference were to “dispel the myth” that bullying is “an inevitable part of growing up” and to “prevent bullying and create a climate in our schools in which all our children can feel safe [and] like they belong.”

It is difficult to reconcile the White House’s promotion with its goals. How can we deny that bullying is an “inevitable part about growing up” if it is, at the same time, “an issue that affects every young person in America”? As a participant in the conference, I soon found that its underlying philosophy was based not on logic but on emotivism.

“We all remember what it was like to see kids picked on,” the president continued. “With big ears and the name that I have, I wasn’t immune. I didn’t emerge unscathed.” President Obama went on to sketch the size of the problem: “one third of middle- and high-school students report being bullied,” and three million report being pushed, shoved, tripped, or spat on. All the while, he exuded confidence that bullying-prevention policy can ensure that “no child is in that position in the first place.” One of the breakout sessions that followed was devoted to “establishing clear and consistent policies in schools . . . to establish a climate in which it is clear that no bullying, regardless of form, type, or severity will be tolerated in school.”

Clearly, the school environment is only the tip of the iceberg, because web technology now expands bullying potential beyond school facilities and hours of operation to virtually anywhere and anytime. That did not lessen the resolve of those at the conference, however, because, as Michelle Obama said that morning, “it breaks our hearts to think that any child feels afraid every day in the classroom, or on the playground, or even online.”

Why, one might ask, would the president lead a conference on preventing something like bullying, which is ultimately impossible to prevent? It could be, perhaps, because bullying is something that everyone agrees is wrong, and it is something that everyone can relate to, because everyone has been bullied at some point.

But sadly, bullying is like any unfortunate human conflict and will exist as long as humans do. This does not mean it is okay to bully; it means it is problematic to imagine that we can create a world in which conflict doesn’t exist. It is hard to imagine zero-tolerance bullying prevention without schools becoming mini-bureaucratic-police states—the likes of which only belong in films like Minority Report or Adjustment Bureau—where kids could be criminally charged for hurting each other’s feelings, “different” kids could be targeted as “likely to be bullied,” and so on. But that is exactly what this boils down to: a child’s version of hate crimes.

In reality, laws like New Jersey’s risk worsening the problems of bullying. There is reason to believe that hotlines where kids can anonymously text-message tips to incriminate bullies are yet another technology that kids will abuse for the purposes of bullying. Further, bullying prevention is arguably the wrong goal altogether. It would be better to focus on conflict resolution than on conflict prevention. Devoting all effort to preventing the inevitable is not only wasteful policy; it is a failure to do what actually might lessen the damage of real-life conflicts.

I left the conference thinking that educators would benefit from an approach with a different focus: helping victims to cope after bullying, and helping bullies to reconcile and socially recover. I soon learned that such a thought is not novel. As a Cleveland high-school teacher informed me, this idea—conflict resolution as a response to bullying—is so widespread in education that the Obama administration’s emphasis on prevention must be an intentional effort to go in the opposite direction. Educators like to use the conflict-resolution approach, he told me, because it minimizes the chance that formerly bullied children will become bullies themselves, a common vicious cycle that teachers know too well.

Since changing educators’ views won’t be easy, the government has created a new website, www.stopbullying.gov, to provide teachers with all the resources they need to “change the climate of the school and social norms with regard to bullying.” Materials include a significant focus on LGBT issues and suggestions for teachers to devote 20-30 minutes in their classrooms each week to the subject of bullying. Considering the many pressing challenges for public schools today—from proficiency in math and literacy to drugs and gang violence—it is a tough sell to ask teachers to devote extra time to teaching kids not to be mean.

Apparently, however, this is the only way to stomp out bullying for good. Forget owning up to our trespasses and forgiving those who trespass against us; Obama insists we focus instead on using the curriculum to create a world where no trespassing takes place. Such broad policies, which hold humans to unrealistic expectations, are recipe for disappointment. New Jersey’s law, in attempting to put these policies into practice, could, at least, send a clear message to other states about how not to solve the bullying problem.

Mary Rose Somarriba is chief operating officer of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, DC, and managing editor of Altcatholicah.

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The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reserves to the states all powers not delegated to the federal government. For most of our nation’s history, education was considered preeminent among those reserved powers, and for good reason. Teaching and learning are quintessentially local activities—the thought never would have occurred to our founders that a bureaucrat in Washington is more capable than parents or teachers of creating an educational plan appropriate for an individual child.

But President Obama seems to reject America’s founding principles and embraces instead the belief that people must be managed, for the good of the country, by elites in government and other institutions. This was the philosophy of the early-20^th-century progressives, and it is pervasive in the Obama administration. A prime example is the complete transformation of the American health-care system in a manner that has proven to be ill-founded everywhere it has been tried.

The progressive view of health care—that the system should be managed by “experts” for the good of the economy and society in general—is identical to the progressive view of education: the education of children is simply too important to be left, as the Founders intended, to parents, localities, and the states. This view is far more entrenched than most people realize. The progressive agenda threatens our constitutional system and parents’ right to transmit their values to their children through education. It is an ongoing effort that predates the Obama administration and has been infiltrating American culture for decades. With a renewed effort in the current administration, it is no exaggeration to say that we are now at a critical point in the battle for the soul of America.

Progressive educators have long advocated sweeping national control of education. One prominent progressive reformist, Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), fleshed out this view in a now-famous letter he wrote to Hillary Clinton (then a member of NCEE’s Board of Trustees) shortly after the 1992 election. Tucker laid out his vision, which, to conservatives, describes a dystopia of authoritarian control: “remold the entire American system for human resources development . . .  [a] seamless system of unending skill development that begins in the home with the very young and continues through school, postsecondary education and the workplace.” Beginning with the creation of national standards of curricula and assessment, and then solidifying control of education from preschool through the workforce, this vision is being implemented by the Obama Department of Education (DOE).

The first step in this process is the imposition on the states of common educational content standards, so that every child in every locality will be taught content decided upon by “experts” affiliated with the federal government and special interests. Presidential efforts to develop such “voluntary” national standards in the 1990s collapsed under scrutiny, so this time around, the “common standards” advocates have realized the political necessity of presenting standards as generated by the states, not the federal government.

The result is the Common Core Standards (CCS), created and propagated under the auspices of the National Governors Association, with tens of millions of dollars in funding from the Gates Foundation and other corporate interests. The Obama DOE is determined to force these standards on all the states—not by direct diktat, which is forbidden by federal statute, but by showering federal funds on states that adopt the standards and withholding, and threatening to withhold, funds from those that balk. Not surprisingly, most states have fallen in line. And because the deadline for deciding on the CCS was carefully timed by DOE to fall when most state legislatures were not in session, the decision had to be made, in most cases, by state education officials without input from the people’s representatives in the legislature. So much for parental control, or even parental notification.

CCS currently encompasses only English language arts and mathematics but in time will include science, history, and other subjects. But even these current standards have been criticized as deeply flawed: the math standards would put U.S. students two years behind students in other high-performing countries, and the language-arts curriculum radically departs from traditional literature, steeped in the classics, that equips young minds to appreciate and follow in the footsteps of the citizen-leaders who founded our country.

The DOE is also pumping money into developing assessments that will track the CCS. By the time these tests are finalized, probably in 2014, and the additional standards are imposed, states will find themselves locked into a rigid educational scheme that most legislatures never approved. Additionally, given the makeup and philosophy of the federal bureaucrats who will oversee the system, and their alliances with interest groups pushing radical agendas such as (to cite only one example) complete normalization of LGBT activity, the danger is very real that parents will see their children taught principles in conflict with their own. This is what inevitably happens when local control, as envisioned by the Founders, gives way to national control influenced by special interests.

Curriculum standards are only one aspect of the progressive effort to control education for the good of a managed national economy. Other activity by DOE reveals an intent to expand the concept of “education” to permit government oversight and tracking of a multitude of human endeavors, from cradle to grave, that might affect the national economy.

This intent is reflected in DOE’s recently proposed amendments to the Family and Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), a statute that strictly limits the dissemination of a student’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII). For example, the amendments would redefine “education program” under FERPA to include any program that could marginally be considered “educational,” even if not conducted by an educational authority such as a public school or college. This radical change would allow nonconsensual access to PII compiled as part of practically any program, whether truly educational or otherwise.

It gets worse. DOE proposes to allow transmission of students’ PII—without parental consent—to any governmental or private entity designated by DOE and others as an “authorized representative.” If this amendment takes effect, DOE could share a student’s PII with, for example, the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Labor (DOL). The student’s parents would have no right to object; indeed, they would probably never know that such disclosure had occurred. HHS and DOL then would have access to all manner of personal data that would be invaluable in managing a planned economy.

What kinds of personal data might be included? According to the National Data Education Model, a myriad of information such as blood type, health-care history, birthmarks, family income range, and family voting status would be available. And DOE is encouraging and lavishly funding the development of statewide longitudinal data systems intended “to capture, analyze, and use student data from preschool to high school, college, and the workforce.” Imagine how a progressive statist, armed with such technology and information, could manage a society for the good of its grateful citizenry.

In its proposed rulemaking, DOE asserts that “there is no reason why a State health and human services or labor department . . . should be precluded from . . . receiving non-consensual disclosures of [PII] to link education, workforce, health, family services, and other data” for the purpose of auditing or evaluating education programs. But there is reason, not least that it runs counter to our founding principles that aimed to protect privacy, limit government intrusion, and allow for local autonomy. The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, which is expert on FERPA compliance, describes this proposal as “a very radical policy shift” that overturns decades of settled interpretation.

The DOE rejects even the basic requirement that it demonstrate legal authority for its data disclosure. The proposed changes would expand the government’s right to disclose personal data for purposes of research studies, audits, or evaluations, without having to identify express legal authority for that action.

What to do? The obvious answer is to abolish the Department of Education. This is a worthy goal; there is no constitutional, and little practical, justification for DOE’s existence. But given the deeply entrenched interests of the education bureaucracy, and the power of the special interests that created and continue to benefit from it, DOE may be impregnable for now. Even President Reagan, who campaigned on the issue, was unable to abolish it. Moreover, as illustrated by the willingness of leftist politicians and bureaucrats to evade the legislative process by stealth (see the attempted rewriting of FERPA by regulation), the objectionable functions of DOE might simply be transferred to a different department, where they can be exercised with even less transparency. (The discredited Head Start program, for example, is administered by HHS rather than DOE.)

Rather than stake everything on an immediate battle to abolish DOE, a more achievable and effective course would be to enervate the agency so that it can no longer impose its will on the states. The most pressing concern at this time is to roll back DOE’s attempts to mandate acceptance of the Common Core Standards. The following steps could be taken to achieve this goal and prevent future mischief by DOE:

1)      Pass federal legislation releasing states from their commitment to adopt the Common Core Standards. In keeping with the Constitution and federal law, states should be free to devise and implement standards that satisfy the parents of the children they educate.

2)      Pass federal legislation prohibiting DOE from conditioning the grant of federal funds on a state’s commitment to certain actions. Instead, to the extent that federal funds are spent on education, they should be awarded in block grants on an equitable basis. This reform would end the sly tyranny of DOE, which uses its considerable power of the purse to evade the current federal prohibition on directing curriculum.

3)      Withdraw the proposed amendments to FERPA, so that the statute will continue to protect students’ Personally Identifiable Information from nonconsensual disclosure.

4)      Reauthorize the provision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that prohibits the creation of a national database of student information.

5)      End all federal funding of development of curricula and assessments. Allow states to choose the curricula and assessment schemes that are best for them and acceptable to parents.

These proposals are designed to restore the vision of the Founders: that in all matters not properly delegated to the federal government, including education, the states should be free to craft and implement their own policies. Freedom works, in education as in most things. Allowed to choose what is best for their children, parents will gravitate to good public schools or private schools or charter schools or homeschooling: to whatever produces the best outcomes for their children. Competition among the states to maximize educational freedom—unencumbered by the federal government—will yield results far superior to those from top-down mandates imposed by “experts” in Washington. The best thing the federal government can do to facilitate this process is to get out of the way.

Jane Robbins is a Senior Fellow with American Principles in Action. This essay is part of the 2012 Election Symposium. Read all of the entries here:

• Ryan T. Anderson, “Liberty, Justice, and the Common Good:
  Political Principles for 2012 and Beyond”
   
• O. Carter Snead, “Protect the Weak and Vulnerable:
  The Primacy of the Life Issue”
• Maggie Gallagher, “Defend Marriage: Moms and Dads Matter”
• Samuel Gregg, “Fix America’s Economy:
  Two Principles for Reform”
• Ed Whelan, “Defend Our Laws: Justice Matters”
• Helen Alvaré, “Uphold Conscience Protection:
  Religious Freedom’s Contribution to the American
  Experience and Threats to its Survival”
   
• Jennifer Bryson, “Promote Democracy:
  Start at Home but Don’t Stay at Home”
• Yuval Levin, “Heal the Sick and Reduce the Debt:
  The Moral Economy of the Healthcare Debate”
• Jane Robbins, “Empower Parents:
  Return Educational Policy to the States”
• Patrick Trueman, “End Child Pornography:
  Enforce Adult Pornography Laws”
• Laura Lederer, “End Human Trafficking:
  A Contemporary Slavery”
   
• Robert P. George, “Reflections of a Questioner:
  The Palmetto Freedom Forum Revisited”

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Historically, national control of education has come up as an issue about once every ten to fifteen years. In the past, it has usually produced a lot of fireworks but burned out pretty quickly. This year is very different. The nationalizers have learned from their past mistakes; they understand now that the American people don’t want the federal government to control schools. So they’ve adopted clever tactics to disguise what they’re doing and misdirect public attention, and as a result, they are already dangerously close to getting everything they want.

Today, a coalition of educational and other leaders, representing a broad diversity of viewpoints, is releasing a manifesto, “Closing the Door on Innovation,” that opposes this stealth campaign to impose a single curriculum and a single test on the nation’s schools. The over 100 signatories include numerous leaders in the education world, as well as such nationally known figures as Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, Shelby Steele, Richard Epstein, and Edwin Meese. You can read it and add your signature at www.k12innovation.com. I’m proud to have played a supporting role in organizing this effort.

The Department of Education is forbidden by law from developing a national curriculum. This reflects the clear judgment of the people and their congressional representatives, expressed forcefully on all the previous occasions when this issue has come up, against handing over control of education to a single national body.

In lieu of an outright establishment of a national curriculum, the Department has spent the past year pressuring states to “voluntarily” adopt the education standards promoted by the private organization Common Core. At the same time, it has hired two consortia to develop curriculum materials and tests based on Common Core’s vision. These materials are being developed behind closed doors, with no transparency or accountability to the public.

No one even knows exactly who’s working on the project. However, such information we do have indicates there are blatant financial conflicts of interest among some of those involved.

The Department’s existing leverage over education policy gives it a lot of muscle to make this happen. Even the president himself has openly warned states they may lose federal funding if they don’t adopt Common Core or something like it (and nothing else like it really exists). But the feds’ position has been greatly strengthened through close cooperation with the Gates Foundation. Most of the important educational organizations get funding from Gates, and Gates has made it clear that those who wish to continue lining up at its trough should take a serious look at supporting national education standards.

The combined influence of federal and Gates funding turned out to be especially great at a time when school budgets were experiencing their first contraction in living memory. Last year, many states—including Massachusetts, whose state standards were widely agreed to be the best in the nation—enacted commitments to drop their state standards for Common Core’s. Just the other day, the teachers at my daughter’s school were discussing how our state’s recent adoption of Common Core is requiring them to rework their whole curriculum.

This summer, the Department hopes to drive in the final nail by getting language into the federal education law which mandates—or that it can twist to de facto mandate—that states lose their federal funding unless they adopt a multi-state system of standards, curriculum, and testing. Only one such system exists. A single curriculum and test, designed behind closed doors by agents of the national government, in every school in the country, all done through the back door so there will be no public outcry to stop it.

There are plenty of reasons to be against a national curriculum. One is that the Common Core standards are inadequate—their “college-ready” standards are actually set below what you need to apply to most colleges. Another is that the educational special interest groups who fatten themselves by destroying children’s lives are more powerful at the national level than at the state level. Even if the standards were good now, we’d have every reason to expect that, over time, national control over education would become subordinate to interest-group agendas. More importantly, the very idea of a single, one-size-fits-all curriculum is a relic that needs to be discarded. The government’s school monopoly is moribund and desperately needs innovation. We should be encouraging more diversity of curricula and assessments, not less.

But all of those issues will get plenty of attention from others. What I’m anxious to add to the discussion is the question of what national control of education would do to our culture.

Suppose you were nostalgic for the culture wars of the 1990s. Most of us have been relieved over the past decade, as the level of cultural savagery has begun to recede, and Americans with different religious and moral viewpoints haven’t been quite as eager to viciously tear each other apart as they used to be. But suppose you missed the height of the culture wars, and wanted to find a way to bring it all back. You could hardly do better than to turn over control of K-12 education to the national government. If the 1990s were a culture war, the 2010s will be a culture Ragnarok.

Although the overt hostilities between conservative and progressive religious-moral cultures have subsided, the two groups are no closer than they were to having established common ground or a even a viable modus vivendi. The September 11^th attacks and other events temporarily created space for a cultural ceasefire, but no substantial progress has been made on the underlying problem—how can we live together now that we no longer share even the most basic agreements on the morals and metaphysics that allow us to interpret the meaning of our shared laws and institutions?

Ceasefires are fragile. The shooting war can restart even if neither side really wants it to. All that has to happen is some event or development that convinces one side that the other side is going to resume hostilities—or even just that the other side is likely to do so. Neither side wants to be the second one to start shooting—that’s a great way to lose a war.

National control over curriculum creates a single lever you can pull to move every school in America. Would conservatives trust progressives, and would progressives trust conservatives, not to try to seize control of that lever to inculcate their religious and moral views among the nation’s youth? And if you don’t trust the other side not to try to seize the lever, is there any reasonable alternative to trying to seize it first?

And this would not be just a single conflict that would happen and then be over. Like the Golden Apple or the One Ring, national curriculum and testing will continuously generate fresh hostility and cultural warfare as long as they exist. And once you forge this ring, there’s no Mount Doom to drop it into.

My own view is that the root of the problem is the government monopoly on schools. Governmental monopolization of the education of children guarantees that all our religious and moral differences will be constantly politicized. School choice, in addition to delivering better academic performance, seems to me to be the only way to end the scorpions-in-a-bottle cultural dynamic and create space for shared citizenship across diverse religious and moral views.

But that’s an argument for another day. At the very least, let’s not reignite the culture wars by creating the educational equivalent of One Ring to Rule Them All. We won’t be able to heal the culture until we learn the most important lesson—real tolerance for real diversity.


Greg Forster is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Educational Choice. 

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Stanley Fish (Save the World on Your Own Time, 2008) chastised modern professors for attempting a “character transplant” in students who had “signed on for something more modest, to wit, a course of instruction.” Charles Murray (Real Education, 2008) made similar points, rebuking the impossibly high ideals of what he called “educational romanticism.” Alongside these critiques, however, came publications that mourn higher education’s failure to address the bigger, interdisciplinary questions. These include recent books by Anthony Kronman (Education’s End, 2007), Martha Nussbaum (Not for Profit, 2010), and Mark C. Taylor (Crisis on Campus, 2010). Kronman, to choose just one example, laments, “I have watched the question of life’s meaning lose its status as a subject of organized academic instruction and seen it pushed to the margins of professional respectability in the humanities, where it once occupied a central and honored place.”

But while critiques of both romanticism and shortsightedness need to be made, rarely do commentators on higher education appear to grasp the full contour of what has been lost. It remains strange that universities, inhabited by a disproportionate number of historians, usually limit themselves to seriously investigating the last century or so when diagnosing their malaise. Medieval wisdom on education can provide some missing perspective, regarding both what learning is and the setting in which it best occurs.

Augustine wrote De Magistro, a dialogue in the form of a conversation between him and his son, in the late fourth century. De Magistro is a surprising treatise. For starters, we find a fourth-century thinker accurately diagnosing the modern/postmodern trajectory that has paralyzed so many educators today:

For just as it is proper to assent to things well explored and perused, so it is perilous to consider things known which are not known. Because there is a danger, when those things are often upset which we supposed would stand firmly and endure, lest we fall into such distrust and hatred of reason that it might seem that confidence in evident truth itself is not warranted.

Following modernity’s epistemic avarice, contemporary thought has indeed fallen, at points, into a “distrust and hatred of reason.” But Augustine not only diagnoses this intellectual condition, he provides a way forward as well.

One reason educational romanticism has had such a grip in American schooling is that it contains an element of truth. Indeed, student-centered, “you can do it” approaches have some value, and Augustine agrees. “Who is so stupidly curious,” he asks, “as to send his son to school in order that he may learn what the teacher thinks?”

Those who are called pupils consider within themselves whether what has been explained has been said truly… Thus they learn, and when the interior truth makes known to them that true things have been said, they applaud, but without knowing that instead of applauding teachers they are applauding learners.

The difference between Augustine and educational romanticism, however, is that the “inner oracle” for Augustine is not the latent power of the unaided student. Instead, this power comes from God: “He who is said to reside in the interior man is Christ, that is, the unchangeable excellence of God and His everlasting wisdom, which every rational soul does indeed consult.” While unquestionably Christian, Augustine’s view is not strictly sectarian—he refers to every rational soul. Augustine combines skepticism in the power of mere words with confidence in a power higher than any human teacher.

Nearly a millennium later, in a treatise also entitled De Magistro, Thomas Aquinas concretized Augustine’s teaching philosophy with two illustrations. First, Aquinas uses a horticultural analogy to caution against Augustine’s Platonism. “Knowledge does preexist in the student,” Aquinas admits, though “not completely but in a seminal state.” Aquinas broadens the role of a good teacher, who is actively to foster an environment where such “seeds” of knowledge can grow: “Now while it is true that no created power has implanted these knowledge ‘seeds’ in us, still the action of a created power [i.e., a teacher] can realize the potential of those seeds.”

Aquinas’ second analogy is a medical one. A physician, according to Aquinas, cannot heal the body. Instead, a physician creates the stimulants and conditions for the body’s healing itself. In the same way, the teacher cannot inspire, illuminate, or impart genuine knowledge—but diligent teachers can greatly improve the conditions for such illumination. For Aquinas, the teacher plays a somewhat larger role within Augustine’s nearly mystical view of student-centered learning.

But it is one thing to expound upon the mystery of learning, and another to discuss the practical conditions necessary for such learning to occur. It is here that ancient and contemporary educational practices may seem most disparate. In an essay titled “Alexandria: A School for Training in Virtue,” Robert Louis Wilken relates that the first-century teacher Apollonius of Tyana gave up on lecturing to large audiences, insisting, “No discourse can be really useful, unless it is delivered to a single individual.” Plutarch agreed, adding, “Admonitions to specific persons produce the most useful fruit.”

The Catechetical school of Alexandria, which drew on Apollonius and Plutarch, understood this well. Learning had to be intimate, because only in this way could a “character transplant” (so distasteful to Stanley Fish) occur. In The Tutor, for example, Clement of Alexandria argued that the role of the teacher was to better students’ souls, not just their minds. Intellectual training certainly followed, but the Alexandrians understood that if knowledge were not planted in the seedbed of wisdom, it would either never take root, or—far worse—grow into something dangerous. From Alexandria we learn that ethics was never a sub-discipline of the educational curriculum, but was, in a way, its entirety.

What’s more, the primary medium for such instruction was not a course, but friendship. Origen, Alexandria’s greatest teacher, understood friendship to be that “affable and affectionate disposition which is shown in the [teacher’s] words and his associations.” A chief metaphor used by Origen’s students to describe their teacher’s legendary effectiveness was the friendship of David and Jonathan described in the Bible. That very scene holds an honored place in the finest visual manifesto for liberal arts renewal that I am aware of—the window scheme of the Princeton University Chapel.

A nineteenth-century master of this pedagogical ideal of friendship was John Henry Newman, who lived it for two decades as a tutor at Oriel College, where the University of Oxford contracted to a human scale. Christopher Olaf Blum’s essay “Newman’s Collegiate Ideal” explains that Newman’s focus on friendship enabled the university to be “not a chance collection of individuals building their careers, but a kind of fellowship, even a friendship, whose characteristic activity was to ‘rejoice in the truth’ (gaudium de veritate).” Common meals were the soil where acquaintanceship grew into friendship, which Aristotle understood to be among the highest of life’s rewards. Genuine learning without the “pure and clear atmosphere of thought” fostered by true friendship was difficult to achieve. Like Origen, Newman understood that “personal influence… was the means of propagating the truth.”

In an age of unmanageable class sizes and overworked (and out of work) professors, advocating such an intimate scale of virtue-based learning may seem naive. Yet such ideals are probably closer to most of our own learning histories than we might think. If a given class distilled more than mere information, but instead shaped our lives and futures, some kind of friendship probably played a role. Wherever our own education occurred, or is occurring, transformative learning continues to happen as it always has—through communities of friendships upheld by some measure of mutual virtue. Even within oversized, impersonal institutions, such communities tend to arise spontaneously.

The bloated modern educational system may be due for collapse. But so far as I am aware, there is no university where the mystery of learning as described by Augustine and Aquinas has been successfully prohibited, or where the Alexandrian ideal of communities of virtue seeking truth through friendships has been effectively proscribed. Whether in the form of a well-managed classroom, a religious fellowship, an Honors College, or one of the university’s increasing numbers of satellite institutions, communities of renewal in higher education have either recovered these principles, or never lost them in the first place. We can wait for massive reform to fix our troubled universities, or we can continue practicing such ideals wherever we are today. That may be the only way to bring about any broader solution.


Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in art history at Princeton University. He blogs at millinerd.com.

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That evening, when my daughter was doing her homework, I looked at the permission slip again. Just to make sure that the program would be appropriate for my 9-year-old, I decided to investigate online the organization that was running it. I soon discovered that the college’s gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender student group co-teaches one of the programs for middle-school-aged children, and that this program also happened to be advertised on the site of a prominent national gay-rights activist group. I have nothing against organizations working with other groups in order to determine how they might best approach school problems like bullying. In fact, work needs to be done on many fronts to prevent school bullying, which can result in alienation, depression, or even suicide among our youth.

But this bullying awareness program claimed to do something else: to celebrate diversity. Upon further investigation, celebrating diversity turned out to be a celebration of moral relativism: the shallow and self-satisfied yet insidious and contradictory sort of relativism that, while paying homage to “liberty” (read: indeterminate self-fulfillment), and “equality” (read: the leveling of all differences and distinctions including natural ones), undermines and replaces religious and other traditional views of morality.

Instead of being taught the necessity of distinguishing between noble and base or right and wrong, our children are told at a tender age to be equally open to all ways of life on the grounds that all values are subjective. I wondered if the real intention of the classes on diversity for students my daughter’s age was to prevent in the future any principled opposition to homosexuality: the organization was attempting to get children, once cast out in the murky waters of relativism and left stranded without a moral or spiritual compass with which to orient themselves, to blindly accept homosexuality on equal footing with traditional sexuality. Being taught that all lifestyle choices are conventional and acceptable and based on an individual’s right to self-definition and self-expression would likely confuse my daughter, either sapping the strength from her own religious and moral convictions in the future or, even worse, preventing them from ever taking root.

I do not want my daughter to be exposed to a worldview that, with regard to moral truth and virtue, breeds indifference at best and contempt at worst. In fact, I would like to teach my daughter a very different lesson about bullying prevention, namely that the inviolable worth and dignity of all people is an objective moral principle, and this principle provides us with a basis for how we treat other people. And it is through moral conduct (e.g., just treatment of others and concern for the common good) that we express our good character and sound judgment and exercise those virtues that, at their peak, lead to honorable and noble achievements and human excellence.

So, with these concerns in mind, I told my daughter that she could not participate in the bullying awareness program. She said that she was very upset with me because she didn’t want to be the only student who was not allowed to attend the field trip. When she asked for an explanation, I discovered that I had no idea how to talk about these issues in a way that would be appropriate for a 9-year-old. Anxious to reassure her and explain things properly but, at the same time, fearing I would make matters worse, I told her how important it is for me to protect her and do the right thing, even if doing the right thing is sometimes very difficult. And I asked her to put her trust in me, even when I cannot always explain everything to her because it would be inappropriate to do so. As I was reconsidering this “explanation” and trying to anticipate her response, my daughter said that she wanted to tell me a story about her best friend, who is Muslim. I wasn’t sure if this story would have anything to do with what we had been discussing, but, for the time being, I was relieved to be off the hook.

My daughter said that last spring her best friend was not allowed to go on the class trip to the pool (a class trip of which my daughter was particularly fond) because she cannot wear anything that shows her bare legs. Apparently my daughter’s friend was a little upset when she witnessed the excitement and eager anticipation of all her classmates as they were being shuttled onto the bus that was departing to the community pool. Nevertheless, and much to my daughter’s surprise, her best friend compliantly, and only with a small sigh of resignation, accompanied her mother to the school parking lot and got in the car that was to take her home. Then my daughter asked me if her best friend obeyed her mother without any objections because she knew her mother was trying to protect her modesty.

I was a little surprised that my daughter used the word modesty in the context of how one dresses, for we had never talked about this at home. My daughter explained to me that her friend sometimes discusses with her the inappropriateness of dressing immodestly and chasing boys. (Now I knew why my daughter had previously asked me about the difference between playing tag with boys and chasing them because you “like” them.) But what surprised me the most was not that my daughter seemed to understand on some level my very inadequate explanation as to why she couldn’t attend the bullying awareness program, but that she took some comfort in knowing that she was not alone, that there was someone else’s mother in her school who also made unpopular moral decisions and a daughter who sometimes felt a little disappointed and embarrassed as a result of them. A little smile appeared on my daughter’s face when I pointed out that this friend of hers would probably not attend the field trip either. My hope—and perhaps it is an unrealistic one—is that the friendship between the two girls will help my daughter gain a bit of confidence when her own beliefs are put to the test (as they inevitably will be in the near future) by a set of very different beliefs held by the majority of other children with whom she goes to school.

The next day when I considered talking about the issue with the mothers to whom I usually talk on the school playground during pick-up time, I felt oddly uneasy and hesitant, and after glancing in their direction indecisively, I quickly turned away and stood by myself for a few minutes. I felt a little out of place, and doubted if any of them would think the same way I did about the bullying awareness program, and so I decided this time to keep my opinions to myself.

Then I looked across the school playground and saw a Muslim mother, the mother of my daughter’s best friend, holding her headscarf in place with her hands as the wind blew about restlessly. I caught her eye for a moment and we smiled at each other. Before this moment, I had never thought that my situation in any shape or form was similar to that of a Muslim mother. And I had never thought seriously about talking to a Muslim mother about issues of faith or raising children in our community. But now I was beginning to reconsider. Perhaps our Muslim fellow citizens, especially those who are spiritually and intellectually confident in their ways of life, can challenge and inspire us to reflect more deeply on our own faith and morality, and perhaps in the process we might discover that we share some of the same moral principles and hopes and dreams for our children.

We always hear so much about the things that separate Muslims from Christians (and no doubt there are things that do separate us), and often these differences are expressed in negative and prejudiced ways. I wonder if our misunderstandings and misconceptions prevent some of us from trusting and forming spiritual bonds and friendships with those who are confronting some of the very same challenges that we confront. I live in a community where many of my moral views about sexuality, marriage, and the family are in the minority. Sometimes they are challenged (respectfully and disrespectfully), and every now and again someone agrees with them, but often they are simply dismissed. Like my daughter, I’m comforted to know that there is someone else with whom I share similar experiences (and perhaps a moral view or two).

In that moment we only shared a smile, but perhaps sometime soon I might try to strike up a friendship with her. Perhaps our very ordinary personal experiences have something to say about human connectedness, our attachments and loyalties, memories and traditions, and may help us to think about a truer, better, and more fundamental vision of diversity, one based not on individualistic or egalitarian expressions of relativism or an all-consuming tribal identity, but on a willingness to share with another those meaningful things that bring us together and permit us to enter into each other’s lives. Recognition of universal moral truths combined with a human desire to seek the good may be the best way to confront our prejudices. And our distinct individuality—religious plurality along with our competing and complementary traditions—may prove to be the best way to begin to understand our common humanity. Perhaps the tensions between unity and particularity, love of the good and love of our own, openness to transcendence and a connection to others, are integrated components of our human nature and are indicative of our fragilities but also our great possibilities.


Anonymous is a mother of four children. She holds a Ph.D. in Classics.

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One problem with the rapidly expanding crisis-in-the-humanities book genre is that few discussing academic reform seem willing to examine thoroughly the ideals that generated Western universities in the first place. One exception I have pointed to before is Stratford Caldecott’s Beauty for Truth’s Sake. For the most part, though, books and articles discussing what has gone wrong in the American universities appear to have done little to seriously investigate the ancient and medieval origins of universities themselves.

Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas distinguishes itself by providing at least some historical background, reaching back to the 19th century to discuss Charles Eliot’s influential presidency at Harvard. Menand points with approval to Eliot’s defense of the liberal arts as distinct from professional or vocational instruction (while strangely failing to mention Eliot’s widely publicized debates with Princeton’s more religiously minded Presbyterian president, James McCosh). The essence of the liberal arts, according to Eliot, was “the enthusiastic study of subjects for the love of them without any ulterior objects.”  He was but regurgitating the most elementary principles of a great and deep tradition, one that—it seems—is lately out of sight and mind.

In Book VII of The Republic, Socrates defended knowledge as sought after “with a view to the beautiful and good,” contrasting someone who deals with numbers for the sake of buying and selling with one who contemplates the mystery of numbers themselves. Aristotle perpetuated this liberal tradition (as opposed to servile tradition), defining ‘liberal’ as “that which tends to enjoyment… where nothing accrues of consequence beyond the using.” Education’s end, for Aristotle, was the pleasure of knowing itself. Cicero agreed, adding that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake was “a condition of our happiness.” Such truth, he suggested, is the first thing pursued “as soon as we escape from the pressure of necessary cares.”  This enterprise, as systematized by Marcus Varro and fortified by Augustine and Boethius, generated Western civilization’s curricular DNA, which we know as the liberal arts. Probably the best modern articulation of this tradition came with John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, which—I am sorry to report—seems to have made no appearance at all in our current harping about the humanities. Newman, without requiring religious commitment, articulated the Socratic inheritance exquisitely:

Truth has two attributes—beauty and power; while Useful Knowledge is the possession of truth as powerful, Liberal Knowledge is the apprehension of it as beautiful… That alone is liberal knowledge, which stands on its own pretension, which is independent of sequel, expects no complement, refuses to be informed (as it is called) by any end, or absorbed into any art, in order duly to present itself to our contemplation.

If Newman is right, then to justify the liberal arts, which would now include what we call the humanities, as instrumentally useful, is also to betray them (a fact that several perceptive bloggers have pointed out).

Should this principle—knowledge for its own sake—be understood, the amount of time it takes to obtain a degree in the humanities comes into focus. Menand complains, “You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years.” But it is here that the medieval perspective illuminates, making nearly a decade of study seem not ridiculous, but just about right. Culled from Marcia L. Colish’s essay, Teaching and Learning in Medieval Paris, here is what it took to get a degree at that institution which Newman called “the glory of the middle ages,” the University of Paris:

The theologian’s training… involved a two-part course following the arts degree, lasting at least eight years and deferring his theological license to his thirty-fifth year at the earliest—an education more grueling and protracted than that of any other learned professional. First came four years of [extremely rigorous] Bible study… On completion of his biblical course, the young theologian taught Scripture for two years, alternating lectures on Old Testament and New Testament books… Next came a two-year course in systematic theology based on the Sentences of Peter Lombard… After his course on the Sentences, the candidate taught them for two years… Then came three or four more years as a regular participant in theological disputation and preaching, his final oral examination, the award of doctorate, and his admission to the theological faculty as a licensed master.

Menand points out that ABD (all-but-dissertation) teaching in American universities today is a co-dependent, potentially exploitative arrangement that benefits both the University, because graduate students come cheaply, and graduate students, because there are not many jobs. But according to Colish, the twelfth century was not so different. Learning and teaching mixed then as they do today, if for no other reason than that the two skills are closely related partners in the enterprise of contemplation. So what’s the rush? If—as the Parisians once believed—examining the created order (to say nothing of its Creator) is a necessarily ennobling venture worth pursuing for its own sake, then the enterprise demands time. To be sure, a stipend-dispensing University need not formally sponsor all such contemplative activity, and Menand’s call for shortening our contemporary degree-granting process is worth consideration. But perhaps more worth considering is this: Extended study of the humanities may not work within the anti-metaphysical framework that has been advanced in select quarters of academia for the last several decades. If the music of the spheres is not music, but unending dissonance, then even the British-style three-year PhD is far too long. That deadening message can be transmitted in one unpleasant sitting.

In regard to the pressing issue of employment, Marcia Colish’s medieval comparanda are illuminating as well. Having obtained his license, the University of Paris’s new doctor “proceeded to deliver an inaugural lecture, and taught for at least two years at that level. Whether or not he acquired a coveted chair, he often moved on with startling rapidity to ecclesiastical preferment or administrative work in a religious order; theologians rarely grew old in the schools.” Turns out that in twelfth-century Paris, it was hard to find that tenure-track job as well.

Part of the reason for the academy’s present acridity is that many have treated doctoral programs as glorified vocational institutes—getting the degree to get the job. When the job becomes unavailable, the degree, and the years spent acquiring it, become retroactively pointless. To be sure, many who complain about academia are fully justified. They’ve been given a raw deal. Talent does not always rise to the top. The latest fusion of fashion and mediocrity gets tenure, while superior minds get shattering disappointment. That said, anyone who enters this line of work unaware of the employment odds was probably not among such superior minds. Most importantly, it is worth considering that—if Plato’s intimations were sound—then time spent in the self-justifying humanities is time well spent, whether or not it results in certain and sustained employment.

There is good reason that it’s hard to find a job teaching at the university level, both in the Middle Ages and today: such jobs are (or at least should be) enjoyable. Aristotle believed that the exercise of the mind, enhanced by the friendship of colleagues, is the essence of human flourishing. Universities—while frequently failing to realize this ideal—allow for its possibility like no place else. When such conditions are enhanced by subjects as inherently worthwhile as the humanities, life begins to look pretty good. An apocryphal tale has it that when Harvard hired its first lecturer in the fine arts, Charles Norton, the nature of his subject matter permitted his employer to ask, “And will you be needing a salary?” This is not, of course, to suggest that researching and teaching the humanities do not require work—they require a backbreaking amount. But it is worth remembering that many have found such work so inherently worthwhile, so endlessly rewarding, that they have happily done it for free.

Ultimately, the apparent crisis in the humanities may be a metaphysical one, unwilling as many of us are to make the bargain that being itself, or as we might say more clumsily, “the universe,” is both beautiful and good, and thereby worth contemplating for its own sake. But should we take the gamble, the humanities (not to mention the sciences) will flourish, and will continue to be understood as their own reward. At the end of the day, even if one doesn’t believe that the end of the humanities is non-instrumental enjoyment, it is worth riffing off Pascal’s wager to at least pretend that it is. Enjoying one’s subject matter, after all, might help in getting a job.


Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in art history at Princeton University. He discussed similar matters in “The State of Higher Desperation” and responded to embittered academic xtranormal videos here. He blogs at millinerd.com.

Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

It all began at the annual Fall Convocation of faculty and staff at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU). When President Doug Whitlock announced that he would be instituting a domestic partner benefit in January 2011, most of my colleagues applauded. I, however, believed it was a step that ultimately would provide justification for the state supreme court to overturn traditional marriage in Kentucky. If a same-sex couple, the argument will go, can enjoy most of the benefits of marriage in state-sponsored settings such as EKU, on what grounds can we deny them the full status of marriage?

President Whitlock was happy to talk to me about my concerns but he wasn’t willing to change his mind about the policy. When the campus paper, the Eastern Progress, endorsed the new policy in a glowing editorial, my friends and I thought it was time to act. If traditional heterosexual marriage was really threatened by the domestic partnership policy, someone had to do something. As a junior professor I’d kept a low profile, but I had tenure now. Was I the one who should challenge the policy? After some soul searching I decided to send the following letter to the Progress:

I am concerned about the sponsored dependent (domestic partnership) benefit that will be offered to EKU employees in January for three reasons:

1)      It undermines marriage. The policy endorses the practice of unmarried couples living together and confers marriage-like benefits to them. It says to EKU, to Madison County, and to Kentucky that sexual relationships outside of marriage are not only legitimate but important enough to necessitate university sponsorship.

2)      The policy conflicts with the Kentucky Constitution, which says, “A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized.” The “sponsored dependent” envisioned by the policy is “an adult that shares primary residence with the covered EKU employee” who is not a relative and who must sign an “Affidavit of Sponsored Dependent Relationship.” Those qualifications are clearly the creation of a legal status substantially similar to that of marriage. If such is not the case, why can’t the sponsored dependent be a relative or a child?

3)      The policy adds significant financial liabilities to EKU at a time when state budgets are being slashed and offices are being closed. Proponents of this policy point out that sponsored dependents must pay the full price for health insurance, but the policy encompasses far more than insurance. It confers rights to the faculty/staff tuition scholarship (currently worth $3,312 per semester), sick leave, and bereavement leave, in addition to several other benefits. Do we really want to tell our generous friends in the legislature (who have saved higher education from the massive cuts experienced by other parts of the state government) that EKU is so flush with funds that it can create a new and open-ended benefit?

When I saw the letter in print, I felt mostly relief. It felt good to get the socially conservative views that I’d been hiding for years out into the open. The next issue of the Progress, though, gave me pause. Professors, staff members, and students replied to my letter with surprise, shock, and anger. Dozens of professors took out a full page ad to express support for President Whitlock and his new policy. I don’t know if anyone wrote in to support my ideas but certainly nothing of the sort was published in that issue. Although I have some good friends among the faculty who supported what I wrote, I still battled a sense of being exposed and unprotected.

Soon, though, I accepted my new role. I had started a conversation on campus, and I needed to stick with it. The discussion of marriage and sexuality has continued in almost every issue of the campus paper but it also now occurs in campus coffee shops and professors’ offices. I’ve met professors and students who agree with me and I’ve met those who don’t. I’m in the middle of negotiating with the Philosophy Department and proponents of gay marriage about holding a series of public debates on gay marriage and related issues. The discussion mentioned at the beginning of this article came about when an EKU librarian responded to one of my letters in the Progress by asking me to bring the ongoing debate into the weekly discussion series that he runs in the university library. It is safe to say that the definition of marriage has become an issue on campus and that it will continue to be one for some time. Although still uncomfortable with my new role at the forefront of a controversial issue, I’m willing to continue because I believe that traditional marriage is the foundation of a healthy society. What we decide about marriage, even here at EKU, actually matters.

In the midst of all this, while reading George Weigel’s The End and the Beginning, the second volume of his biography of Pope John Paul II, it occurred to me that John Paul might have something valuable to teach me. His predecessors, Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, treated the Soviet bloc as a permanent fixture in modern Europe. Their so-called “Ostpolitik” sought to preserve what could be preserved of Catholic life behind the Iron Curtain by avoiding confrontation and cooperating as much as possible with the demands of Communist governments in Eastern Europe. This was a modus non moriendi, a way of not dying, not a way of fomenting Christian growth and expansion. Despite the pleas of many bishops behind the Iron Curtain to adopt a stronger stance and despite the Paul VI’s own anguish about Communist perfidy, the policy lasted through the 1960s and 1970s. Pope John Paul II, of course, ended the policy and began a vigorous spiritual campaign against the Communist domination of his homeland, Poland, and the other eastern European countries. The rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland and the eventual fall of Soviet communism owe much to the more confrontational approach of John Paul. “How many divisions does the pope have?” Josef Stalin had once asked. The Polish pope demonstrated that he didn’t need armies, that personal example, words of truth, and the creation of a culture of life were more important than guns and tanks. John Paul’s example and my own experiences at EKU have convinced me that it is time to end Ostpolitik on campus.

For at least two generations, Catholics, Orthodox, Evangelicals, and other religious conservatives have sought to “get along” with the prevailing American campus culture of relativism and moral license. We have dedicated ourselves to academic excellence, to fair and balanced teaching, and to keeping a low profile. We have kept quiet in department meetings, in the faculty senate, and on university committees. We have bitten our tongues when colleagues disparaged our religion, our morality, and our most cherished beliefs. We have convinced our colleagues that religious conservatives can be surprisingly thoughtful and urbane.

In the end, what have such actions won for us? Many of us have produced solid scholarship and positive teaching evaluations. We’ve been awarded tenure and even prizes. We have the respect of our colleagues and our administrations. Ostpolitik on campus has allowed religious conservatives to live normal lives, to teach our courses with a degree of independence, and to pursue the research agendas of our choice. Our jobs are secure and our careers give every sign of continuing success.

We have watched, though, as our campuses veered farther and farther off course. Sexual license is now taken for granted. Mentions of abortion, homosexuality, and even bestiality hardly merit a second glance in our campus papers. Many students have never heard a rational conservative argument about any moral issue. Our colleagues now scoff even at the idea of truth, as if it were some quaint notion from the Middle Ages. Discipline after discipline has lost its mooring and drifted into irrelevance or outright idiocy.

Perhaps all this might be justified if students were somehow benefitting from this atmosphere of license and relativism. The opposite is the case. Most students, even at the best universities, have no passion, no love of learning. Focused on careers, at best, or, more often, on nothing at all, they approach texts that have changed the world as if they were being forced to read the dictionary. Faced with the results of painstaking research, they yawn and check their phones. They do less homework than American students have ever done before because professors have relaxed their requirements. The result is that, amazingly enough, students are bored in their modern Sodom.

What is to be done?

Step one is to end Ostpolitik on campus. Holding our tongues might have allowed us to advance professionally but it has contributed to the near death of the American campus. Yes, progressives bear much of the blame for the stultifying sameness of contemporary academia, but we let them do what they wanted. It’s time to speak up. It is time to make a public case for truth, for human dignity, for academic standards, and for the joy of learning. I guarantee that students will not be bored when they see us defending the truth. (I should point out that speaking up is not a synonym for being rude.)

We need to go into this process knowing that the risks are real. We probably will be condemned by our colleagues, our students, and our administrations. I doubt that I’ll ever get used to hearing the kind of words I related at the beginning of this article or to reading that much of the Psychology Department believes that my ideas reflect the kind of obscurantism that one might find in theocratic Iran. Still, this experience of being criticized publicly is not as negative an experience as some might believe because it is balanced by the support one receives from those who were waiting for someone to speak up. In fact, it is through bold public discourse that we can best find our friends and allies.

Much more seriously, we risk our jobs. There’s not much that can be said to minimize this threat, but I can propose that if universities make it a common practice to fire their vocally conservative professors, it will publicize our arguments more than anything we could do on our own.

Step two is ecumenism. There are, of course, very real theological differences between, for instance, Catholics and Evangelicals. But there are large areas of agreement, such as marriage, abortion, the dignity of the human person, and the existence of truth, where we can cooperate. In this time of crisis we can put aside our disagreements to fight for the common good. The principles outlined in the Manhattan Declaration—life, marriage, and religious liberty—offer a strong basis for such ecumenical work.

Third, we need to dialogue with those most opposed to our ideas. Some professors and students will respond to our more visible presence on campus with anger and ridicule, but some will want to understand us. With this latter group we must make every effort to communicate clearly and to forge relationships of trust and respect. Most of our partners in dialogue, of course, will not change their minds. Many, however, will come to see that our views have a certain logic that they can respect. The discussion that I led in the EKU library had its dramatic moments, but I am looking forward to more such events for two reasons: first, it personalized “the other side” and made me see them more clearly as men and women struggling to find the truth; second, as weak as the truth may seem, it is inherently appealing. Being able to speak the truth, especially in an intimate setting, is worth our time and effort.

Fourth and finally, live in hope. Soviet Communism had the KGB, the Red Army, millions of party members, and a system of gulags to enforce its nefarious designs, yet it utterly dissolved during the course of a few years. Do not assume that the regime now dominating our campuses is any more substantial, any more permanent than the Soviet regime. Structures built on faulty foundations may look solid but are inherently unstable. The contemporary university, resting on relativism, multiculturalism, and rationalism, does not have a coherent account of its purpose because its most cherished notions are mutually contradictory. Despite the fears of many conservatives that it is unredeemable, the university is in fact ripe for criticism and reform. Ostpolitik, however, will not get us very far.


Todd Hartch is Associate Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The buildings that go up in our neighborhood matter to us in just the way that our neighbors matter. They demand our attention, and shape our lives. They can overwhelm us or soothe us; they can be an alien presence or a home … Buildings need to fit in, to stand appropriately side by side; they are subject to the rule of good manners just as much as people are.

Elsewhere, Scruton emphasizes the importance of good manners—whether in decorum or construction—to our common life:

In America’s culture manners are of supreme importance, and recognized as the ultimate guarantee of peaceful coexistence … so that people will fit in, not stand out … to ensure that each person is secure within his space, and that the public realm is minimally threatening.

Edward Shils, in The Virtue of Civility, agrees that good manners “are like uniforms and discipline which hide slovenliness, poor taste and unpleasing eccentricity,” in order to “restrict offensiveness” and allow us to dwell alongside others in courtesy and peace.

Just as the pleasant neighborhood emerges from a diverse set of buildings all striving to “fit in” with their neighbors without losing their own particular status, so too manners in ordinary human conduct recognize, preserve, and quietly insist upon what Marion Montgomery termed “the very graciousness of being,” a tacit acknowledgement of the value of the other. The tradition of civility checks our tendency to put ourselves forward at the expense of comity.

Civility in the political sense allows diverse individuals and groups, even when partisan, to pursue the good of all. So important is civility, the moderating of particular interests for the common interest, that “it comprises a pattern and standard of judgment without which the institutions of civil society cannot flourish.” Thus, while civility is not reducible to liberal democracy, civility is a necessary condition of its success, for civility accepts the plurality and irreducibility of human goods without thereby resigning political life to disordered relativism. If we are to be free, then we must accept that the good can be pursued in many ways; if we are to be free and ordered, then we must not accept any and every judgment but rather those proportionate to human flourishing. Civility, then, allows political neighborliness of those not so illiberal as to turn their backs on the common good.

Here I’d suggest that the two forms of civility highlighted by Shils—good manners and civil society—indicate an underlying third sense without which neither good manners nor civil society could be ultimately reasonable, namely, respect for the dignity of others, for their “very graciousness of being.”

The tradition of good manners recognizes, preserves, and insists upon the graciousness of being and dignity of each individual. Good manners recognize that as ends in themselves persons ought to be afforded courtesy. Neither courtesy nor civil society creates this worth but rather they recognize the pre-existing value of personhood, recognized because it is true.

Civility in this third sense means due respect—piety, even—toward citizens of the cosmos, or, as we usually refer to them, persons. Civility is rightly due to persons because they are goods in themselves, and so not merely factical givens but rather more like gifts. To encounter another person is something like receiving a gift, for in such an encounter a good in itself is gratuitously offered for our consideration—the very graciousness of being—and in the face of that gift we owe courtesy and civil society.

The campus architecture of Randolph College and the many colleges like it is a reminder of the role universities played in promoting civility. Today, though, the university has moved away from the idea that each human is a person with dignity that demands respect. In a 2007 commencement address at Bellarmine University, Wendell Berry explained his resistance to exclusively utilitarian education, arguing that the “American civilization so ardently promoted by these institutions is … a civilization entirely determined by technology, and not encumbered by any thought of what is good or worthy or neighborly or humane.” A university fails its purpose when in unchecked enthusiasm for technological progress it overlooks “preparing their students for responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity,” and so become “unabashedly utilitarian.” The sort of technological civilization sponsored by the new university is, Berry thinks, fundamentally hostile to civility in all its forms.

The main reason for this, I suggest, is that the utilitarian education of the new university views the cosmos (and its citizens) as brute, factical, as merely given—what Charles Taylor calls the “great disembedding.” The cosmos is mere stuff—indifferent and valueless until it is found useful and assigned a task. Lacking a sense of the gratuity of being, such education lacks also commitment to the worth of being; lacking a sense of the worth of being, such education lacks also commitment to acting only in conformity with the dignity of things; lacking a sense of the dignity of things, such education lacks also commitment to civility and the teaching thereof. If all that is has value only in its use, then nothing is owed any proper respect, let alone the rather quaint respect of modest civility and neighborliness.

It would be thought slightly quaint to suggest that universities exist to form scholars who are also good citizens, and perhaps ludicrous or offensive to add that they should form gentlemen at the same time. This reaction has some justification. Certainly some of the past formation of ladies and gentlemen was genteel and exclusive nonsense. Still, the new university seems to lack civility. Perhaps most glaringly obvious in the sexual norms on campus, incivility extends also to architecture, faculty culture, the lack of genuine intellectual and political diversity, the corporatization of the college (including naming rights for buildings and athletic facilities), cheating as common and accepted, politicization of the curriculum, grade inflation, careerism, and sadly the list goes on. Some of these phenomena reveal a failure of civility in the first sense, the lack of courtesy, while others link more closely to incivility in the second sense, an illiberality in the pursuit of the common good, but all these forms of incivility have at root incivility in the third sense, the stripping away of the very graciousness of being. For without confidence in the worth of things, very little mandates we act in modesty and grace in the face of that worth.

Soon the summer quiet of Randolph College, as of so many other colleges, will return to the bustle and activity of study. Many students will labor under the arches, columns, and balustrades of grace’s legacy: have they been taught the courtesy of offering thanks?


R. J. Snell is an associate professor of philosophy and director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

In “What Will Replace Behemoth State University?“ (March 2, 2010) Robert Koons points out many of the flaws and dangers of gigantism in university culture and mission.  While he leaps to blame modernism and humanitarianism for these excesses, Koons remains absolutely silent about the capitalistic and corporatist imperatives which have been driving universities and American culture during the same period that has seen gigantism arise. The concomitant rise of gigantism in business is surely worth a mention, no?

For the sake of argument, let us stipulate that Koons’ “charter colleges” can provide a cure for this admittedly sorry state. But how could this ever work? All Koons needs to do is look at how our bottom-line, free-market economic planners have created conditions in which virtually every mom-and-pop grocery store and independent coffee and book shop has been swallowed up. If the cultural loss of independent initiative, creativity, and autonomy are worth worrying about, then Koons needs to direct his gaze way past the university gates.

Near the end of his piece, Koons writes that “the reconstitution of civilization will begin with Burke’s small platoons growing organically into the space left by an increasingly sterile modernity.” Whether one is talking about universities or book stores, television networks or furniture factories, one cannot simply plead for the recapturing of open space—as if all we needed to do was change people’s hearts. That space is largely unavailable because it has been sold and Koons must acknowledge who has bought it all up. (Hint: look at who advertises during Texas Longhorns’ football broadcasts.)

Surely, Koons is partly correct to lay some blame at the feet of secular scientific culture and universities for abandoning the sentimental (for some) vision of the monastic mission to discover one telos. (The notion that the universe should be taught teleologically is debatable, but let us set that aside for now.) But one need not listen to liberals to discover where else the blame must be placed. Just listen to what religious leaders like Pope John Paul II have pointed out: namely, that the assault on a vision of the world as value-laden comes just as powerfully from consumer capitalism as from secular humanism and science.

By ignoring this economic engine that drives all of us, every day, Koons winds up implicating himself in the culture-wide myopia he lambastes for ignoring values. That world has been created by an overestimation of the guidance scientific and bureaucratic technologies could provide, but the motive for that overestimation is surely, largely, driven by profit. Such myopia does not refute Koons’ more cogent points, but rather indicates fertile regions to which his critical logic must be extended.

-David Hildebrand, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado Denver.


Thanks to Professor Hildebrand for his thoughtful letter. He raises an important and difficult question: to what extent has the evolution of America’s political economy in the last 150 years, especially the rise of the corporation, contributed to the demise of classical learning? I am no fan of gigantism and bureaucracy in the private sphere, and I share Hildebrand’s concerns about the separation of ownership and management (identified so presciently by James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution). However, I find it hard to see a direct causal link between the rise of corporations and the fall of the liberal arts in the university. I’ll accept that the turn to mass production in industry and mass education in the university reflect a common, Baconian elevation of quantity over quality and of calculation over wisdom, but this involves attributing each to a common cause. It’s also true that corporations, along with federal and state governments, subsidize both scientific research and vocational training within the university. However, there is no necessary link between the rise of research and vocationalism, on the one hand, and the decline of liberal education, on the other. The humanities are not dying because the business schools are flourishing: the demise of the humanities is self-inflicted.

In any case, the last thirty years have brought significant change to the world of industry, with the revival of entrepreneurship and the flattening of managerial hierarchies. The internal structure of the research university is increasingly a relic of a bygone era of mass production and central control.

The pursuit of profits is in itself an innocent and even wholesome activity, one as old as civilization itself. Of course, the temptation to avarice is equally ancient and certain always to be with us. From the perspective of political economy, what matters are the answers to these questions: how is the pursuit of the accumulation of wealth organized, and to what end? It is to answering questions such as these that the classical tradition awakens the mind. I don’t believe that the revival of higher learning must wait until after some sweeping revolution has freed us from the moral dangers of our time. Although the siren song of obsessive consumerism is indeed seductive, it can be overcome by the exercise of practical wisdom (as Odysseus demonstrates).

-Robert C. Koons, professor of philosophy and founding director of the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the University of Texas-Austin.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

On the surface, the Behemoth State Universities appear to be a smashing success, realizing all of the ardent hopes of the egalitarian architects of the G. I. Bill of the 1940’s and the scientific boosters of the Sputnik era. Millions of Americans have dutifully jumped through the hoops and claimed their credentials. Promoters of the system are quick to point out that college graduates earn an additional 60% in income, amounting to a college-education premium of over $1 million on average during the course of a lifetime. However, skeptics have a ready and cogent response: that such an argument is guilty of a crude post hoc fallacy, confusing causation and correlation in a way that would earn no more than an A- in even the most grade-inflated college statistics course. College graduates earn more than those who have not graduated primarily because bright, literate people are more likely to succeed both in college and in life. There is virtually no evidence that success in college yields tangible benefits later in life, in contrast to the very tangible debt typically acquired.

But what about intangible benefits? Virtue? Character? A coherent and serene philosophy of life? I can still remember the day when deans and presidents at least gave lip service to such ideals (as La Rochefoucauld put it, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue). Nowadays, such pretense would provoke nothing but cynical chortles.

What about the benefits of university research? Mark Bauerlein has ably documented the fact that the deluge of literature and language research monographs is now far beyond the saturation point, with output up 26% over the last six years and average sales of each monograph dropping from 2500 to 700 or 800. To paraphrase Churchill, never before in history have so many written so much to be read by so few. Even in the hard sciences there is reason to be skeptical. Many in industry report that university-sponsored research is no longer useful. This is to be expected, since university research is funded by log-rolling peer review within communities of specialists, many of whom have a vested interest in perpetuating research programs that have long since exhausted their potential. Add to this the ideological pressure to reach politically correct results, as has come to light in the Climategate scandal. And perhaps it is worth noting that the state of Texas is flourishing economically with only three top-level “Research I” universities, while California, with nine, languishes on the brink of bankruptcy.

America’s higher-education system perpetuates itself in a tightly circumscribed feedback loop: a university education is popular because universities are selective; universities are selective because admissions are competitive; and admissions are competitive because a university education is popular. Instead of making university education more affordable, huge federal and state subsidies drive the spiral of costs higher, resulting in runaway tuition inflation, which persists even in the midst of a deep recession. At some point in the near future, the prohibitively high costs will unwind the positive feedback loop into a vicious, downward spiral as thousands of the best students join the ranks of the university refuseniks, depriving admission to university of its selective cachet.

What has brought us to this point? Russell Kirk blamed the influx of federal funds, beginning with the G. I. Bill, for creating overgrown institutions that lost the quasi-monastic communities and academic traditions of America’s small liberal arts colleges. However, this influx of aid could not be the sufficient cause, since it might instead have led to the proliferation of small colleges dedicated to classical learning. The windfall of government aid wouldn’t have ruined the system had it been intellectually sound. However, the colleges and universities in America in the post-war era were already under the influence of forces deeply antithetical to the classical and Judeo-Christian heritage: Baconian scientism and Rousseauite sentimentalism, as was brilliantly outlined by Harvard’s Irving Babbitt in his 1908 jeremiad, Literature and the American College.

As Babbitt observed, the superficial tensions between the “two cultures” of scientific pragmatism and romantic individualism merely disguise their more fundamental affinities. Both are united in their rejection of the teleologically ordered cosmos of the classical tradition, with its finite and universal goal of happiness-through-self-restraint (eudaimonia). In its place, the moderns substitute the unbounded pursuit of infinite progress, both through the attainment of ever-greater technical power over nature (including human nature) and through the ever-novel exercise of the idyllic imagination and the ever-freer indulgence of spontaneous whim. These aspirations expressed themselves in the new college curriculum of the twentieth century, which substituted a smorgasbord of electives for a common and coherent course of studies, and replaced the scholar’s reflection and synoptic vision with the fragmentation and hyper-specialization of the professional researcher.

The examination of the new college curriculum brings to light the underlying commonality between scientistic and sentimental humanitarianism. In practice, both advance a course of study that privileges the quantity of information absorbed over any selection based on quality. Both conceive of the college as an engine of social progress, ignoring the vitally important task of the “assimilation and perpetuation of culture,” in Babbitt’s words. Both deny the existence of a natural end or telos of man, the conception of a finite, bounded and balanced fulfillment of human nature, rationally intelligible and fixed. Both reduce the scope of knowledge to what can be secured by the methods of physical science, with the capacity to control and manipulate as its acid test. Both hold the wisdom of the past in contempt, replacing piety toward our forebears with a chronological narcissism and a naïve faith in the fusion of scientific technique with the sentiment of humanity.

Technological advances, ironically enabled by the modern research university, may make its eventual displacement possible. The great texts that make up the ancient canon and well crafted lectures and introductions to those texts are now freely available on-line as an academic open source (Babbit’s book, available on Google Books, is just one example). Social media and teleconferencing make possible the spontaneous formation of international communities of scholarly amateurs (in the original sense of the word), in and through which the heritage of the West can still find its outlet. All that is needed is for scholars committed to the true republic of letters to join together to provide some formal quality control to the process. This model would provide students from modest backgrounds who aspire to a classical education a low-cost credential by examination (modeled on the final examination schools of Oxford and Cambridge), as an alternative to the residential four-year college.

Existing colleges and universities will no doubt survive in some form, but in order to best meet the needs of the present and the future they will need to outsource their vocational training efforts to community colleges and distance learning and decentralize control over the traditional arts curriculum. The large-scale bureaucracy should concentrate on what it does best (ancillary student services, property maintenance) and leave education to small and innovative “charter colleges,” freed from the control of the politically correct bureaucrats and the tyranny of the faculty majority. This reform would empower small cadres of teachers to revive the classical curriculum and the close-knit communities of our ancient and native liberal-arts tradition.

The task of the classical educator in today’s world is not to tame the verdant wilderness but rather, in C. S. Lewis’s words, “to irrigate the deserts.” The corporate and financial crises of the past decade, and the looming political crisis of today, have revived in the public’s mind the ancient truth that character matters. A successful revival of the classical tradition can only take place when the connection between liberal learning and virtue can also be brought back into view. Such a revival of the tradition is possible: in fact, America has been the locus of several such revivals in the past. The reconstitution of civilization will begin with Burke’s small platoons growing organically into the space left by an increasingly sterile modernity. There is no substitute for patient, persistent toil, sustained by fellowship and by hope.


Robert C. Koons is a professor of philosophy and founding director of the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the University of Texas-Austin. He is a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute and sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

West and Fineman are guilty of some overly broad generalizations about the inadequacies of home-schooling, and sloppy inferences from what can happen to what should. There is little evidence that home-schooled children are subjected to widespread abuse or neglect, and some evidence that home-schooled children perform as well or better than publicly educated children by a number of measures of assessment. Yet, on the grounds that abuse can happen and occasionally does in the homeschooling environment, Fineman, for example, draws the astonishingly strong conclusion that “public schooling should be universal and mandatory.”

This conclusion rests on the faulty assumption—widely shared amongst liberal theorists of education—that the state is in some way a privileged player in the question of children’s education. According to this view, the state should educate children, and others who claim a right to do so should be subject to special scrutiny or meet a special burden of proof.

One can see how such an assumption might make sense. If children are to be primarily educated into citizenship, then it might seem entirely natural for the state to have the primary responsibility for doing so. And if children are primarily to be educated for autonomy, then removing children from the religiously, morally, and culturally homogeneous environment of the home might be essential. Finally, if children are to be educated with a view to their best interests, and those interests are understood as in tension with the interests of their parents, then again, the state will seem to be the default educator of children.

But are these the ends of children’s education? And should state schooling be the default position against which others are judged? The two questions are, as we have just seen, linked, and they must be addressed together.

Moreover, these questions need to be addressed against the background of what we might call the ontology of children and the family. Is the family a mere aggregate of individuals—spouses, and children—held together, perhaps by common or overlapping interests, but ultimately independent, in their interests and their being, from one another? Such a picture seems implicated by those who pit children’s interests against the interests of their parents; but it can also seem lurking in the naked assertion of “parents’ rights” as a conclusive justification for the right to homeschool.

A more adequate picture emerges from a more accurate account of marriage as a comprehensive sharing of lives that extends not just through those immaterial aspects of the spouses’ lives, such as intellect, will, character, and emotion, but penetrates down to the bodily being of the spouses in the act of sexual intercourse. That act of intercourse is, by its nature, ordered to the biological function of reproduction. Thus, children who are born of marriage so understood are the fruit of that parental union, and so themselves in a strong sense new parts of that union. The unity and multiplicity that characterizes the lives of spouses who have become one flesh is thus extended to include the lives of children born (or, I believe, adopted) of that union.

On this latter view, children are not property of their parents, for the family is a society of mutual service, and is not for the good of parents alone. But neither are children independent agents, existing only in association with their parents but ontologically apart. The good of the children is now a part of the good of their parents as parents. Thus parental care of children, before they have fully separated from their parents, is continuous with parents’ care for themselves, and their concern for the common good within the family is, as Germain Grisez puts it, a concern for “the child’s good considered insofar as it also perfects the parent precisely as parent.”

This indicates a key reason why objections to homeschooling cannot be met with a straightforward assertion of “parents’ rights,” anymore than the rejection of homeschooling can be predicated on a bald assertion of “children’s rights.” Both assertions, unless significantly qualified, adhere to the mistaken aggregate view of the family discussed above.

How, then, should the child’s good, which also is the perfection of their parents, be understood?

Children’s education is primarily about their fulfillment, but that fulfillment is and can only be rooted in an orientation towards a life of service to genuine human goods, including the goods of others and service to God. The particular form of life within which each child is called to perform these services is the child’s vocation; the task of education—its primary end—is to enable children to recognize, accept, and pursue that vocation.

This task cannot be accomplished without a host of subsidiary ends being met. Children must be instructed into the moral and religious life, and this must include sexual education. As a part of this education, children must be taught how to distinguish true from false claims, and genuine from illusory goods. This part of a good education is itself bound to be deeply countercultural in the consumeristic and erotically charged world in which we live. Further, children will not understand or make adequate use of the gifts they have been given unless they are allowed and encouraged to discover and cultivate those gifts; consequently, an adequate education will be attentive to the much of the traditional curriculum, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, the study of literature, history and the social sciences. At the same time, education should also provide exposure to nonacademic domains within which children might have gifts, such as music and sport. Children must also learn what it is to act in communion with others, and what it is to possess the virtue of solidarity. Finally, because children are, and will grow up to be, members of a state, to the authorities of which they are rightly subject, children must learn what respect is due those authorities, and how they may be responsible citizens of their state.

When these genuine educational interests of children are violated by their parents, as when parents neglect their educational responsibilities, or positively abuse their children, this cannot be construed as in the interests of the parents. Rather, parents fail themselves as parents just insofar as they fail their children. To frame failures of education in terms of conflicts of rights or interests entirely misconstrues the proper relationship between parents and children.

This possibility of failure is real. Since serious failures of this sort have the potential to radically damage a child’s capacity to lead an upright and flourishing life, the state must take an interest in ensuring that children are not seriously harmed in their education. Still, there is, I believe, a straightforward argument to be made that parents, rather than the state, have the default position in judgments about who should educate children and how they should do it.

The foundation of that argument returns, again, to the very nature of the family: just as spouses take on a radical commitment to each other’s good when they marry, that good becoming “common” to the union, so they take on a radical commitment to the good of their children, that good too becoming part of the family’s common good before it can reasonably be thought of as part of the good of any other social union. The good of the family, that is to say, is first relative to the goods of other societies, including the state. But education of children, like love and care for those children, is essential to that common good; the responsibility, and thus the right, for that education, rests first with parents.

Such considerations are furthered by noting that the ends of children’s education, as identified above, are, in a sense, formal. Each requires further specification in order to generate adequate content for an educational program. There is widespread disagreement about the nature of children’s sexual education, about the meaning to be attributed to solidarity and cooperation, and about the nature of human flourishing. Who, then, is to provide that content? The mission of parents to provide for their children’s good cannot be accomplished unless they are charged also with the responsibility of bringing their own understanding of these ends to bear on the formation of their children.

Moreover, a child’s developing recognition of his or her vocation—which is the ultimate end of children’s education—is not simply a matter of recognizing the goodness of this or that way of life, for there are many such good ways of life. Additionally, the child must recognize the fittingness of some particular way of life for him or her. The particular way of life to which this child is called is not the same as the life to which that child is called, and the particular shape this a child’s obligations, opportunities, and destiny will take are, in many ways, unique to him or her.

Parents are in a unique position to help children through the years of their formation, in recognizing what they are called to. There are dangers here, of course, of parental overreaching and domination, but such dangers are to be combated by a deeper awareness of parental responsibility, not a mistaken judgment that it is really the state’s responsibility for providing, and assisting in interpreting, the moral materials out of which a child’s education is structured.

Such considerations do not provide an argument against state assistance in children’s education, or even an argument against the existence of state-funded public schools. But they do suggest, I think, a rather strong conclusion: that the option of home-schooling should be the prima facie starting point for parental deliberations about their children’s education. Many parents will, in the course of their deliberations, realize that they are best positioned to pursue, with their children, the ends of education in the home. Others will conscientiously judge that others, in one or other of a variety of possible ways, must be brought on board to assist with the task. But, as the starting point for deliberation in this area, homeschooling, and homeschoolers, should be given considerably more deference, in theory and practice, than recent educational theory suggests.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

It is eminently fitting—it is not the mark of a crimped nature—that parents take a heightened responsibility for the children who are theirs. We know enough by now to know that this, the most natural of sentiments, has not always held true. Not all parents have been protective of their children; some have been willing to “get rid” of their children, and some have had a merchandising attitude toward their offspring. We think of Woody Allen’s line, that “this is a watch . . . that my father, on his death bed . . . sold me.” But this is a day for people who have borne their responsibilities, parents and children, in reaching this day, and reaching it in the presence of faculty pursuing a rather distinct mission . . .

I don’t want to sound like that cleric described by George Eliot in Daniel Deronda, a man who seems to fancy that his personal correspondence was part of the history of Protestantism. But I wonder if I could lead you into these remarks by telling a bit of my own experience teaching at a small college in New England . . .

Early in my career at Amherst I was teaching a course on political parties. I told another junior professor that I was determined that no student of mine would flub a question on political parties, as I had during an oral for honors as an undergraduate. My colleague confided to me that this was the wrong measure: we cannot make the course an annex to the graduate schools. Most of the students in the course will not even be majors in Political Science, and this could be the only course they will have in the subject. The question is: how does this course stand on its own as a contribution to a liberal arts education—which is another way of saying: where does this course on parties, of all things, fit into the history of philosophy?

My late colleague, Joe Epstein, once put it to me in this way: you are a doctor of philosophy resident in the department of political science; your task is to engage the students where they are, on the issues of the day that engage them—but then to lead them back to the enduring questions of philosophy. My friend Dan Robinson used to say that our mission was to shape students who could not be bought and not be fooled. And we happened to think, we young professors, that we bring people a long way to the point of not being bought when we bring them to the point where they are not easily fooled—where they are not taken in by slogans masquerading as principles. The question, we used to say, was whether our students had a principled ground for their motivations, and reasons for their actions.

In that vein, we used to cite that fine passage from Aristotle in the Ethics when he said that the study of politics may not hold much interest for those people, young or old, for whom life consists of a series of disconnected emotional episodes. But for those people who are genuinely concerned that there be some connection in principle between the judgments they made last week and the judgments they make today, this study of politics could be quite instructive. Or as Immanuel Kant put it, when we respect a person, we are registering our reverence for that law of which he happens to be an example. And so the question for us, forming our mission, is this: can we bring our students to the point where they can give an account of that law, or those principles, of which they purport to be examples?

We like to think that we are engaged here in what used to be called “higher education,” and it was especially suitable then to raise the question of what was indeed higher and lower in the things we could know. We come to know how to drive a car, but then we could drive an ambulance or we could drive a getaway car for the Mafia. And so we may ask, which is higher: the knowledge of how to drive, or the knowledge of those ends or purposes of driving that are justified or unjustified, right or wrong? The answer was contained in what we might call the logic of morals itself. As Thomas Aquinas taught us, the good or the right is that which everyone is obliged to do; the wrong is that which everyone is obliged to refrain from doing. The good is higher than the bad, more desirable than the bad. And so the knowledge of good, the knowledge of right and wrong is higher than the knowledge of technical means, because the knowledge of right and wrong is better than an ignorance of right and wrong, or a life lived with indifference to matters of right and wrong. Higher than the knowledge of driving the car is the knowledge—the moral knowledge—of the ends of driving that are good or bad, right or wrong, justified or unjustified. This leaves us with an uncomfortable question: who does the highest work in this society? Who has the highest art or science, the science that directs everything else?

Aristotle’s answer is one that predictably jars people or leaves them scratching their heads: the highest science, he held, is political science. Now I’ve seen political scientists gathered in large numbers, and when they are assembled in mass they don’t exactly strike you as the people you would trust to rule the world—or even accurately describe it. But political science is, at its best, the science of reflecting on the principles of justice, the nature of the just political order and the things we are justified in imposing on people with the force of law. Political science, as Aristotle thought, is the architectonic science, the science that knows the first-order principles that give proportion and scale to everything else.

Science Without Political Science?

Well, what about people working on new drugs that deliver us from high blood pressure, prostate cancer, diabetes and other ills? Wouldn’t that be more important than something like political science? As important as such life-saving research is, science itself still works under the governance of moral principles that are even higher. But we used to understand, also, that science itself worked under the governance of moral principles that were even higher. For there were moral limits on the way science acquired what it wanted to know. Some of the research carried out by the Germans during the Second World War had considerable utility for people in other countries. If we wanted to know just how icy were the temperatures that pilots could absorb when they were downed in the Atlantic, what better way to test the proposition than by dunking some prisoners, in the death camps, who were, as the saying goes, going to die anyway.

And yet we seemed to have been clear in this country—or clear until recently—that we should not do lethal experiments when there were alternatives that were non-lethal, and we shouldn’t do experiments with lethal risks on patients without their consent. Those moral inhibitions could indeed slow the pace and reach of research, but we seemed to understand that there were, as I say, serious moral limits even on what scientists deeply craved to know. And now, in our own day, we are faced with a choice of whether we will do research on stem cells extracted from embryos, killing these nascent lives, or whether we will use adult stem cells, or the newly contrived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), cells that are formed by reprogramming adult cells, which can therefore be made from skin cells. They can be contrived without killing live human beings. The new methods involved here would allow us to produce the equivalent of embryonic stems cells for research without creating and destroying embryos.

The distinction is critical because each one of us began as an embryo—and it was all there in our genetic makeup—our likely height, our allergies, perhaps even our SAT scores. That embryo, and that alone, was you or I. When we make a decision either to allow the destruction of embryos in research or not, we make a decision at the top of the state about the kind of work we think legitimate and salutary, the kind of work we are willing to encourage by removing the moral and legal inhibitions, and licensing, encouraging, and promoting that work. And so a whole new industry arises, with many people working in labs.

My point though is this: a decision is made by legislators, by people making laws—they are engaged in the highest practice of a political science, and the decision they make will either foreclose many people from making their livings in a branch of research involving the use of embryonic stem cells, or they will remove the inhibitions and cause that kind of work to burgeon. What is permitted then, in this new line of “work,” is the killing of human beings in their earliest stages. The people in official authority make a decision, and that will have the most palpable result in the way that thousands of people will be permitted or even encouraged to make their livings. Aristotle curiously had it right: political science is the architectonic science. It gives proportion and scale to everything else; it even decides which occupations we think fit for a decent people.

I once posed the question in this vein to students preparing themselves for medical school: did they think that the dignity of medicine in the United States was on the same plane as the dignity of medicine in the Soviet Union? I didn’t mean, how much money did doctors make or what status they enjoyed. I meant: were the ends of the medical art the same in both places? Was the status of medicine the same, say, in a concentration camp, where people were restored to some minimal health for the sake of returning to slave labor? Wasn’t medicine itself diminished in that setting? Wouldn’t the ends of medicine be higher in a country, or in a political regime, in which people were restored to health with the possibility then of living at the top of their potential—by living, that is, as citizens in a country in which they were free to join with their fellow citizens in facing the highest questions about the way they will live and the kinds of laws they would impose on one another?

If that is right, the point was simply that there are certain political regimes that will enhance or degrade the practice of medicine. The upshot for the student entering a liberal arts college then is this: if you’re a student preparing to become a doctor, you should be taking organic chemistry and biology, and it wouldn’t hurt to have physics and a brush with the neural sciences. But it also will matter profoundly to the integrity of your profession as to the regime that will supply the cast of your life in practicing your arts as a doctor. And so it may be useful to you to learn something, in college, about the principles that define the kinds of political orders that are just or unjust, and more or less fitting for human beings.

Competing Allegiances

This is the age of diversity in enrollments, and colleges have been recruiting students from more and more exotic places overseas. But do we care then about the kinds of moral commitments they bring to the college if they have absorbed the principles of those regimes from which they come? As Aristotle taught us, the good citizen is the same as a good man only in a good regime. If we brought to the campus in the 1930’s a German student who was loyal to the Nazi regime, a student who had absorbed within his character the principles of that regime, how might it have mattered? We have at Amherst students who have come from the totalitarian regime of Vietnam and that curious, free market despotism in China. The question has to arise then of what are they bringing—and what is their intention in going back home? Do they hope to become a force to change their regimes, bringing them closer to an American model, when they return home? Or is it their purpose to use the skills they learn in America in order to put them in the service of a regime that may be hostile to our own?

We can hardly do better than to recall the notable example of that famous member of the Harvard Class of 1921, Isoroku Yamamoto, later Admiral Yamamoto, an early advocate of naval aviation, the man who commanded the Japanese fleet of ships and planes for the attack on Pearl Harbor. People may not recall that Yamamoto had a real affection for the United States; he was opposed to the war with the United States. He was opposed to the invasion of Manchuria; he was opposed to the pact with Hitler and Mussolini; in fact he was thought so politically unreliable that he was watched by military intelligence. Nevertheless he thought the highest honor was to die in the service of the Emperor and the Empire. He liked America, but he loved even more the Japanese regime.

It was found in a recent survey, by the Council of Graduate Schools, that in the fall of 2007, 241,095 non-U.S. citizens were enrolled in American graduate programs. About 55% were in engineering and the biological and physical sciences, whereas only about 16% of American students are enrolled in these fields. We could use these people—and many of them wish to stay—if our immigration laws would only permit people with these skills to stay. Many of them are in public universities, supported by public funds. Years ago New York State tried to limit this public education to citizens, and the Supreme Court struck down that move. But the Court missed the importance of a critical moral question: by the time a person has reached college age, why would it not be apt to ask, Are you clear on your own moral commitments? Are you clear on the character of that political regime that commands your allegiance in principle? For if you are committed, say, to using your skills as an architect and engineer to help Albert Speer work out ways even more efficient for shipping people to killing centers , or to be an engineer for Saddam Hussein, what moral principle would oblige us to tax the American people for the sake of perfecting skills for the service of an evil regime? And would it be gross, or reflective of a narrow parochialism that we even raise the question? Or would we show a respect for the student himself as a moral being, with serious commitments standing before him? Or show that we as a country do take, as profoundly serious, the moral terms on which we live together?

All in the Family

That brings me, finally, to this place and to a day for the celebration of families. The point has been aptly made that the biblical injunction, honor thy father and thy mother, could not have been referring simply to the biological father or mother, for in that case we would be enjoined to honor the man who sired us in the course of a rape. But “duties” or “obligations” are moral terms, and they flow only to the people who have fulfilled the moral office of parenting, the people who have been there to nurture, to protect, and sustain.

Aristotle said that the polis, the political order, was prior in the order of nature to the family. This urbane man certainly knew that people were perfectly capable of having sex even when their governments broke down. But that was different from a family. For what constitutes a family? Would it be two people—or several joined together in a polygamous or polyamorous ensemble? Would it be two people of the same sex, the same species? What constitutes a family is something that has always depended on the moral understanding that pervades the community and finds expression in its laws.

Our late friend, Allan Bloom, wrote that “the children who are the products of nature and real love lack something that can be provided only by law and its constraints.” He went on to say that

it is only within the context of the law that a man can really imagine that the offspring from his loins can people the world. The law that gives names to families and tries to insure their integrity is a kind of unnatural force and endures only as long as does the regime of which it is a part.

Those laws on marriage invited us, as parents, to say the most telling words that parents may say, as they claim their children as their own, and do it through that simple device of imparting a name. As they do that, they replicate those words spoken by God in relation to Israel, the words that any parents are invited to speak in accepting their vocations. And is there finally anything simpler or more decisive than those words that come back to us from Isaiah: “Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine.”

This is a day when we celebrate again the parents who have given their names to children, borne the responsibilities for them, and the students who have borne their own responsibility, in a handsome way, by working faithfully to justify the sacrifices made for them, and to learn what this faculty has sought to teach.

Hadley Arkes is Edward Ney Professor of American Institutions at Amherst College. The author of many books, including Natural Rights and the Right to Choose, Arkes sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The collision finally occurred on October 4, 1957, when the Western democracies awakened to the news that the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, all 23 inches of it, with an orbiting lifetime of fifty-seven days. This event, more than any other in recent times, seemed to vindicate criticisms that had been directed at colleges and universities for decades, namely, that the prevailing curriculum of study, except for the parts that were expressly pre-professional, were irrelevant to life, indifferent to the real needs of society, out of step with the modern world, and plagued by the perspective of the Prep School headmaster. Our arch adversaries in Moscow knew better than to squander the national brainpower on idle chatter. It was time for the U.S. to know better, or else! Several days after Sputnik was launched the New York Times carried ominous warnings from Dr. Elmer Hutchisson, Director of the American Institute of Physics: Unless future generations appreciate the role of science in modern society and understand the conditions under which science thrives, he said, “our way of life is, I am certain, doomed to rapid extinction.”

Within a decade, stimulated by the civil rights movement and an unpopular war, criticism moved to a decidedly shrill part of the register, dismissing all traditional features of higher education as simply irrelevant and—shame of shames—elitist, a term introduced in the 1950s as the ideologically approved alternative to the harmless epithet “snob.”

All this, of course, had been said long before, often by persons who were themselves beneficiaries of higher education and should have known better. Consider in this connection John Locke’s influential Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692). After speaking of the value of apples in the diet and the regular washing of feet in cold weather, and after offering wise alternatives to corporal punishment, he then turns to the formation of character, only to rebuke those parents who “have a strange value for words, when preferring the languages of the ancient Greeks and Romans to that which made ‘em such brave men.”

He concludes the section by warning against an education that would trade “your son’s innocence and virtue for a little Greek and Latin.” Later in his essay, Locke returns to this theme, referring disparagingly to “the learning now in fashion in the schools of Europe,” insisting that “a gentleman” can well do without it.

We see as early as the Age of Newton, and in the writing of Newton’s most committed disciple, an impatience with attention to the remote past at the expense of a future that stands to benefit from the achievements of science and the practical arts. One does not reach the moon by way of Plato’s dialogues.

II.

Consider Locke’s reference to “a great part of the learning now in fashion in the schools of Europe.” The learning in fashion, as Locke put it, was the bequest of the first great and true universities established in the High Middle Ages. These evolved from the Abbey schools mandated in the Ninth Century by Alfred the Great in Britain and by Charlemagne on the Continent. By the Eleventh Century some of these, notably the one associated with the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, were already centers of serious scholarship and teaching, the participants organizing themselves as a universitas. The University of Paris, by the twelfth century, would come to define the genre, so much so that when St. Ignatius of Loyola judged his own scholarly preparation to be hopelessly defective, he took himself to Paris. It was the great University of that city that would later provide him with the very framework for the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum that would be foundational for liberal education until our own lifetime.

What St. Ignatius found at Paris was higher education, by Roman Catholics and for Roman Catholics, but no less universal in its reach for all that. Whether to defeat heresies or promote papal authority, whether to serve princes or thwart the infidel, the earliest Catholic universities were predicated on certain assumptions readily found both in the lines and between the lines of what was taught. From the first, the very atmosphere of higher education was alive with criticism, with the “Sic et non” that conduces not to skepticism but to inquiry; with the viva voce that every aspiring don must endure as more seasoned minds test and taunt for the purpose of cleansing and empowering. G. K. Chesterton’s great “Dumb Ox,” Thomas Aquinas, single-handedly and carefully examined some ten-thousand objections to positions he would oppose or defend. He gained intellectual disciples who carried his teaching far and wide. One of his pupils, Remigio de ser Chiaro di Girolami, at Santa Maria Novella, would educate the author of The Divine Comedy in Thomism.

Ignatius was not simply studying in “Paris” for some seven years. His principal collegiate affiliation within the University was Sainte Barbe, which, by the time of his arrival, had taken the lead in developing the long-opposed program of humanistic study, and chiefly the study of classical Greek and Latin sources. These were understood as foundational for all other studies. But defenders had to argue this curriculum into being. One might say that what they were arguing into being was the spirit of the Renaissance itself. Thus, as early as 1542, Ignatius is found writing to students in the Society that it is to be their Latin studies that will ground all the rest, and that these studies are therefore mandatory. The study of Greek would soon be added and for the same reason. All this was in specific opposition to prevailing practices at Italian colleges where students were free to choose to study whatever they wished, in any order and, we might surmise, with no compelling purpose or reason (how contemporary!).

By 1599 there were nearly 250 Jesuit schools. All of them called for scholars in Scripture, Hebrew, Greek, Theology, Mathematics, Philosophy and Moral Philosophy. Nothing in the curriculum was “sectarian,” for a common humanity erases the traditional barriers of sect and party. The writer students were required to study and formally imitate under the earliest versions of the Ratio was the pagan lawyer Cicero. All in all, in the long and still intense struggle between urbanity and provincialism, it would be the university that would revise the maps of thought and set loose the instructed mind. Locke’s reference to “the learning now in fashion in the schools of Europe” was chiefly a reference to this education, which had been his own: an education that shaped the Anglo-European mind and bequeathed it, with refinements and ever more daring possibilities, to the Founders of the American Republic.

III.

The intellectual and philosophical sources of greatest use to and influence upon the American Founders were the productions of the classical world, interpreted and systematically presented in the major works of British—primarily Scottish—and Continental scholars. Much of this was delivered by way of the Scottish Enlightenment and, indeed, by native Scots.

Scottish education, with its distinctively “humanistic Calvinism,” was widely adopted in the Colonies and then in the states of the Union. At the time of the American Civil War , of the 207 colleges and universities, forty-nine had been founded by Presbyterians. It was common for American faculties to appoint Scottish tutors or those educated in Scotland. At William and Mary, for example, Jefferson was introduced to the works of his greatest heroes—Locke, Bacon and Newton—by William Small, a graduate of Marichal College, Aberdeen. Jefferson would later reflect on his debt to Dr. Small:

Dr. Small was . . . to me as a father. To his enlightened and affectionate guidance of my studies while at college, I am indebted for everything . . . He procured for me the patronage of Mr. Wythe, and both of them, the attention of Governor Fauquier . . . At their frequent dinners with the governor . . . I have heard more good sense, more rational and philosophical conversation than all my life besides.

The diffuse influence of Scottish thought, itself beholden to classical sources, did much to immunize the Founders against metaphysical extremes, which were all too often followed by extremes of action. This same influence protected the colonial consumer from most of the products still minted in Europe’s frippery shops. A balance was sought and even found between the speculative and the practical, between lofty and sincerely held principles and the dangerous business of genuine self-governance. To speak of this influence is indirectly to speak of the Ratio Studiorum once or twice removed, for even the divisive centuries of Reformation and Counter-Reformation did little to alter the main elements of higher education. It is to speak of the classical bequest, of the great Medieval institutions, of Renaissance humanism, of that culture of criticism and of piety that can be traced to Homer, to Plato and Aristotle, to the Stoics, to Cicero, and to so many others in the long list of those who do what is finally “the work of the world.”

It was not a matter of mere taste that yielded the Eighteenth Century’s “classic revival” in art and architecture, nor was it just a clever literary device that found Dante choosing Virgil as his guide, nor was it simply quirky that Cicero’s Pro Milone would engage the intellectual energies of John Adams and his fellow lawyers in Boston. The century that supplied our contemporary world with the most compelling arguments for liberty, for self-government, for the authority of reason over that of mere tradition or even revelation, the century that hosted tumultuous revolutions under the banner of the Age of Reason, never lost sight of the Classical past, and generally invoked its models to render its own conclusions and aspiration more credible. Alas, there is a lesson here. We do not reach the moon by way of Plato and Aristotle but, without them, we might not know what to do when we get there, or why we should even make the attempt.

IV.

Thanks to Sputnik, American colleges and universities came to host what now is called “big science,” once the exclusive preserve of the largest corporations. After Sputnik, there was less room for, less patience with the mere dilettante. Vocation gave way to profession, and profession to career. The ethos of the academic world, for so long collegial and perhaps even a bit unworldly, metamorphosed into something ever more focused, ever more entrepreneurial. America entered something called “the Space Race,” thought at the time to be an event within that larger and macabre Olympiad known as the Cold War. With all this going on, and in light of the great stakes, there could be little room for Latin or Greek.

But of course there is always something going on and, if only for this reason, it may be that there must always be room for a literature, a culture, a means of self-critical appraisal found in purer form within the classical context. If Sputnik awakened the complacent West in the middle of the twentieth century, it was Darwin who did the same a century earlier. By the time Origin of Species appeared, the divorce between science and the humanities was effectively complete, so much so that when the Birmingham Technical Institute, thanks to a large gift from Josiah Mason, emerged as Mason College, the very terms of the gift would include the stipulation that humanities not be taught.

The Founder’s Day address, titled “Science and Culture” (1880), was given by Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog” and one of the most acute intelligences of the Victorian era. Huxley’s address could have been given on October 5, 1957, the day after Sputnik’s first completed orbit. It might just as well have been given in 1694, to honor Locke’s discerning comments on an education worth having. Huxley discharged his duty with confidence and controlled enthusiasm. He paid a handsome compliment to Josiah Mason for his prescience, and then tested his audience with a question: suppose a youngster hoping to have some good effect on the world had to choose between two curriculums while at University. One, says Huxley, featuring a pair of dead languages, perhaps of use to some future reviewer of books, the other, based on the laws and principles of science by which one can comprehend the operations of the natural world. Huxley took this to be an easy question. Is there any doubt, he asked, in anyone’s mind, as to which of these should be chosen? He answered that the only ones who could doubt were those famous “Levites in charge of the ark of culture,” notably Matthew Arnold.

It would not be long before Arnold accepted the challenge and published his instructive reply, “Literature and Science.” There Arnold politely acknowledged Huxley’s authority as a man of science, not to mention as a “prince of debaters.” He then shares with his readers some lines he has read in Darwin’s Descent of Man, where we learn that “our ancestor was a hairy quadruped, with pointed ears and a tail, probably arboreal in his habits.”

Arnold is prepared to accept this characterization of our common ancestry. But he goes on to note that, regarding “this good fellow,” this hairy quadruped with pointed ears and a tail, no doubt arboreal in his habits, he must have carried in his nature something that inclined him to Greek! There must have been in him a veritable necessity to Greek. The point should be clear enough. To know thyself, in the full meaning of that command, is not to look back upon a primordial past when the very marks of humanity are few and doubtful. It is to look instead at what has been achieved in our finest hour and what it was that nurtured and impelled such achievement.

Huxley was not unaware of the need to understand the human condition within its political and social context. This very understanding, however, was, on his account, not to be enlightened by higher education but by science. Let’s listen to him again: “I confess, I should like to see one addition made to the excellent scheme of education propounded for the College, in the shape of provision for the teaching of Sociology.”

Think of that: delete the Classics and add Sociology. The commitment to relevance and to practicality inescapably leads to politicized and trendy teaching, for to be “contemporary” is, alas, to be contemporary in one’s knowledge, one’s methods, and one’s passions. To follow Huxley is to leave the world of ancient Greece and partake of the methods—the methodology—of the social sciences. Thus did the Biblical king Rehoboam trade gold for brass.

It is a higher education that pulls us up out of the distractions of the moment and allows us to see further, to see more clearly where we’ve been, what we’ve done, who we are, who we might become. Higher education exposes to a bright light all forms of counterfeit: ingratiating talk as the counterfeit of teaching; rote learning as the counterfeit of thought; mere opinion as the counterfeit of judgment; enthusiasm as the counterfeit of principle.

Perhaps under prevailing conditions such an education is simply beyond the resources—material, personal, even moral resources—of our colleges and universities. Perhaps the now universal practice of counting publications and tracking grant revenue as the means by which to establish and reward members of a faculty is so deeply entrenched that there can be no genuine community of scholars, no systematic and disciplined examination of the moral dimensions of life. Perhaps the very organization of today’s colleges has gone too far to be reversed. Might an acceptable compensation be a successful lunar landing?

Professor Daniel N. Robinson is a member of the Philosophy Faculty, University of Oxford, and Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College. He sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse. This article is based on a lecture given for the James Madison Program at Princeton University.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.