Conservative and libertarian scholars sounded triumphant notes here on Thursday as they described the proliferation of college centers and programs designed to expose undergraduates to their perspectives.
In many cases, establishing such centers at colleges has required sidestepping faculty bodies and enticing the institutions’ administrations with the promise that the centers will bring in new philanthropic support, according to a report on the centers’ progress that was the focus of discussions here.
“Money talks,” said the report’s author, Jay Schalin, director of policy analysis at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, as he explained his findings at a luncheon gathering at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Although a few attempts to establish such academic centers at colleges have been thwarted by faculty opposition, for the most part the centers “are not just surviving but thriving,” his report concludes. It estimates that there are now about 150 college centers, programs, or institutes devoted to exposing undergraduates to conservative, traditionalist, or free-market-oriented perspectives—up from just two in 2000.
In a panel discussion of the centers staged at Cato on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Schalin said, “Every once in a while a concept comes along that changes the game, and I believe that these centers are doing just that.”
Ducking Fire
To be sure, the centers continue to face resistance from colleges’ faculty members and, in some cases, students. Tellingly, the Pope Center’s report says many center directors either refused to be interviewed unless assured anonymity or would not talk to Mr. Schalin at all, worried that such publicity for their centers would arouse opposition.
Mr. Schalin declined on Thursday to provide the list of centers he had compiled in preparing his report, saying some center directors had refused to cooperate with him unless he promised not to publish a list of where centers are located.
“There is a lot of fear,” he said. Nevertheless, according to the report, most of the center directors he interviewed “said they have excellent relationships with their schools.”
Dave Levinthal, who has examined many such centers as a reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, said he is concerned that many of the students he has interviewed were unaware that college offerings were being financed by “major political bankrollers.” On both the left and right, he said, donors finance college programs “to push a specific school of thought, or an agenda.”
Henry F. (Hank) Reichman, first vice president of the American Association of University Professors and chairman of its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, this week dismissed the Pope Center’s report as “a slick promotional piece” he found difficult to take seriously.
Mr. Reichman argued, in an email, that most centers of the sort discussed in the report “are at smaller and regional institutions.” “There is little evidence,” he said, “that the broader efforts touted here have won more than occasional acceptance.”
Financial Considerations
Mr. Schalin’s report, “Renewal in the University: How Academic Centers Restore the Spirit of Inquiry,” says most of the centers it describes are financed by just a few private major donors. Among their biggest supporters are the North Carolina-based BB&T Foundation, the Pennsylvania-based Jack Miller Center, the Manhattan Institute’s Veritas Fund, and various philanthropies associated with the billionaire conservative activists David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch.
Big donors, the report says, “have the leverage to negotiate the terms that can keep centers safe from faculty control at schools where the faculty is antagonistic to their missions.”
And the prospect of opening an academic center financed entirely by outside donors “can melt the heart of university administrators” of any ideological leaning, it says, noting that college presidents “are often judged primarily on their ability to raise funds.”
John A. Allison, president of the Cato Institute and former chairman of the BB&T Corporation, which through its philanthropic arm has helped establish such centers throughout the Southeast, argued here on Thursday that such targeted donations represent the most efficient means of ensuring students’ exposure to ideas unlikely to be voiced by college faculties he regards as dominated by liberals.
Crucial to the centers’ success, he said, is employing faculty members “who really want to do this” and have tenure and the job security it brings. “If you have someone who is lukewarm,” he said, “you get lukewarm results.”
The centers’ activities vary but can include offering courses, awarding fellowships and scholarships, sponsoring research, staging debates and colloquia, and simply distributing copies of books such as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the report says.
Clemson University’s Institute for the Study of Capitalism, described in the report as “the crown jewel” of centers supported by BB&T, offered 18 courses in history, political science, and philosophy last year, and plans in the fall to begin offering 10 incoming freshmen scholarships of up to $10,000 a year to take eight courses together over four years.
C. Bradley Thompson, the institute’s executive director, said he made clear to Clemson’s administration early on that “we were not going to be shunted to some dark corner of the university. We were not going to be ghettoized.”
To help expand its audience, he said, the Clemson center often hosts debates. “We have remained steadfast to our principles,” he said, “but we have done it in a way that is collegial and inviting.”
Skewed Perspectives
For its part, the report often dispenses with niceties. It argues that, at the beginning of millennium, “American higher education faced a crisis” in which the forces of multiculturalism, postmodernism, and statism “were sweeping away thousands of years of Western thought.”
The report alleges that philanthropists with liberal or leftist leanings encountered little faculty opposition in financing “explicitly political” centers or programs, with some being “run by self-described ‘activists’ rather than by legitimate scholars.”
Conservative or libertarian philanthropists, by contrast, were seeing their efforts to establish centers or programs that promoted their views co-opted by faculties, the report says. Typically, it says, faculties would argue that a donation tied to a specific perspective threatened free inquiry, would insist on a voice in the undertaking to remedy the problem, and would then take steps to ensure that any views espoused by the center matched their own.
The donors were left with the choice of going along with the faculty, rescinding the gift, or moving the center off campus.
As a result of such experiences, the report says, donors have learned to spell out their intent in writing, as a condition for their gifts. The report notes that the AAUP holds that colleges violate the principle of academic freedom by soliciting or accepting gifts conditioned upon the teaching of material that would not otherwise be taught. But, it says, faculties “have turned the AAUP’s definition of academic freedom on its head” by using any say in the matter to try to limit the range of ideas expressed on campuses.
Mr. Reichman of the AAUP called the report’s accusations of liberal bias by college faculties “unfounded and extreme.” He argued that, while “donors have every right to request that their donations be used for goals they support,” it is a well-established principle in academe that universities have a responsibility “to ensure that those goals do not conflict with the basic principles of university autonomy, of academic freedom, and of shared governance.”
Mr. Schalin’s report contends that the directors of the centers it describes “are extremely careful to avoid the slightest hint of politicization and take great pains to prove they are not dogmatic but objective, fair-minded, and inclusive of a range of views.” Mr. Reichman said, however, that the report “is simply disingenuous” in characterizing as politicized only those centers that espouse conclusions its author does not support.
New Allies
To be sure, the centers remain susceptible to opposition once they get on the radar of faculty members and students.
Among the most recent such controversies is a legal dispute arising from efforts by Students for a Sustainable Future, a student group at the University of Kansas, to investigate the university’s Center for Applied Economics and the center’s director, Arthur Hall. an outspoken opponent of renewable-energy subsidies.
The student group is seeking documents related to the center’s financing and its hiring of Mr. Hall—previously chief economist for the public-sector group of Koch Industries Inc.—based on suspicions of undue influence by the Koch brothers. The university has agreed to hand over the documents, but Mr. Hall has asked a state court to block their release, arguing that the records request threatens his academic freedom and that the private financing of his work exempts it from the state’s open-records law.
Although the AAUP has previously cited such concerns about academic freedom in denouncing similar requests for the records of public-college faculty members, its Kansas conference has come down on the side of the student group. The conference’s president, Ron Barrett-Gonzalez, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Kansas, argued in an interview this week that Mr. Hall’s job description makes him an administrator, not a faculty member, and the records request covers administrative matters not covered by academic-freedom protections.
“We are interested in openness, transparency, and maintaining academic integrity,” said Mr. Barrett-Gonzalez, who accused the economics center, located in the university’s business school, of having a “gross conflict of interest” and essentially “laundering” a private interest’s ideas by presenting them as the work of a public-university scholar.
Despite such flaps, the Pope Center’s report is optimistic. It argues that the nation might be at a point “when conflicts with the radical left help rather than hinder” the centers, attracting alternative-media coverage sympathetic to the centers and support from people who are like-minded.
“It is likely that the rapid proliferation of conservative centers will continue,” says the report, adding that “a critical mass has been reached that indicates their permanence in academia.”
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
