In the last few years, several universities have opened centers devoted to the study of Western civilization and America’s founding. Most of the centers are financed not with university money, but by donations from alumni and foundations. The centers sponsor conferences, invite well-known speakers, create new courses, and give awards to undergraduates.
Some have been created specifically to bring attention to conservative thought and ideas, and to answer critics who say that American campuses — and the professoriate — are ideologically one-sided. Other centers have distanced themselves from politics, focusing instead on bolstering a core curriculum in American history that they believe has been lost on their campuses.
The centers have been embraced by administrators, who are loath to turn down a new source of funds and perhaps feel the need to answer to legislators and other critics who have charged that campuses are not intellectually diverse. But on some campuses the centers have come under fire from professors who resent the implication that existing campus debates are missing certain viewpoints.
At Hamilton College, in New York, faculty members even managed to shut down a new center — shortly after its directors and college administrators had toasted its opening — by charging that the college could not adequately monitor it.
Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, is as familiar as anyone with the charge that the professoriate is filled with liberals and that conservative ideas are missing from the classroom. But he doesn’t buy it. “There is a wide range of views about the United States on today’s campuses,” he says. “I don’t believe there is a real lack to be filled.” He also warns that the outside money fueling the centers might “impose a particular intellectual agenda on the faculty and distort their role in designing the curriculum.”
| UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF THE PRINCIPLES OF THE AMERICAN FOUNDING Founded: September 2006 Budget: $100,000 in start-up funds from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute What it does: The center has sponsored lectures on topics like Lincoln’s view of the founding and on commerce and Christianity. It plans to bring in visiting professors and offer dissertation fellowships. It will hold an undergraduate essay contest, with a cash prize, on the topic of America’s founding. From the founder, Nathan Tarcov, professor of political science and professor on the Committee on Social Thought: “Chicago has lots of Western civ. But if you look at our common core, it’s heavily European. There’s very little in the way of American things. No Federalist. No Lincoln-Douglas. No Jefferson. We want to encourage the serious study of the American founding and the traditions that led up to it and some of the things that come out of it. To me it seems odd and unfortunate if people are reading all these wonderful things from elsewhere and never reading The Federalist or Jefferson or Lincoln.” |
| UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER CENTER FOR WESTERN CIVILIZATION Founded: January 2005 Budget: $5,000 from the university and $20,000 from donors What it does: The center ran a two-week institute last summer for 25 junior faculty members on the principles of America’s founding. This fall it is planning a two-day symposium with the C.S. Lewis Foundation on the role of religion in academe. It is developing an undergraduate minor in Western civilization. From the founder, E. Christian Kopff, associate professor of classics: “We emphasize from the ancient world to the American foundation to encourage people to look beyond their immediate parochial surroundings. We’re less interested in politics. That isn’t the crisis on campuses. It’s the marginalization of the past and the reality that we’re seeing more and more attention given to the recent past and science and technology, and less to the traditional liberal arts.” |
| PRINCETON UNIVERSITY JAMES MADISON PROGRAM IN AMERICAN IDEALS AND INSTITUTIONS Founded: Summer of 2000 Budget: $1.5-million annually, from such donors as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation What it does: The James Madison Program is considered the Cadillac of the new history centers. It has sponsored lectures and conferences on topics like the contemporary meaning of the Declaration of Independence, and it brings in visiting fellows and professors each year. It runs a series of courses, called “Statesmanship and Character,” focused on American presidents. It also holds special events for undergraduate fellows, including afternoon teas where students have had the chance to quiz Supreme Court Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Antonin Scalia. From the founder, Robert P. George, professor of politics: “We’re less interested in contemporary policy questions than we are in the basic principles: Separation of powers, federalism, concepts like, What does free exercise of religion mean? For many kids, even at a place like Princeton where they come in with astronomical SAT’s and wonderful grade-point averages, no one has taught them anything about basic American concepts. We want to invite students into the debates of the great thinkers in America. This isn’t catechism class. There is no right answer.” |
| COLGATE UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR FREEDOM AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION Founded: Spring 2004 Budget: $65,000 annually, from alumni What it does: The center invites scholars from across the political spectrum to speak on topics like Islam and the West, libertarian philosophy, religion and the American Constitution, and immigration and national security. It also sponsored a conference on the future of Afghanistan and has begun “Project Afghanistan” to help Kabul University develop new course materials and programs. The center gives two $2,500 awards each year to the seniors who make the greatest contribution to promoting freedom and Western civilization. From the founder, Robert P. Kraynak, professor of political science: “There’s this general problem of lack of ideological balance on campus. You have a debate about the war in Iraq, and everyone is against it, and no one on the faculty will take the pro-war position. How can you educate students if they’ve never talked to a Christian evangelical, someone in the military, someone who’s against abortion? All these people are completely missing from college faculty. “I decided the way to try to do something about it was to go to the alumni. We have a list of alienated and disaffected alumni who’ve stopped giving to Colgate because they think it’s too liberal. The development office was glad because this helped re-establish contact between the school and alienated alumni.” |
| EMORY UNIVERSITY PROGRAM IN AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP Founded: November 2006 Budget: $150,000 annually from the university and $15,000 in start-up money from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute What it does: The program began as a pilot project this semester, running two freshman seminars on “Liberalism vs. Conservatism.” Students read documents from America’s founding and classics of American liberal and conservative thought. Public intellectuals help teach the classes and meet with students one-on-one to discuss students’ career possibilities. The program’s administrators hope to offer at least five freshman seminars a semester next year in English, history, philosophy, and political science. From the founder, Mark Bauerlein, professor of English: “It started seeming to me there was a strong political dimension in higher education oriented toward the celebration of the new, the radical, the innovative, and the breakthrough revolutionary. While we want to cultivate people who question conventions and who do a radical interrogation of cultural norms, we also want to give them a solid background in why those norms exist. You’ve got to immerse students in the bunk before you debunk it. My program is oriented toward freshmen. I want these kids to see more public discussion of issues of American politics and American culture that are handled much more sensibly and responsibly than they are on cable news shows.” |
| BROWN UNIVERSITY POLITICAL THEORY PROJECT Founded: July 2003 Budget: $750,000 annually, from alumni and foundations including the William H. Donner Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute What it does: The project brings in five postdoctoral fellows each year to teach classes in political science and philosophy. It started a speakers series this academic year called the Janus Forum in which well-known scholars speak on controversial topics chosen by students. After the talk, students on the board award a trophy with a hardball on top (at right) to the person in the audience who asked the most penetrating question. The board also threatens to hand out a softball to the person who asks a question that fails to challenge the speakers, but it has yet to be awarded. The students hold an essay contest after each forum, with cash prizes for the top three essays. From the founder, John Tomasi, associate professor of political science: “The historical trigger for my getting involved was five years ago when two students came to my office: a well-known conservative writer for the student paper and another well-known liberal writer. They said they had both searched for a course where they could learn the philosophical underpinnings of the Republican Party’s platform and hadn’t been able to find it. They asked me if I’d help them sponsor a new course called “Knowing Right: Conservative Thought in America.” That same year, an alum came forward who had three daughters who’d gone to Brown. He had some concern about their political education. He offered me a fellowship to bring postdocs to Brown to teach the course the students came up with.” |
| HAMILTON COLLEGE ALEXANDER HAMILTON CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION Founded: August 2006 Dismantled: November 2006 Budget: $3.6-million from an alumnus What it was to do: The center planned to award fellowships to scholars who did research on the study of freedom, democracy, and capitalism. It planned to sponsor annual lectures and conferences, conduct an annual student essay competition, provide stipends for student research, and recognize an author of the most outstanding work of scholarship related to Alexander Hamilton. Although professors and administrators toasted the center’s founding with champagne in August, the center never got off the ground because faculty members criticized its board, which they said included too many outsiders. Faculty critics were concerned the college would not have enough control. From the founder, Robert L. Paquette, professor of history: “You had an organized group of politicized faculty who were interested in either destroying the Hamilton center or in causing changes in its governance structure so that it could be co-opted. What they seized on is that it had too much autonomy that could lead to too much outside influence. I think certain members of the faculty want governance structures such that the faculty would exert a predominant authority over this center. But what that would mean is in a couple of years the Alexander Hamilton Center would have been turned into the Hamilton Center for the Postmodern Study of Human Sexuality!” |
| UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN PROGRAM IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION AND AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS Founded: April 2006 Budget: $60,000 in start-up money from the university’s president, Humanities Texas, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and Phi Beta Kappa What it does: The program sponsors a lecture series with well-known speakers. It will create a new concentration for undergraduates, using existing courses in philosophy, history, government, and classics. Students in the concentration can be part of a junior-fellows program, which will sponsor dinners with visiting scholars, internships with the federal government and in think tanks, and a competition for a senior thesis prize. From the founder, Robert C. Koons, professor of philosophy: “We’re part of a pretty broad movement that wants to re-emphasize some sort of core to the curriculum. It’s the Matthew Arnold philosophy of focusing on the best that has been thought and said. What tends to happen in higher education periodically is the pendulum will swing. Right now it is toward extreme fragmentation based on the research specialties and interests of faculty members, who teach to those specialties. We’re attempting to bring that pendulum back in the other direction to a common core that all students ought to be exposed to.” |
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 53, Issue 28, Page A10