The history is clear: Conservative colleges can have huge successes, as long as they don’t do what Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is doing right now.
DeSantis has stacked the Board of Trustees at Sarasota’s New College of Florida with conservative celebrities. As Christopher Rufo put it, he plans — as the most famous and disputatious new board member — to form a hostile “landing team” to overthrow the existing progressive campus culture, top to bottom.
There’s plenty of precedent for this kind of thing. In the 1920s, conservatives grew alarmed by what they saw as the wild anti-Americanism sweeping modern campuses. They tried to thwart the changes at both public and private institutions, but the task was not as easy as they imagined. Though they scored some big successes when they observed two fundamental principles, those lessons came at the cost of repeated humiliating failures.
In the public colleges of North Carolina, for instance, conservatives tried to fire progressive faculty members. Albert S. Keister was one of the first. In 1925, Keister was attacked for telling a group of students that the Bible was a form of mythology, and for having “infidel ideas” that questioned white supremacy.
Conservatives thought they could simply fire him because they dominated the state legislature, but Harry W. Chase, the president of the flagship University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, stymied their efforts. Chase went public, warning the people of North Carolina that such attacks threatened the very existence of high-quality public education in their state. Any “real university,” Chase wrote, needed to guarantee the academic and intellectual freedom of its faculty. In the end, Chase won and Keister kept his job.
Even private colleges were much harder to transform than conservative pundits had promised. In 1927 a well-known conservative Baptist preacher, T.T. Shields, took over a financially struggling Baptist school, Des Moines University. He swept onto campus promising a top-to-bottom overhaul, a radical transformation that would create a “great Christian school of higher learning.” His first move was to fire all faculty members, forcing them to endure probing one-on-one interviews to get their jobs back. He also attempted to drastically alter campus culture, forbidding female students to engage in public athletics and banning the teaching of evolutionary theory.
It was a disaster. The entire faculties of the science and math departments refused to return. Fans of opposing football teams humiliated the Des Moines squad by chanting “Darwin! Darwin!” Eventually, students rioted against the new administrators, pelting their offices with rotten fruit and driving Shields back out of town.
Conservative universities have flourished if they can sell themselves as something distinctly separate from mainstream higher education.
Those abject conservative failures, however, were not the whole story. Bob Jones University, in South Carolina, and Hillsdale College, in Michigan, are very different from one another, but they both managed to become very successful, very conservative institutions of higher education — in part by learning the lessons of Des Moines and Chapel Hill.
The first challenge for conservative institutions is to prominently promote themselves as something different, something unique — a kind of university experience that mainstream universities could not provide. Bob Jones, for example, was founded in 1926 explicitly as a renunciation of open, mainstream higher education.
From its beginnings, the leaders of Bob Jones emphasized the idea that their university stood out from the higher-ed norm. For years, they advertised Bob Jones as the “World’s Most Unusual University.” Mostly, its unusual-ness came from its utter lack of freedom for both students and instructors. Faculty members were strictly enjoined to teach only those ideas that conformed with Bob Jones’s vision of proper religion and culture. Any “gripers” who disagreed were quickly fired. Students, too, were bound by an endless list of rules. The university’s most famous student, Billy Graham, quickly transferred out. Graham explained that the culture on campus was utterly different from normal college life. As Graham put it, the expectations of the World’s Most Unusual University “shocked me. There were demerits for just about everything.”
Bob Jones University was also famous for its rigid, unyielding segregationism. Even after most other conservative Christian colleges had changed their whites-only policies, Bob Jones insisted on banning Black students. As one Christian magazine reported in 1982, by that point it had become “Bob Jones versus Everybody.”
The history of Hillsdale College was very different, but the principle of loud-and-proud norm-breaking was the same. It was only in the 1970s that Hillsdale moved in an explicitly conservative direction, under the leadership of its president, George Roche III. Since that time, its leaders have made sure that no one would mistake it for a typical, middle-of-the-road institution.
Walking the campus, for example, it’s impossible not to notice the statue of a genial Ronald Reagan, beaming at the proudly conservative campus. And Hillsdale has made itself an institutional hub for conservatives, what the conservative stalwart Clarence Thomas praised as a “shining city on a hill.” With its extensive internship programs, Hillsdale explicitly promises to prepare students to push America in a more conservative direction.
Today, Hillsdale’s president, Larry P. Arnn, has doubled down on its difference from the norm. As chair of the 1776 Commission, for instance, Arnn and his co-authors warned that most American universities had become “hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship.” Not Hillsdale.
That difference, that uniqueness, was miles apart from the religious fundamentalism of Bob Jones. But the principle was the same: Conservative universities have flourished if they can sell themselves as something distinctly separate from mainstream higher education.
It hasn’t been enough, however, merely to be different. Conservative institutions have also had to prove to their potential students that they would remain different — that they would never change their steadfast adherence to their conservative visions. That’s why successful institutions like Bob Jones and Hillsdale endlessly repeat their commitments to conservative ideals. At Bob Jones, it was written in from the beginning. Its 1926 charter specified that it could “never be amended, modified, altered, or changed.” At Hillsdale, the commitment showed up in a well-publicized refusal to accept any federal aid for its students. With money came strings, and Hillsdale demonstrated its enduring adherence to the dream of conservative independence by turning it down.
Could today’s campus-storming conservatives score similar long-term successes? As Rufo promised, he hopes to create something different for conservatives, “a public university that reflects your values.” And there is certainly no reason why conservative leaders today can’t have a marked influence on prominent universities both public and private, as Mitch Daniels has shown in his leadership of Purdue University.
Today’s campus shakedowns are more about the ballot box than the lecture hall.
But today’s conservative coup attempt at Florida’s New College shows no signs of learning from the past. Rufo’s slapdash culture-war grandstanding is more T.T. Shields than Mitch Daniels. The New College grab ignores the basic lessons of higher-ed history: Conservative colleges have succeeded when they’ve filled a niche, but public institutions must satisfy a wide range of ideas and interests.
As Chase, the UNC president, showed almost a hundred years ago, to be a “real university” a college must answer to the norms of international higher education, not the rhetoric of Republican primary races. And to succeed, conservative institutions have had to pledge unshakeable fidelity to their conservative ideals, which today’s politicians will be unable to do. Any changes they can make will be just temporary grabs for attention. In the end, today’s campus shakedowns are more about the ballot box than the lecture hall.
