Renewal in the University - ERIC

1 Jay SchalinJA N UA RY 2 015 Renewal in the UniversityHow Academic Centers Restore the Spirit of InquiryAbout the Author Jay Schalin joined the Pope Center in August 2007. A Philadelphia native, he began his writing career as a freelance journalist for the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey and wrote for several other papers in New Jersey and Delaware. He also worked as a software engineer for Computer Sciences Corporation. Schalin has a in computer science from Richard Stockton College in New Jersey and an in economics from the University of articles have appeared in Forbes, the Washington Times, Fox News Online, News and World Report, Investor s Business Daily, Human Events, and American Thinker.

2 His op-eds have been published by the McClatchy News Service and the News & Observer. He has been interviewed on ESPN, National Public Radio, and UNC-TV, and his work has been featured on ABC News and Fox News The O Reilly Factor. He is a regular columnist for photography: Alexander Hamilton Institute by Mike VerostekRenewal in the UniversityHow Academic Centers Restore the Spirit of InquiryJay SchalinCopyright 2015 John W. Pope Center for Higher Education PolicyThis paper is available on the Pope Center website: of this paper is encouraged as long as proper credit is given to the author and the Pope 1935-3510353 E. Six Forks RoadSuite 200 Raleigh, NC : IN THE University : HOW ACADEMIC CENTERS RESTORE THE SPIRIT OF INQUIRYE xecutive Summary Renewal in the University : How Academic Centers Restore the Spirit of InquiryAt the dawn of the new millennium, American higher education faced a crisis.

3 Dogmatic philosophies of multiculturalism, postmodernism, and statism were sweeping away thousands of years of Western thought. The academy was being scrubbed of free market economics, traditional attitudes toward Western civilization, time-tested methods of scholarship, and the general philosophy of liberty. Into this breach stepped a new concept: privately funded academic centers that preserve and promote the knowledge and perspectives that are disappearing from the academy, with an emphasis on undergraduate education. In 2000, the James Madison Program at Princeton University opened its doors. Today, the number of such centers, institutes, and programs that roughly follow the Madison model (or that of its sole predecessor, the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University ) exceeds report discusses many of these centers, some aspects of the way they are funded, and the charitable organizations that initiated or support them.

4 It shows the myriad of programs they provide for students, often on a shoestring budget, and explains how they are able to survive in environments that range from welcoming to hostile. The report includes discussion of four issues: Are they political entities or do they reflect objective scholarship? Who controls the curriculum of these centers? What are the rights of the donors? And what does their emergence mean for the future of academia and the nation?With a few exceptions, these centers, from the Alexander Hamilton Institute (on the cover) to the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke, are not just surviving but thriving, thanks to their directors tact and strict adherence to objective principles of inquiry.

5 As they continue to prove their value and grow in number, they give great hope for the future of the American academy. We appreciate the generous funding of this paper by the Thomas W. Smith Foundation. 3 January 2015 INTRODUCTIONA decade ago the future of academia seemed bleak to many September of 2007 the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy held a conference in which a series of higher education analysts and academics cited abuses of politicization and the erosion of objective inquiry. The question was even raised whether American higher education was capable of reform or was simply year before then, Michael A. Deshaies was dismayed by the results of a project he was involved with at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

6 ISI s Civic Literacy Report indicated that students made just about no gains in their knowledge of our nation s history or government. In fact, at some highly prestigious universities, students actually lost civic knowledge. A few years earlier, John A. Allison IV, the CEO of BB&T Bank headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was concerned that college graduates were increasingly unaware of how an economy works, and also worried about negative attitudes they often held about were resigned to the general failure of an effort lasting several decades to fund individual professorships focused on capitalism or traditional views of history and politics.

7 One of those was James Piereson, head of the John M. Olin Foundation, which endowed several dozen faculty movement to introduce intellectual diversity statutorily, often with David Horowitz s Academic Bill of Rights as a model, fizzled around the same time. As many as 20 state legislatures had explored the possibility until it became apparent that implementation was likely to cause more problems than it that the Ivory Tower was only discussing one side of the story seemed everywhere. In 2007, Thomson-Reuters Web of Science published a list of the 37 most cited authors of books in the humanities and social sciences. All but three or four can be firmly identified as holding ideas primarily on the left side of the political spectrum none on the right.

8 The top three were French communist Michel Foucault, French communist Pierre Bourdieu, and French communist Jacques Derrida. The rest of the list was equally depressing, including three members of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, MIT anarchist Noam Chomsky, and, of course, Karl Marx. To say that the left had conquered academia seemed an understatement the institution of higher education has long been moving incrementally away from the spirit of objective inquiry to dogmatic left-wing uniformity, chasing all non-conforming ideas from in the UniversityHow Academic Centers Restore the Spirit of InquiryJay Schalin4 Renewal IN THE University .

9 HOW ACADEMIC CENTERS RESTORE THE SPIRIT OF INQUIRYYet, outside of academia, among the educated classes, the ideas of thinkers identified as conservative or libertarian the Founding Fathers, Edmund Burke, Alexis De Tocqueville, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek are increasingly part of the national discussion. Those names are more likely to come up in a conversation among informed but ordinary, non-academic people than almost all of the names on the Thomson-Reuters list. Their popularity didn t matter in academia, however ideas and writers that deviate from a narrow range on the left were largely absent. The Ivory Tower seemed not just occupied but impregnable; those who sought reform or restoration were deeply frustrated.

10 Today, however, many reform-minded people are more hopeful. The prospects for restoring the best of academia s intellectual traditions look brighter in one very promising way: the academic landscape is now dotted with 150 or so academic centers that promote the open and objective study of Western civilization, capitalism, and political theory, often against the prevailing campus winds. Some are not just thriving but bringing renown to their institutions. And the more closely one looks at the phenomenon of their emerging presence, the more it seems possible that they may end up redeeming the academy in remarkable SURROUNDING THE CENTERST hree controversies dominate discussion of the new academic centers with conservative or free-market is whether they are political entities or whether they seriously observe the common standards of objective scholarship and address intellectual needs of the campus.