Governors and legislatures of Republican states—such as Florida, Ohio, and Texas—are doing good and necessary work both in establishing centers for education in civics and the liberal arts and in reforming state-run colleges such as the New College of Florida. But if they don’t want these temporary victories to be just that, they need to consider the future of higher education, particularly the future of Ph.D. granting programs.
Rather than entrusting the next generation of academics to current programs, structured according to leftist, anti-American, and anti-truth ideology, responsible parties in state government should consider establishing state graduate institutes that bring together the best that the humanistic disciplines have to offer.
As John Ellis recounts in “The Breakdown of Higher Education” (2020), it was already the case in 1999 that professors who were “left-of-center” dramatically outnumbered their “right-of-center” colleagues by a ratio of 5-to-1, generally, but much more radically in the humanities. English departments at that time had a ratio of 88-to-3, and politics was similar at 81-to-2. The problem, especially in our moment, is not the voting record of the faculty, but the anti-academic ideological position which is now standard among the campus left.
Roger Kimball described this position in “Tenured Radicals” (1990). It is ideological, meaning “not simply a set of opinions” but, in the words of political philosopher Hannah Arendt, composed of “isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise,” not grappling with the complexity of the world. It fails to do so because it is “interlinguistic,” because according to this ideology, “neither philosophy, nor literary theory, nor even history refers to the real world.” It is not open to rational debate because it does not conceive of its work as oriented toward truth, which the philosopher Josef Pieper argued is the fundamental focus of all truly academic study.
That this ideological position has become standard in state-run Ph.D. programs helps explain my experience in a first-semester historiography seminar. Such seminars are foundational for doctoral students, as they examine the varieties of historical practice and begin to think critically about the vocation of the historian. But I found less critical discussion in that seminar at an R1 research university than in my senior history seminar at the small, Catholic University of Dallas. Why? Two reasons: the lack of desire for truth as such, and the lack of adequate knowledge to pursue it.
Take one example: In both courses, I read a book by a thinker who has been a major influence on not only many historians, but on student culture at schools like Columbia, particularly in their pro-Palestine, anti-Israel protests: Edward Said’s “Orientalism.” Said’s thesis is essentially that the West has created an image of the East as inferior, more given to passion rather than reason, for the sake of justifying colonialism, and he argues that this has been the case from the ancient Greeks until the present of his writing.
At my R1 Ph.D. program, our seminar barely considered whether this argument was true but rather featured effervescent praise for the author and considered how we could apply his idea to our research. At the University of Dallas, however, the question of truth was central. The students in the course, thanks to shared studies in the core curriculum where we studied Greek tragedy and the Catholic poetry of Dante Alighieri, both subjects of Said’s ire, could assess how his interpretation presented a misunderstanding of these works in the service of his political agenda.
What this story illustrates is not only the unfortunate failings of publicly-funded graduate education in the U.S., but also the way forward. Responsible state governments should establish graduate institutes to educate the next generation of professors. These graduate institutes would seek to give its students a foundational education in the disciplines of literature, history, philosophy, politics, and theology, while specializing in one of these, allowing them to see the truth beyond the current constraints of state university programs.
A model for this exists: the University of Dallas’ Institute for Philosophic Studies, which brings students of different disciplines together in a sequence of interdisciplinary core courses. The core sequence is now composed on a ”Great Books” model, such that students take courses from ”Homer and Virgil” to ”Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky,” becoming familiar with the literature, philosophy, theology, and political philosophy of the greatest Western thinkers.
But the Institute’s core was once arranged as a historical sequence, which suggests another model for states to consider in organizing a program of their own. By allowing states to test out different variations of such institutes, federalism provides a solution to the problem better than the current academic status quo.
In founding such graduate institutes, state governments should seek to find capable administrators and faculty who not only support the mission of liberal arts education—namely the pursuit of truth and the formation of free citizens—but are committed to their particular states and these institutions. Recent events in higher education show that new administrators can lead to the collapse of good programs, but committed leadership could lead to a revitalization of the humanities disciplines which shape the imagination and sharpen our ability to reason.
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