Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower rejected advice to land hardened veterans of the Italian campaigns on the beaches of Normandy.
Success in that desperate gamble, Ike concluded, was more likely with men who had not yet grappled with the enemy. To do the implausible required men who did not understand the challenge so well.
The National Association of Scholars, founded in 1987, has been fighting for a very long time. Its cause is defending academic freedom, the principles of free society — liberty, equality, and responsible citizenship — and the heritage of Western civilization.
It has battled declining academic standards, multiculturalism, and political correctness. It has opposed the promiscuous application of critical race theory, racial and ethnic preferences taking the place of merit, administrative bloat, and the imposition of diversity, equity, and inclusion, an Orwellian euphemism for racial, ethnic, and sex discrimination.
This time last year it proposed a Curriculum of Liberty, beginning with a withering indictment: colleges are failing to protect our national independence. Instead universities are training personnel for the “managerial-therapeutic state” and indoctrinating students in a “perverse ideology of ‘liberation’” at once tyrannical and depraved.
To a traditional focus on philosophy, history, literature, and language, the association proposes a fuller course of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, along with military science, engineering, computer science, musicology, and practical knowledge of law, business, medicine, and self-defense.
The author of the plan, Dr. David Randall, strikes a militant tone, but his trumpet sounds retreat. Like the wary veteran of too many battles, he doesn’t believe that our failing universities can be retaken in this generation.
“The advocates of American higher education must continue to support the nation and the republic,” he writes, “but from a position of exile from its institutions — above all, from its colleges and universities. American higher education must provide Americans the ability to endure this regime and the tools to reclaim the republic.”
We aren’t going to redeem higher education from a foxhole.
We’re going to do it by marching forward — by persuading Americans of the basic truths about freedom and exposing freedom’s enemies at home and abroad.
This will require securing a sufficient share of popular media to articulate the message in language so plain and clear as to win the assent of the large proportion of moderate, patriotic Americans and relying on their sovereign power to reform our existing institutions of higher education, most of which are funded by taxation and can be subordinated to the public will.
We will redeem higher education by reviving moderation, renewing our lost commitment to institutional neutrality in the marketplace of ideas.
We must distinguish between scholarship and activism and reward faculty members who understand that distinction. To professors who want to dabble in politics, we say: Demonstrate the courage of your convictions in the public arena. Imposing your partisanship on captive audiences in our classrooms is cowardice. We aren’t going to tolerate it and we aren’t going to pay for it.
We must end activism on campus by students, who ought to have too much studying to do to devote time to hanging out in crowds on campus expressing opinions about the cause of the moment. We must revive the simple truth that college is about learning from people who know more than you rather than about self-expression.
In their arrogance our universities have ignored, betrayed, and abused our trust. We must strengthen institutional oversight. We must hold public university leaders accountable to the public.
We must strip academic departments that pack their faculties with ideological fellow travelers of their role in hiring and replace administrators who go along with this pernicious nonsense.
We must also start treating college professors like adults, holding them accountable for their performance and paying them like professionals. The idea of paying a newly appointed assistant professor less than the market pays the manager of a coffee shop is appalling. It’s also self-defeating.
A tiny number of talented people dedicated to the life of the mind and willing to do without security and comfort will accept such terms. The rest who accept them are mediocrities and activists, and they will continue to be frustrated, angry, and alienated.
In the marketplace of ideas, as in any other, you get what you pay for.
We can redeem higher education without retreat. And we can accomplish it in this generation.
Jack Warren is an authority on the history of American politics and public life and editor of The American Crisis, an online journal of history and commentary (www.americanideal.org). His newest book is, "Freedom: The Enduring Importance of the American Revolution." Read Jack Warren's Reports — More Here.
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