Posted on 01/13/2023 7:04:09 PM PST by ProtectOurFreedom
The most significant political story of the past half-century is the activist Left’s “long march through the institutions.” Beginning in the 1960s, left-wing activists and intellectuals, inspired by theorists such as Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci and New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse, made a concerted effort to embed their ideas in education, government, philanthropy, media, and other important sectors.
This process came to spectacular fruition following the 2020 death of George Floyd, when it seemed that every prestige institution in the United States got busy advancing the same ideological line on race, gender, and culture—which, whether they knew it or not, mimicked the precise themes that the old radicals had originally proposed.
The long march through the institutions, in other words, was complete.
But conservatives, too, have updated their playbook. They have read their Gramsci and have begun to understand that ideological capture poses a grave threat to the American system. President Donald Trump shook conservatives out of their complacency with instinctual, if sometimes crude, cultural countermeasures. Florida governor Ron DeSantis has built on this approach, offering a sophisticated policy agenda for protecting families against captured bureaucracies.
Last week, DeSantis raised the stakes and proposed, for the first time, a strategy for reversing the long march through the institutions, beginning with what Marcuse believed was the initial revolutionary institution: the university. The governor appointed a slate of new trustees to the board of the New College of Florida, a notoriously left-wing campus, similar to that of Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington. DeSantis tasked the new board with transforming it into, to quote the governor’s chief of staff, the “Hillsdale of the South”—in other words, a classical liberal arts college that provides a distinctly traditional brand of education and scholarship.
(Excerpt) Read more at christopherrufo.com ...
The Florida state legislature has long been frustrated with New College, the state’s smallest public university, for repeatedly failing to meet recruitment targets, achieve financial stability, or improve its dismal dropout and graduation rates. The college accepts almost anyone, with a 74 percent admissions rate, but few choose to attend: the “yield,” or matriculation rate, is a grim 13 percent.In recent years, legislators have contemplated shutting down the college altogether and transferring its assets elsewhere in the public university system. But, in a dramatic move, DeSantis proposed a last-ditch alternative: bring in a new board of reformers and turn the school around.
I (i.e., author Rufo) was honored to be appointed to this board, along with friends and colleagues from the conservative movement, including Claremont Institute scholar Charles Kesler, Hillsdale College vice president Matthew Spalding, former Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein, and others. Governor DeSantis has tasked us with something that has never been done: INSTITUTIONAL RECAPTURE. If we are successful, the effort can serve as a model for other states.
The premise of this reform is simple. Voters in Florida, who charter and fund the public-university system through their legislative representatives, deserve to have their values reflected and transmitted in their public institutions. Left-wing hegemony over public universities, in academic departments and administrations, is antithetical to free inquiry and civil debate. With the New College of Florida transformed into a classical institution, voters will have access to a wider range of voices, scholars, and opportunities for their children. At a moment when universities are merging into a homogenous, “diversity, equity, and inclusion”-style morass, it is essential that the people’s elected representatives create meaningful alternatives.
This task won’t be easy. The legacy media has already sought to portray this effort as one of “barbarians at the gates of the university.” But the truth points in the other direction. As esteemed historian Daniel Boorstin observed in 1968, the activists of the New Left—that is, the progenitors of the “woke” ideologies that have now seized America’s institutions—were “the new barbarians” who rejected the ideals of the American Founding and sought to tear down society. “We must not be deceived by our own hypersensitive liberal consciences, nor by the familiar, respected labels under which the New Barbarians like to travel,” Boorstin wrote. “If American civilization is to survive, if we are to resist and defeat the New Barbarism, we must see it for what it is.”
...snip...
Ours is a project of recapture and reinvention. Conservatives have the opportunity finally to demonstrate an effective countermeasure against the long march through the institutions. The Left’s permanent bureaucracy will be dead-set against this gambit, but if it succeeds, a new era for higher education—and for the country—is possible.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a leading free-market think tank.
This is absolutely OUTSTANDING. I had not heard that Desantis was taking on higher education like this and has launched an effort to recapture the radical far-left institutions of higher ed. This is exactly where the battle must be taken. Every pernicious, destructive, anti-American, communist idea in the past 70 years has emerged from American universities and they have trained several generations of skulls-full-of-mush.
This Desantis effort in Florida and the Hillsdale College effort to expand through charter schools around the country have real promise to push back on the communist efforts.
See also...
"Conservative Hillsdale College Expanding Charter School Program"
Newsmax, April 10, 2022.The Hillsdale network now has 24 schools in 13 states and hopes to expand even further, but its push is sparking concerns from critics who say it uses taxpayer money to educate students through a political-leaning agenda, reports The New York Times.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, has recently invited Hillsdale to start 50 of the charter schools in his state through the use of public funds that includes $32 million that the state set aside for charter schools.
Lee said he sees the expansion as an effort to expand "informed patriotism" in the state, and told lawmakers that he believes Hillsdale College's efforts are a "good fit for Tennessee."
Critics, however, say such plans allow states to use public money for political-leaning schools. [POF - that is just too rich!]
Hillsdale currently sponsors 22 member charter schools that get a full suite of its curriculum and training. Two other public schools are regarded as affiliates using the Hillsdale curriculum, with eight more ready to open, including one in Tennessee. Applications have been filed for more of the charter schools, which include three of the 50 additional schools Hillsdale says it will open in Tennessee. Part of Hillsdale's offerings includes the "1776 Curriculum" which paints the United States as an "exceptionally good country."
What DeSantis has done here is crucial, but it is important for those of us who are activists to remember that we have a role to play for ourselves.
Our job is NOT just to (on election day) go, vote, and then sit around twiddling our thumbs for the next 729 days until the next election day comes around.
We can influence and pressure education completely from the outside!
I heard Rufo on Beck the other day. Sounds like a real plan happening.
A lot of insiders have been saying for many years that the root of American cultural problems is in its universities. The intellectual and social atmosphere in those places has long since turned poisonous. It was clear where this was going way back, in W.Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale”, 1951. The rot was well emplaced by the time of Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”, 1987. Angelo Codevilla defined the modern problem, in 2010, created by these fanatically ideological universities, that created a malicious leadership class.
Since politics is downstream of culture, and American culture is driven largely by its elites, and these elites are brainwashed in universities, the route of transmission is obvious.
I dont see how this can be resolved at this point. You are stuck with millions of poisoned minds ruling every institution, and these people are sick for life (people cant really be persuaded en masse, nearly all are what they are after childhood) and there is no alternate pool from which they can be individually replaced. It will take a genuine revolution in which all institutions are destroyed and rebuilt from scratch.
Yes. All of us should write to our governors and request that they do what Desantis has done and to evaluate adding a Hillsdale charter school in your state. Put the pressure on them.
“I don’t see how this can be resolved at this point.”
No doubt it is a TOUGH challenge, but the challenge was equally immense to the communists and radical leftists in the 50s and 60s. But they took a long view and got the changes they wanted put in place. It took them 60 to 70 years and reversing it will take equally long. You have to retrain two, three or even four generations of Americans.
Desantis is making it happen in Florida. You know that the leftists will be out en force to destroy this project. It’s going to be interesting watching this play out.
Hillsdale College has survived and prospered in spite of the tall odds against it.
Probably the only possibility is something like DeSantis has started in Florida. People and governments who agree need to create conservative, or simply true, open universities that teach critical thinking and factual history, and allow all viewpoints. Create real educational as opposed to indoctrination institutions to compete with the schools ruined by leftism and closed mindedness.
Create genuine alternatives all around the nation to compete with the indoctrination institutions. I think large numbers of parents would opt for alternatives if available.
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