Russell Kirk on Higher Education

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | January 8, 2020 | Allen Mendenhall

[karpov]

Russell Kirk isn’t known as a policy wonk. The Great Books, not the mathematical or statistical models of economic technicians, were his organon of choice. He devoted essays to broad, perennial themes like “the moral imagination,” “liberal learning,” and “the permanent things.”

Read his numerous columns about higher education, however, and you might come away with a different impression, one of Kirk as a political strategist with a strong grasp of educational policy.

Kirk wrote on a wide variety of issues involving higher education: accreditation, academic freedom, tenure, curriculum, vocational training, community colleges, adult education, college presidents, textbooks, fraternities and Greek life, enrollment, seminaries, tuition, teachers’ unions, collective bargaining, student activism, British universities, urban versus rural schools, boards of trustees, university governance, the hard sciences, grade inflation, lowering academic standards, libraries, private versus public schooling, civics education, sex education, school vouchers, university presses, and more.

One of his go-to subjects implicates several of those issues: federal subsidies. He believed that federal money threatened the mission and integrity of universities in numerous areas.

For starters, he believed that federal subsidies—and, it must be added, foundation grants—created perverse incentives for researchers, who might conform to the benefactor’s “preferences” and “value judgments.”[1] Recalling the proverb that “[t]he man who pays the piper calls the tune,”[2] he cautioned against financial dependency on outside influences, which, he worried, could impose ideological conditions on grants to advance or purge particular viewpoints.

Moreover, the grantors, whether they were foundations or the government, would, he believed, quantify the value of their funded work according to measurable outcome assessments that were “easily tabulated and defensible.”[3] The intrinsic value of reading Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, or Euripides, however, is not easily assessed in instrumental terms.

[Starboard]

The intrinsic value of reading Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, or Euripides, however, is not easily assessed in instrumental terms.

****************

I think this august group would be very dismayed at the exploitative nature of higher education today where the classics and critical thinking skills are given short shrift, if not completely ignored. Instead schools focus on political indoctrination, harvesting the financial benefits of no risk (to them) student loans, and the expansion of bloated administrations.

[junta]

You bet the prez or whatever the head shaman calls itself of my local cow college/football team, well you should see the hilltop shack allotted to such a worthy. IMO we bypass these hostile pockets of resistance and let them wither and 50 years from now they will emerge like the Japanese left behinders of WWII.

[Carpe Cerevisi]

[wintertime]

Re: Leave Behind

Yes! Yes! Yes! Free or nearly free education exists NOW! The missing ingredient is certified testing.

Yes, some fields require laboratory and clinical rotations. These need a brick and mortar setting....BUT...It should cost my associate a quarter of million dollars to practice his profession. Most of the material he learned was **ROTE** and could have learned at home through the Internet and used textbooks.

It should cost a quarter of a million to become a doctor or engineer. The more reasonable cost is a tenth of that.

[wintertime]

That sentence should read:

Should it cost my associate a quarter of a million dollars to practice his profession?