Reforming Our Universities

FrontPage Magazine ^ | Frontpagemag.com

[Michael van der Galien]

[Editor's note: It’s a modern-day tale of David vs. Goliath. In 2003, David Horowitz launched a reform campaign that made up with an ambitious goal what it lacked in its limited resources: to defend and restore academic standards to liberal arts programs in America’s universities and to challenge a corrupt and politicized academic culture that had hijacked traditional liberal education for the purposes of liberal indoctrination.

Aided by a shoestring staff, Horowitz took on an academic status quo bankrolled by millions of dollars and supported by vast apparatus extending from the Democratic Party, to the education media and the local press in every university town. Assailed by the academic Left and its allies, Horowitz also found his campaign shunned by much of the conservative intellectual establishment, including its leading journals of opinion, which attacked the academic freedom campaign when they deigned to notice it at all.

But despite the heavy odds against him, Horowitz persevered, eventually succeeding in getting a number of prominent schools to adopt the principles of his campaign and in raising national awareness about the state of abuses in academia. In his new book, Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign For An Academic Bill Of Rights, Horowitz chronicles his campaign to restore integrity to the academic enterprise in the face of overwhelming opposition and shows that while the battle for America’s universities is not yet won, it is very far from lost.

[wintertime]

I support all legal and ethical efforts to reform our nation's colleges and universities.

If our nation's young people started college fully capable of and prepared to defend their faith and the values of our Founding Fathers, their Marxist professors would wither before their righteousness. Instead of Marxist clubs on campus there would be Judeo Christian organizations. Sororities and fraternities would support and uphold the values taught at home.

Solution: The surest way to reform these colleges and universities is to shut down our nation's K-12 schools!

Solution: Conservatives must work to provide our nation's children with private conservative schools that **thoroughly** integrates our nation's founding principles and their family's specific Judeo Christian values into every minute of their education day.

Yes,...reform of our universities is absolutely necessary but we must start far earlier than age 18 and Horowitz generally tends not to pay much attention to this.

Also...Yes! We can provide every child in this nation with a conservative education. What is needed is an understanding that:

1) Government K-12 schools must be shut down.

2) Private K-12 educational settings are needed and a will to make it happen.

3) We must stop thinking that K-12 education can happen only in large prison-like schools. With today's technology we could have very inexpensive homeschools, one-room schools in the homes of neighbors, day care based schools, and church sponsored schools.

[Albertafriend]

While I agree with what you are saying about the importance and value of home-schooling, it does seem to me to be a kind of chicken vs egg situation. Many parents have been providing home-schooling for many many years now and many have been very successful at it and the same for many private conservative value oriented schools. But the real war for the graduates of these efforts begins the minute they step foot into the modern college and university and SADLY this part of this excellent article focuses attention on a real dilemna for the conservatives who say they are concerned about what the radical left has been doing in the realms of education for over 100 years now.

“The calculated distance which the conservative establishment took towards our efforts reflected the same disposition that lay behind Buckley’s failure to organize a campaign for reforming the university system, despite his prescient critique of its curriculum at Yale. While precise in their diagnosis of what is wrong with the university curriculum, conservatives have remained reluctant to pursue a course of action to correct it. Conservatives are uncomfortable with organized movements generally and institutional reform efforts in particular. They are especially uneasy with conflicts that might bring them into collision with the intellectual establishment, or that would invite unscrupulous ad hominem attacks from the opposition. Ours involved all three.

There were significant exceptions to this abstinence. I did receive important support for my campus appearances from Young America’s Foundation and the Leadership Institute, while Human Events was a conservative publication that gave attention to our efforts. The talk radio network and Fox News Channel did feature our cases and played an important role in raising the visibility of scandals such as that involving Professor Ward Churchill, which greatly helped our cause. Sean Hannity, co-anchor of the Hannity & Colmes show also devoted an unprecedented five segments to my book The Professors, helping to put our concerns before the general public and induce our opponents to take us more seriously. But these media outlets were also viewed from a distance by conservative intellectuals, and were regarded with ill-concealed contempt by the university audience we were attempting to reach.”

This is another wake-up call!

[abc1]

Based on the performance of the Ivy League educated crowd currently controlling our economy, colleges and universities are long over do for a reformation. The first problem is that K-12 educators are not preparing students for even entry level jobs. As such, these kids graduate from high school literally doomed to consignment to some Orwellian institution of brain washing at the hands of some tenured humanities, social studies or art charlatan. Parents must insist a high school graduates have the education that a person after 18 years on this earth can find basic employment. That is, when universities know they do not have a guaranteed flow of bodies from lousy government run K-12 institutions, they will be forced to more accommodating to those fewer prospects having fewer dollars. A step in direct would mean taking control of schools away from the government. With that, the control of the NEA and its related organizations is effectively severed and thereby putting parents in control. Further, schools would no longer be funded by property taxes and instead these schools would have to compete in a free market environment like church sponsored and other private institutions. That means catering to the needs of parents and students. Catering to the customer. This would also have a beneficial side affect of depriving wasteful bureaucracies from the money they took for granted previously. Yet another state entity would have to compete for the dollars they deem theirs by bureaucratic fiat.

Another step in this reformation is to dissolve the government run financial aid racket which has for years confiscated billions of dollars from taxpayers who in return receive nothing return for their kids since they do not fit into the assigned correct victim group. Whereas the first proposal deprives colleges and universities from a guaranteed flow of bodies, this second proposal deprives these institutions of guaranteed money. Again, if colleges and universities must compete for students dollars based on the merit of the school, we would see a quick disposition of the many touchy-feely curricula which have for too long infected young minds with abhorrent ideas which have caused the anti-(fil in the blank) feelings which then infest these minds as they graduate. The more these institutions have to compete and therefore evolve and hence improve to meet the expectations of potential students and tuition payers.