\n<\/p>\n
A small conservative revolution has swept the humanities at some US colleges and universities. Its vanguard are new programs, called centers or institutes, that have begun cropping up at schools in recent years. Often funded by outside donors or earmarks from state governments, the programs tend to bear names featuring words such as \u201ccivic\u201d, \u201cfreedom\u201d or \u201cclassical\u201d.<\/p>\n
These centers do credible teaching and research, and are usually not explicitly political. But their goal, to counter what conservatives see as hegemonically leftwing teaching, arguably is.<\/p>\n
[There is] a sense that American universities as institutions have deviated from … the fundamental values of the nationWilliam Inboden<\/p>\n
Their rise has created a peculiar irony: just as the economic utility of the humanities is being questioned, and academic departments are gutted on budgetary or ideological grounds, some schools have found money for heady, old-fashioned curricula emphasizing the \u201cgreat books\u201d of western civilization and the literature of what used to be called the western canon.<\/p>\n
While students arriving at some universities this fall may have thought ancient Greek to be dead and French lit struggling for survival, students at these new centers are discussing the philosophical ideas of the ancient world, Christian thought, the Enlightenment, the founding of the American republic, and reading the literature of William Shakespeare and John Milton.<\/p>\n
Students at the University of Florida\u2019s Hamilton school for classical and civic education, for example, can choose this semester from courses such as \u201cWhat is the Common Good?\u201d, \u201cJust War\u201d, \u201cGreat Books of the Ancient World\u201d, \u201cLiberty and Order\u201d and \u201cThe Rule of Law\u201d.<\/p>\n
<\/span>The University of Florida campus in Gainesville, Florida, on 4 October.<\/span> Photograph: James Gilbert\/Getty Images<\/p>\n As the Trump administration attempts to bend major universities to its will, and many Republican politicians accuse higher education of being a hotbed of leftwing ideological indoctrination, schools are feeling pressure to demonstrate that their faculty and curricula are hospitable to conservatives.<\/p>\n William Inboden, a conservative academic and the executive vice-president of the University of Texas at Austin, argued in a recent essay that the American people have lost trust in US higher education, in part because of \u201ca sense that American universities as institutions have deviated from, or even turned against, the fundamental values of the nation and what was once quaintly known as \u2018the American way of life\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n University administrators and state governments have embraced these centers as an end-run strategy, said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Trinity College Dublin who until recently taught in the US. Academic departments tend to resist outside reforms, Faggioli said, and freestanding \u201ccenters\u201d are a way for university administrations to add conservative-coded spaces to their schools while avoiding messy confrontations with existing departments.<\/p>\n Some of the best known of these programs are Stanford\u2019s civics initiative, conceived in 2017 and expanded in 2021, and the University of Texas\u2019s school of civic leadership and Civitas institute, founded in 2023. The University of Arizona\u2019s center for the philosophy of freedom dates to 2008, but recently hired several new faculty members.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, the government of Utah went even further \u2013 not only establishing by state law a center for civic excellence at Utah State University, but giving that center statutory control over the university\u2019s entire general education curriculum. Students there will take new required courses on the \u201cfoundational primary texts\u201d that \u201ccontinue to shape society\u2019s self-understanding, the American experience, and the modern world\u201d.<\/p>\n According to the legislation, they will study the most famous of the dead male Europeans \u2013 such as Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Montesquieu, Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville \u2013 as well as Virginia Woolf and Chinua Achebe.<\/p>\n <\/span>Students at Utah State University will take required courses on the likes of Homer, Shakespeare and Plato, the last depicted in this marble statue.<\/span> Photograph: Panasevich\/Getty Images\/iStockphoto<\/p>\n And last month the National Endowment for the Humanities announced a $10.4m grant, the largest in its history, to the Tikvah Fund, a conservative Jewish organization, for a project that will include the \u201cdevelopment of university courses \u2026 to be offered in partnership with new western civilization BA programs at various major academic centers\u201d.<\/p>\n For some academics whose research interests or views have not been in vogue, the changing winds may come as welcome news \u2013 at least by the relative, and still mostly bleak, standards of the academic job market.<\/p>\n [With] these centers … you could end up with the same kind of groupthink that they were concerned about, just going in the other directionMusa al-Gharbi<\/p>\n Musa al-Gharbi is the author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, and a sociologist who studies politics, culture and institutions. He noted that these centers are hiring people \u201cwho do decent work, who do serious scholarship for the most part\u201d, but in some cases \u201cprobably wouldn\u2019t have a job in academia were it not for this\u201d, because their work is too conservative, too interdisciplinary or too \u201coutside the lines\u201d to appeal to typical academic departments at mainstream universities.<\/p>\n The Hamilton school\u2019s faculty at the University of Florida include a scholar working on a \u201chistory of conservative critics of higher education\u201d. The Civitas institute\u2019s fellows include economists, law professors and philosophers of a conservative, libertarian or pro-market bent \u2013 including John Yoo, the lawyer who, while a White House official under George W Bush, famously wrote a series of legal memos justifying the use of torture to extract information from suspected terrorists.<\/p>\n In some cases, these new centers have been pressed on unwitting or resistant universities; some faculty at Utah State University have sharply criticized the new center there and accompanying curricular reforms as a kind of hostile takeover of the internal affairs of the university. Similarly, the University of Florida has said that it did not ask for the Hamilton school, according to reporting by Inside Higher Ed.<\/p>\n <\/span>The Morningside institute at Columbia university holds discussions on Dante\u2019s Inferno and St Francis of Assisi, painted here by Jos\u00e9 Ribera. <\/span> Photograph: Heritage Images\/Getty Images<\/p>\n These centers bear some resemblance to the \u201cpara-educational\u201d institutes that began springing up at some prominent universities starting about 10 years ago: independent centers funded by conservative donors and sited near universities, but not affiliated with them, to provide extracurricular courses and events about conservative, classical or Christian ideas. They include the Morningside institute at Columbia, the Abigail Adams institute at Harvard, and the Zephyr institute at Stanford. This month, the Morningside institute is holding discussions on Dante\u2019s Inferno, St Francis of Assisi, and Roger Scruton, the conservative British philosopher.<\/p>\n Unlike those programs, these new centers are formally part of universities; like them, however, they tend to reflect an implicit view that the American humanities \u2013 allegedly consumed by ideas from critical theory, Marxism, postcolonial thought and the like \u2013 have drifted too far left, suffer from ideological conformity and promote an excessively negative view of the US\u2019s history and place in the world.<\/p>\n In an email, Josiah Ober, a professor of political science and classics who co-directs Stanford\u2019s Civics initiative, noted that state governments have directly established some of these new centers and that it would be mostly \u201cfair to say that the motives of the legislators in question \u2026 include a concern for viewpoint diversity in university faculties perceived as being overwhelmingly more progressive than conservative\u201d.<\/p>\n Al-Gharbi, the sociologist, believes that ideological conformity and a lack of conservative views are a genuine problem in higher education, but that the \u201creception\u201d of these centers is complicated by the fact that the right is elsewhere engaged in attacking academic programs, such as women\u2019s, ethnic, and area studies, whose ideas they find objectionable.<\/p>\n That makes conservatives\u2019 enthusiasm for plurality of thought feel hypocritical, he said \u2013 and also risks making these centers more isolated from their broader universities \u201cthan might be ideal for them to achieve their actual goals\u201d. He added: \u201cOne of the dangers of these centers is that you could end up with the same kind of groupthink that they were concerned about, just going in the other direction.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet he and other academics also said that it would be wrong to assume that the revival of interest in the western tradition will only attract people who are politically conservative.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have all types,\u201d said Charles McNamara, a professor of classics at the University of Minnesota. Some \u201cclassics undergraduates wear Oxford shirts, some of them wear cutoff shorts\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/span>Students walk through the engineering education and research center at the University of Texas at Austin, on 25 August.<\/span> Photograph: Jay Janner\/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images<\/p>\n Similarly, Dhananjay Jagannathan, a professor of philosophy at Hunter College, said that he knows someone \u201cwho was hired by a small, private institution for one of these rightwing-coded \u2018great books\u2019 programs, and he is a socialist, and I don\u2019t think he hides that about himself\u201d. Jagannathan is \u201ccautiously optimistic\u201d about the programs; at the end of the day, he said, \u201cit\u2019s good if more talented young classicists have jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n Zena Hitz is a tutor at St John\u2019s College, a school in Annapolis and Santa Fe that has taught a strict \u201cgreat books\u201d curriculum since 1937, and the founder of the Catherine Project, a non-profit that organizes discussion groups on the great books for members of the public. She sees the new centers appearing at universities as embodying an unusual mixture of goals \u2013 both functioning as \u201ca kind of beachhead within the university where conservative ideas are welcome\u201d, she said, and representing a \u201cstrategic move\u201d to protect old-fashioned humanities fields, especially at public universities in conservative states \u201cthat would normally just be slashing the crap out of that stuff\u201d.<\/p>\n Conservatives like it because it\u2019s the western canon … but liberals and progressives like it because the style of education is open-endedZena Hitz<\/p>\n Although the great books curriculum may be perceived as conservative or elitist in the current context, Hitz noted that it springs from a historical movement that possessed a \u201cradical egalitarianism\u201d. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, miners and other blue-collar workers raised funds for libraries where they could read and discuss works of literature and political theory.<\/p>\n Similarly, the great books curriculum has historically enjoyed unusual bipartisan support, she said. \u201cConservatives like it because it\u2019s the western canon, and it\u2019s old, but liberals and progressives like it because the style of education is open-ended and honors the individual\u2019s development.\u201d<\/p>\n A few years ago, she co-taught a course on the Bible; as is not unusual at St John\u2019s, about a third of her students were devout Christians, many from homeschooled backgrounds, and another third were gender-nonconforming students with generally activist leftwing politics. Despite some tense moments, it was an \u201camazing\u201d experience, she said.<\/p>\n Al-Gharbi said that even if these centers actually wanted to exclusively hire conservatives, that might be difficult. \u201cI\u2019ve talked to some people who have set up these schools and run them,\u201d he said, and they acknowledged that the recruiting pool for right-of-center scholars is small. Conservatives, in recent decades, have tended to self-select out of academia.<\/p>\n \u201cThey hope that over time, the pipeline could get a bit wider,\u201d he said, \u201cthan is the case at present.\u201d<\/p>\n Similarly, even the small bump in academic hiring that these centers may bring will not mean a major sea change, McNamara said, for classics and similar fields. \u201cWe have not had a good job market in the humanities since the 2008 financial crisis. And if there happen to be two extra jobs at an institute that\u2019s appeared at one state university somewhere, I don\u2019t think that really quite qualifies as a particularly robust job market.\u201d<\/p>\n Quoting Aristotle, he added: \u201cOne swallow does not make a summer.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A small conservative revolution has swept the humanities at some US colleges and universities. Its vanguard are new programs, called centers or institutes, that have begun cropping up at schools in recent years. Often funded by outside donors or earmarks from state governments, the programs tend to bear names featuring words such as \u201ccivic\u201d, \u201cfreedom\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31757,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[648,2389,4170,1294,5634,14099,489],"class_list":{"0":"post-31756","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-coming","9":"tag-conservative","10":"tag-gender","11":"tag-move","12":"tag-studies","13":"tag-tide","14":"tag-universities"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}