School's out - down and out

National Review, June 22, 1992

WHEN Benno Schmidt announced that he was leaving the presidency of Yale University to head Christopher Whittle's Edison Project, he highlighted crisis conditions at two levels of education.

The immediate crisis was at Yale. In six years on the job, Schmidt had been a record fundraiser. Getting some control over spending, however, proved to be too daunting a task. Schmidt's capable number-two man, classicist Donald Kagan, had already come to the same conclusion, resigning the post of dean. Yale's problem, as Kagan saw it, was an "imperial faculty," dedicated to protecting its own jobs while unwilling to protect students or even professors from politically correct fashion. Schmidt's predecessor, the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, once explained his decision to leave Yale and take up the post of Commissioner of Baseball by saying that in his new job, he would be dealing with a better class of people. Schmidt would probably have been willing to become Commissioner of Pro Wrestling.

The job he moved to has been called into existence by the current state of primary and secondary education. Christopher Whittle proposes to found a nationwide chain of for-profit private schools, using among other innovations the television technology he has pioneered with Channel One, a 12-minute news programs shown in ten thousand high schools and junior highs. Channel One has been criticized for running commercials, and for not measurably improving students' knowledge of current events. But Whittle would be attacked if he were Noah Webster II, for he threatens the education establishment--unlike U.S. Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander, who claims to favor school choice but has done nothing to further it. Republicans in North Carolina had a chance to embrace real reform by choosing school-choice proponent Vernon L. Robinson as their nominee for state school superintendent over Teena Little, an establishment Republican who backs the Alexander approach; but Robinson lost by two thousand votes in Tuesday's primary.

American universities have always had problems, or at least critics. Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler criticized them; so, in its genial way, did Owen Johnson's Stover at Yale. The derelictions of America's public schools are something else. Local schools have long been the focal point of community life, the function of government that most Americans care most about. The fact that an entrepreneur sees a chance to move in, and that an Ivy League president is willing to help him, speaks volumes about the education establishment's failure to educate.