Schools of Thought

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 30, 1999 | by Stephen Goode

Here are Insight's annual choices of the nation's most politically incorrect institutions, where a traditional education supersedes current academic fads.

Writing in 1988 in an essay he called "The Intemperate Professor," conservative philosopher and culture critic Russell Kirk defined academic freedom as the security granted "a scholar and professor against arbitrary interference with his study and teaching."

Kirk wholeheartedly favored this freedom but noted that it "could never be perfect." He also noted that this splendid and necessary freedom came attached to a corresponding duty the professor was obliged to acknowledge and perform simply because he enjoyed the extraordinary freedom of teaching and writing according to what he saw as good and fit.

"The obligation which corresponds to the right of academic freedom is this," Kirk concluded. "The scholar must be dedicated to the conservation and the advancement of the Truth. He must be the guardian of the wisdom of our ancestors and the active thinker who reconciles permanence and change in his generation.

"If, failing to fulfill these responsibilities," warned Kirk, "he becomes a propagandist, a secular indoctrinator, a man in love with power, then he falls derelict in his duty, losing his sanction for the peculiar freedom" that his teaching job offers and becomes "the intemperate professor" of the essay's title: a man so in love with his own image and words that he loses a sense of proportion of his place in the scheme of things and comes to believe that his sole purpose in life is training his students to think and behave just like him. On the contrary, concluded Kirk, the ideal professor must be a man of "temperate intellect" with a "dash of humility" that tames his urge to pontificate and control.

Insight kept on the front burner Kirk's outline of what an ideal teacher should be in drawing up this year's list of the magazine's Top 10 Politically Incorrect schools and 15 others for consideration. Do the faculties act as guardians of the best that has been handed down to us and as competent, helpful guides through the inevitable changes society experiences? Are they concerned with the advancement of Truth, with the capital "T" that Kirk assigns it?

The answer is yes, as much as it is possible for any human to pursue these heady, challenging goals. But what Insight looked for above all were faculties devoted to teaching traditional values and subjects in innovative ways and institutions in which faculty research and publishing perhaps play an important but secondary role. Faculty is important because it's a truism but, nonetheless, a fact that the examples set by teachers are just as important as what they teach.

Furthermore, there should be no pursuit of current academic fads and obsessions to keep the school abreast of what is happening elsewhere in academia and where there is none of what Hillsdale College President George Roche calls, in a conversation with Insight, "the self-satisfied and smug trashing of the Western tradition and the pursuit of everything under the sun other than the study of that Western tradition."

The Hillsdale catalog states this goal perfectly. "The College values the merit of each unique individual rather than succumbing to the dehumanizing, discriminatory trend of so-called `social justice' and `multicultural diversity,' which judges individuals not as individuals but as members of a group and which pits one group against other competing groups in divisive power struggles."

Of course, many students can get a good education at whatever college they attend. A recent study by Ernest Pascarella of the University of Iowa and Patrick Terenzini of Pennsylvania State University titled How College Affects Students, for example, found that bright and highly motivated students are likely to do well in college and career no matter the institution they attend, be it a big-name school such as Stanford University or Dartmouth College or public universities such as Rutgers or Ohio State.

That's no doubt true -- good students with motivation will climb to the top in most situations. But it misses the point about what college life is all about because, for great numbers of students, just any school at all won't do: Many students and their parents want a college or university that has the right atmosphere, that offers solid courses taught in a way that won't undermine (or hold up for contempt) everything the young man or woman has learned to cherish and value at home.

The college years, after all, are a very impressionable time. As Wilfred McClay, a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga professor (see Profile, p. 36), puts it: "It is such an important four years of life, these four years of respite and moratorium or truancy from adult life, a time when they get to do things they weren't able to do before and won't be able to do after." It's "a terrible four years to waste, and it's a waste for the whole possibility of education, when you don't have a mainstream [tradition], which we don't anymore."