What Colleges Forget to Teach

Higher education could heal itself by teaching civics-not race, class, and gender

The university is worth fighting for. No other institution can carry the burden of educating our young people. That's why we must redouble our efforts to restore integrity, civility, and rigorous standards in American higher education-particularly in the area of civic education.

I'll be the first to admit that the situation is dire. I sympathize when critics throw up their hands in despair. I sometimes feel that way myself. Darkness often prevails in places where the light of learning should shine. I often trade horror stories with my friend Hadley Arkes, a distinguished scholar of jurisprudence and political theory at Amherst. On one occasion, I explained that the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton was sponsoring a viciously anti-Catholic art exhibit-one that it would never even permit were some favored faith or cause, such as Islam or gay rights, its target. Every year, some outrage along these lines seems to prove that anti-Catholicism really is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals, though anyone familiar with academic life today knows that anti-Semitism itself is making a run at being the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.

Professor Arkes listened sympathetically and said, "Things have gotten pretty bad here at Amherst, too: we've granted tenure in political science to a guy promoting a theory explaining the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush by reference to his alleged homoerotic attraction to Ronald Reagan." "Well," I replied, "Princeton has topped that. We've given a distinguished chair in bioethics to a fellow who insists that eating animals is morally wrong, but that killing newborn human infants can be a perfectly moral choice." (This professor has since gone on to say that there would be nothing wrong with a society in which large numbers of children were conceived, born, and then killed in infancy to obtain transplantable organs.)

And so we go back and forth with each other, in a macabre game of one-upmanship.

Still, teaching at Princeton is in many ways a joy. I have the privilege of instructing students who actually know when the Civil War took place. Even before arriving at Princeton, they know that Lee surrendered to Grant, not to Eisenhower, at Appomattox Court House. Most know that Philadelphia, not Washington, D.C., played host to the constitutional convention. Few would list Alexander Hamilton among the most important presidents, because they know that he was never president. Some can identify the cabinet office that he held and even give a decent account of his differences with Thomas Jefferson. Speaking of whom, all my students know that Jefferson owned slaves-but then, everybody seems to know that, even those who know nothing else about him. My students, though, also know that it was Franklin D. Roosevelt, not his cousin Teddy, or Harry Truman, or JFK, who promised Americans a New Deal. Some can even tell you that the Supreme Court invalidated some early New Deal legislation and that FDR responded with a plan to pack the Court. Yes, my students and students at elite universities around the country come to campus knowing American history pretty well-and wanting to know it a lot better.

Many of these young men and women value historical knowledge not merely for its own sake but because they want to be good citizens. More, they seek to be of genuine service to fellow citizens. Many hope to be legislators, judges, even president. They know that knowledge of American history is vital to effective citizenship and service. But they also need an understanding of American civics-particularly the principles of the Constitution. For all their academic achievement, students at Princeton and Yale and Stanford and Harvard and other schools that attract America's most talented young people rarely come to campus with a sound grasp of the philosophy of America's constitutional government. How did the Founding Fathers seek, via the institutions that the Constitution created, to build and maintain a regime of ordered liberty? Even some of our best-informed students think something along these lines: the Framers set down a list of basic freedoms in a Bill of Rights, which an independent judiciary, protected from the vicissitudes of politics, would then enforce.

It's the rare student indeed who enters the classroom already aware that the Framers believed that the true bulwark of liberty was limited government. Few students comprehend the crucial distinction between (on the one hand) the national government as one of delegated and enumerated powers, and (on the other) the states as governments of general jurisdiction, exercising police powers to protect public health, safety, and morals, and to advance the general welfare. If anything, they imagine that it's the other way around. Thus they have no comprehension as to why leading supporters of the Constitution objected to a Bill of Rights, worried that it could compromise the delegated-powers doctrine and thus undermine the true liberty-securing principle of limited government.

Good students these days have heard of federalism, yet they have little appreciation of how it works or why the Founders thought it so vital. They've heard of the separation of powers and often can sketch how the system of checks and balances should work. But if one asks, for example, "Who checks the courts?" they cannot give a satisfactory answer. The students' lack of awareness flows partly from the conception of the American civic order that they have drunk in, which treats courts as if they aren't really part of the government. Judges, on this view, are "non-political" actors whose job is to keep politicians in line with what elite circles regard as enlightened opinions. Judicial supremacy, of the kind that Jefferson and Lincoln stingingly condemned, thus winds up uncritically assumed to be sound constitutional law. The idea that the courts themselves could violate the Constitution by, for example, usurping authority that the Constitution vests in other branches of government, is off the radar screen.

Lacking basic knowledge of the American Founders' political philosophy and of the principles that they enshrined in the Constitution, students often fall prey to the notion that ours is a "Living Constitution," whose actual words matter little. On the Living Constitution theory, judges-especially Supreme Court justices-serve as members of a kind of standing constitutional convention whose role is to invalidate legislation that progressive circles regard as antiquated or retrograde, all in the name of adapting the Constitution to keep up with the times.

It doesn't take much to expose the absurdity of this theory. The purpose of enshrining principles in a constitution is to ensure that the nation's fundamental values remain honored even if they fall out of fashion. As for adapting the nation's laws to keep up with the times, legislators can-and should-take care of that task. The proper role of courts when they exercise the power of judicial review is essentially a conserving (you could even say "conservative") one. It is not to change anything but rather to place limits on what one can change.

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A small but significant revival of liberal arts teaching in Australia

Last week's column was a series of bleak reflections on the declining levels of literacy in Australian schools and universities. This column, in contrast, is about some welcome developments in tertiary education - the opening for business of Campion College in Sydney and its new degree course in the liberal arts. What difference will a private, Catholic college with an initial intake of only 30 students make to the Augean stables of the local humanities establishment? Time will tell, of course, but my guess is that it will make a difference out of all proportion to its size and sooner than many expect.

Campion is an overdue and welcome addition to the tertiary sector in Australia. It takes as its models the American and continental liberal arts colleges - Catholic, Episcopalian, Lutheran and indeed secular - and a modified version of the Great Books Program. The core of the course, amounting to about 70 per cent of the units, is compulsory. It involves close reading of demanding, seminal texts. Classes are small and the tutorial system is geared to ensure more than just a nodding acquaintance with the canon.

It will be the only humanities course of studies in which Google won't more or less guarantee that you pass. Corporate employers and headhunting firms, who tend to be familiar with American liberal arts courses and the calibre of the graduates they produce, will be taking a keen interest in Campion's first cohort. I expect that word of this will get out very quickly among arts students, and that many of them will be wondering whether their degrees from sandstone institutions are overpriced by comparison.

The deans of the various arts faculties will be inclined to sneer at a small, fledgling institution, and to be especially disdainful of its connection with the Catholic Church. Academe in Australia tends to take its own Enlightenment assumptions and particularly its secularism for granted as self-evidently good things. But many of the great universities of the West, including Oxford and Cambridge, were essentially monastic foundations and the idea that contemporary ecclesiastical affiliations could compromise the character and functions of a university would cut very little ice among America's Ivy League.

Campion promises to be a rather more Catholic institution than the Australian Catholic University. Its staff will be expected to swear an oath of fidelity to the Pope and the teaching magisterium of the church, for example. However, the college recognises, as John Paul II expressed it in Ex Corde Ecclesiae: "The right of individual scholars to search for the truth, wherever analysis and the evidence lead them." Relatively unfettered scholarship within the context of a campus dedicated to the ideals of Christian humanism may strike some as strange, particularly if they haven't read John Henry Newman on the subject.

To my mind it is no stranger - and far less inimical to intellectual liberty - than the politically correct pieties and Left-conformity of Australian public universities in general and their humanities departments in particular. What's more, Campion's emphasis on engaging with primary texts means that students will read ancient historians and Renaissance playwrights in their own words, rather than mostly seeing them through a fog of Marxist commentary or a filter of Michel Foucault.

It is only natural that many university lecturers should be appalled and confronted by this sort of back-to-basics educational fundamentalism. After all, it challenges their own pedagogical methods, their scholarship and much of what they stand for as teachers. Still, just imagine how captivating many parents will find it. Campion is designed primarily, though not exclusively, for Catholic undergraduates. They and their parents are likely to have had to live hard, sub-optimal choices all the way to matriculation. For example, many thoughtful Catholics regard the parochial system as at best a second-rate scholastic option and a proven failure when it comes to cultural maintenance and the transmission of faith.

They quite often prefer to send their children to conservative Anglican or Lutheran establishments, where theological modernism is less rampant, or to state schools where the agenda is merely secularist rather than noisily heretical. Many more have gone to endless trouble home-schooling their children and are now on the lookout for a comparably nurturing tertiary environment. For the thousands of parents in those sorts of predicament, Campion will stand out like a good deed in a naughty world. They will note with pleasure that the college offers Latin as an option, that it has hired one of Sydney's foremost church musicians for the chapel and prefers conservative liturgies and traditional devotions.

It's also just about the only place where students might still be encouraged to mount a Gilbert and Sullivan production - The Pirates of Penzance, perhaps - or where there'd be the enthusiasm and expertise to stage Henry Purcell's English opera, Dido and Aeneas.

Traditionally minded parents with no strong religious ties and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans who can't afford American college fees may well be tempted by Campion. More to the point, perhaps, they may feel moved to follow suit and start liberal arts colleges of their own. The establishment of a few more of them would have a cascading effect, akin to the reintroduction of the gold standard.

Reading the course outline for the three-year program, it's hard not to be consumed with envy of the 30 lucky little blighters about to be chosen for the first intake. Six semesters of history, concentrating on religion and culture from antiquity to the present, sounds just the sort of grounding that educated people need. The same goes for the core sequences in literature, philosophy and theology. It's hard to imagine coming out the other end of such a course without a good grasp of the best that's been thought and said since Plato.

Liberal arts has also tended to emphasise the importance of hard science in the curriculum. At Campion you can opt to undertake up to four units of maths and history of science, but biology is compulsory (and a creationist-free zone) along with a course on science and society. Another elective which is likely to prove popular is human bioethics.

It's all a far cry from the chaos of the summer of '68 - ground zero of the revolution - when I matriculated and enrolled at Flinders University. There the arts students had to belong either to the school of language and literature or the school of social sciences. Inspired by some once-modish theory, the system forced us to choose between English or other modern languages and the competing attractions of history as a major. It was almost impossible to manage a joint honours degree straddling the two schools. It was an obvious barbarism and I've heard similar horror stories about other Besser brick universities both at the time and more recently.

Apart from having an admirably integrated classical curriculum, Campion will be a qualitatively different experience from mainstream campus life in other ways. The most striking is class sizes. In many universities these days it's common for first-year lectures to be delivered to 500 students and for tutorials to comprise 20 people. At Campion, in the third year of operation, after a planned influx of international students, there won't be many more than 150 undergraduates. Everyone will know one another and tutorial sizes will never be over 15. The benefits of such an arrangement are obvious. The potential dangers are a tendency to group-think and a claustrophobic atmosphere in which young people can become inordinately focused on the dynamics of a small group.

Campion has residential facilities, but students are also free to make their own arrangements and live off-campus, which should help minimise those risks. Parents of prospective students can go to the web for more information. Before they do, I suppose I should warn them that tuition fees per semester are $6000, or $12,000 a year. For purposes of comparison, it's in the same league as a full-fee place in the arts faculty of the better sandstone universities. FEE-HELP, a Commonwealth student tuition loans scheme, will be available and it works along similar lines to HECS. Students repay their loans through the tax system once they're earning above a threshold income of about $36,000 a year. It's heartening to note in conclusion that Catholic dioceses throughout the country have also come to the party and begun to endow scholarships.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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