A Higher-Ed Renaissance?

The Law & Liberty Podcast

The past five years have been tumultuous ones for elite higher education. Campuses have been rocked by plagiarism scandals, ugly and violent protests, and revelations about admissions discrimination that went on under the guise of affirmative action. Meanwhile, reformers are trying out new approaches, from civics institutes to more robust legislative oversight of public universities to brand-new private institutions. How pivotal will these years turn out to be? And what strategies are most likely to revive the mission of the university? Law & Liberty senior writer James Hankins has hope for a higher-ed renaissance.

Related Links:
James Hankins, “Learning Civics from History“
James Hankins, “Can Harvard Win Back America’s Respect?“
James Hankins, “Hope for Harvard?“
James Hankins, “A Centrist Strategy for Higher Education Reform“
James Hankins, “Training for the Contemplative Life“

Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

John Grove:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m John Grove, the editor of Law & Liberty, filling in for our regular host, James Patterson. Today I am pleased to be joined by a senior writer at Law & Liberty, Professor James Hankins. Professor Hankins is a professor of History at Harvard University, and his most recent books include Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy. Professor Hankins has written many, many phenomenal pieces for Law & Liberty and elsewhere on higher education. And today we are going to talk about some of the themes that have cut across those various essays and book reviews that he’s written about his own institution of Harvard and about broader trends in higher education generally. So Jim, thanks so much for joining us.

James Hankins:

It’s a great pleasure to join you, John.

John Grove:

So I thought we would start with just the past year and a half, which has seemed really tumultuous for higher education, especially what we call elite higher education, the Ivy League, and similar sorts of institutions. So we’ve had the Students for Fair Admissions decision, which forbids race-based admissions policies. We’ve had plagiarism scandals including with presidents of major institutions. We’ve had the occupation of campuses by pro-Palestine protesters, and many of those have turned violent and have revealed some pretty intense anti-Semitism. We’ve had disastrous congressional testimony by a lot of the Ivy League presidents that were talking about these protests and the institutional response to the October 7th attacks. That then in turn led to a wave of resignations. And then perhaps a little bit more hopefully, we have seen a number of institutions, including Harvard, seem to take a turn toward what we call institutional neutrality, saying, “We’re not going to take positions on a number of political issues like we have in the past.”

So I thought I would just start by saying: how important do you think the past couple of years have been for higher ed? Will we be looking back at this time as essentially just a blip on the radar and everything goes back to normal, a bad normal, or is this going to be a meaningful turning point in American higher ed?

James Hankins:

Well, as you know, I’m a historian. Historians think everything is a blip, but I’m coming to believe that we may be really at a turning point. 2020 was a turning point for K-12 education—in many ways this will come as a surprise—and we’re now in the midst of a renaissance of classical education at the K-12 level. There’s a lot of reforming energies at the high school level and junior high school level outside the public schools. And in 2020, the pandemic and the George Floyd riots meant that parents could suddenly look over the shoulders of their Zooming students and see what they were being taught. And that led to some rather strong reactions, which I think are continuing. First of all, there has been much more parental involvement in district public schools. And secondly, there has been a very large exit from public schools into private education, classical education, and especially into homeschooling. There’s been a spike in homeschooling since 2020, which still continues.

We are starting to see this in higher education. I think that October 7th and its aftermath may be a kind of moment for higher education similar to 2020 in K-12 education. And of course, at Harvard it wasn’t just October 7th, it was the lawsuit of Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard, which in the discovery phase disclosed a lot of really explicit anti-Asian prejudice. And that was a shock to many people. Of course, the worst of it was a long time ago. Recently the admissions office has been more careful, but that was very disturbing to see that affirmative action for some means discrimination against others. And then we had the FIRE rankings, which gave Harvard a zero in academic freedom. Then there was the plagiarism scandal. Our president, Claudine Gay, was caught in plagiarism: real, undeniable plagiarism. So it was a kind of a quadruple whammy that we had last year.

And along with this, there was a massive and very well advertised drop in alumni support for the institution, support in the annual giving. Harvard depends a lot on annual giving. And so last spring, Harvard was very quietly selling bonds to cover its shortfall. There has also been a serious institutional response to October 7th and its aftermath. I have hope that we’ll have a reaction similar to what happened in K-12 education, that both inside and outside universities there’ll be successful attempts at reform. There are attempts already to reform the university from the inside. And also there’s going to be more competition from outside the elite universities, institutions that will be able to compete with existing, so-called elite universities.

John Grove:

And you made a good point, I think, is that one of the questions that I had in mind too, and I think you’ve already sort of answered it, is whether the things that have taken place in the last couple of years have changed higher education. There are certain people who have sort of seen some rot and corruption in higher ed for a long time. These especially tend to be conservatives, who have been saying this for a while; but I’m wondering if that October 7th reaction, and as you said, the plagiarism and so forth, if it sort of opened some eyes in the donor class in the public at large that had largely just sort of been ignoring this sort of thing. And it seems that you’re hopeful that that has happened.

James Hankins:

Yeah, I am. I’ve been around Harvard for a long time. This is my 40th year. I’m the oldest member of the history faculty, I mean, the longest serving member of the history faculty. And I’ve seen a lot of changes. When I came in 1985 to Harvard, it was much more balanced politically. There weren’t a lot of conservatives, but there were enough that people deferred to their views, enough to prevent colleagues from getting involved in political discussions in faculty meetings. But basically, since around the year 2000, most of the conservatives were driven out or retired. I think I’m now the last open—let’s say uncloseted—conservative in the history department. So things have changed. And the fact that it’s a political monoculture is responsible for a lot of the problems that the university has had.

There have been some very positive responses recently, however, in academe in general. To me, the most positive response is the existence of these new civics institutions that have been started in red state universities, at public universities in those states. And I think that that’s a very positive development. And I think, if they are founded in the right way, they have the potential to change the university culture in very good ways.

John Grove:

You’re anticipating my next question, which was this: As more eyes are potentially being opened to some of the problems that we have in higher ed, we’ve started to see some new solutions. Among them are these civics institutes that we have at Arizona State, at the University of Florida. You have an affiliation with the Hamilton Center at University of Florida. New ones coming in Ohio State and Toledo and some other institutions like that. So we have those. We’ve also seen the creation of new institutions. We’ve seen the University of Austin get underway recently. And then you also see some attempts in state legislatures to take a more direct approach, whether it comes to altering or abolishing tenure. You’ve had more direct curriculum oversight and oversight of personnel decisions. You have the New College of Florida, which is maybe one of the most controversial examples of these reform methods, where you have a really top-to-bottom transformation of the school.

So you seem to indicate already that your answer to this question was that you think the civics institutes are the most promising. Why do you think that’s the most promising approach that you’ve seen so far? And what do you think about some of the other approaches too?

James Hankins:

Okay, well, first of all, it’s not just the public universities that are starting civic centers. I’m not sure I want to reveal this because I wanted to take the opposition by surprise, but we’re going to try to start one at Harvard.

John Grove:

Oh, that’s great. That’s news to me.

James Hankins:

There’s very good prospects with the new president, new provost, and a number of changed conditions that we might be able to do it.

John Grove:

It’s not the usual state of affairs that we can say that the Law & Liberty podcast is going to have breaking news on it, but maybe we’ll have to advertise it that way.

James Hankins:

I’m not sure I want that news to get out yet.

John Grove:

Maybe you don’t want to say it. That’s fine. We won’t. We won’t. But if people listen, the careful listener will get it.

James Hankins:

Yeah, I think they’ll find out very soon. It will be announced very soon that we’ll be doing something along those lines. There’s an existing program at Harvard, the Program on Constitutional Government, which has been run by Harvey Mansfield for many years. And we’re going to build on that and try to create an undergraduate major in civic studies.

John Grove:

That’s exciting.

James Hankins:

I think that these civic centers are very positive just because there is a very legitimate public purpose in having a civic center, which is you want an educated citizenry and a state has the right to demand of its state universities, which it funds, knowledge of American history, knowledge of American government. And knowledge of Western history. All those subjects are perfectly legitimate for a state to demand of citizens educated at state expense. The reason I think that these institutions can be successful is partly that, if they’re well-funded and they’re set up the right way—which is to be independent of the departments—they can improve the prestige of the university, they can improve enrollments. Enrollments are the coin of the realm in many universities. If your civic program gets high enrollments, then it will be successful. So there are many subjects that have been driven out of the departments.

I wrote about this in one of my Law & Liberty pieces, about subjects that used to be very popular— American history surveys, things like that—which many departments are no longer offering. Many departments have stopped offering courses on the Enlightenment of Reformation, English Revolution, English Civil War, plus certain types of history like military history, political history. All these things have been neglected in the politicized university. But they are tremendously popular subjects with students. And so I think there’s a lot of potential for civics institutes to attract enrollments and bring in very prestigious scholars. That’s the other thing that’s happened that I think was not predicted about the civics institution is there happened to be a lot of people graduating with PhDs who haven’t been able to get jobs because of their politics or their low intersectional scores, or they’re just doing topics that the university doesn’t want to teach anymore. So they’re there and can be recruited.

At the Hamilton Center at Florida, they’ve hired, I think, 21 people in a very short time, and they’re all excellent people, PhDs from top programs, but they haven’t been able to get a job or they haven’t been comfortable in programs, in universities that are extremely skewed to the progressive left. So we’ve really put together a topnotch group of scholars. I speak as a member of the board. I’m actually going to the University of Florida in the spring as a Visiting Scholar, so I’ll be able to see what’s going on. But I think this is happening also at UNC, Chapel Hill, we didn’t mention that before, but that’s got a major, I think it’s called School of Public Administration.

John Grove:

Right. I left them off.

James Hankins:

And they have an excellent person, Jed Atkins, who’s been put in charge of it, and they’re recruiting like mad; they’re getting excellent people. I think they even stole a person away from the Harvard Gov Department. The Harvard Gov Department was trying to promote somebody from within, but that person preferred to go to UNC, Chapel Hill.

John Grove:

Wow.

James Hankins:

So there’s some serious competition going on out there. What I’m less enthusiastic about is the attempts of state legislatures to involve themselves in micromanaging curricula and hiring and firing and making it easier to fire professors. I understand the impulse to do that when you see somebody at a state university being paid by the state who’s spreading garbage and teaching anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism, pretending their enemies are white supremacists, and all these crazy things. And the state legislature gets worked up and says, we have to have way to fire these people. Okay, I get that. But what I’m worried about, and I’ve seen this from within, is that you don’t want universities being turned into battlefields. And once you start creating martyrs and attacking the right of departments to set their own curricula, you’re going to have a huge political bust-up. And I think there are ways to do the same thing without having those problems.

So what I think that universities ought to be doing, what state legislatures ought to be doing is to change the administration. You’ve got to get university presidents with their own staff, with carrots and sticks who have the ability to move people around. Often they won’t be able to fire people, but they can neutralize them by putting them in positions of no power and cutting their budgets. I mean, if you have that kind of power, you can really change the administrative environment. And that is important. That’s antecedent to my mind, to changing faculty monoculture. And there are many things you can do in administration to make faculties better and more balanced. For one thing, it’s observable that small departments tend to be more politicized. If you’ve got a department of five or six people, and they all agree in politics, they’re going to start talking politics at department meetings, and then pretty soon they’re going to be doing political programs and curricula and so forth.

In bigger departments, that’s less likely to happen just because there’s always a chance that there are more conservative, I don’t want to say conservative, but let’s say fewer people on the extreme left, more people on the faculty who will disagree with small, politicized faction. That’s the case in our department. … So I think at university level, you could probably reorganize university a bit and take some small departments and make them large departments. I’m thinking in particular of you need somebody at the top who has practical wisdom, who really understands how to use the carrots and sticks.

So for example, in our university, we have a lot of different small language departments, and they’re all uniformly to the left, very far to the left. So what could you do? You could combine them into a larger department, you could give them some appointments, but with, let’s say, funding for half a position. The president has to approve the other half. So the president gets a veto essentially on who gets hired. Then you give the language department some big university curricular responsibility. I think it’s a disgrace that American universities do not require languages, mastery of languages. They used to do that, but now there are all sorts of ways of getting around these requirements. But if you told the language departments, okay, now you’re one big department, we’re going to give you some extra appointments. We’re going to beef up our language requirement and require students to really master a language, at least one language, something they don’t do now. Then I think the language departments would respond positively. And I think they would be less inclined to organize themselves into centers of political indoctrination.

John Grove:

In other words, keeping people busy doing what they actually do well, rather than …

James Hankins:

Yes. It’s just an example of how a wise administrator who knew what they wanted, who he wanted or she wanted, could make a serious change in the university’s political culture.

John Grove:

On this question of political reform too. So one of the prominent voices on this, especially with the New College of Florida, has been Chris Rufo, and he has a line that I’d be interested to get your opinion on. He’s pretty robustly in favor of some of these state governments and legislatures taking a more active direct role in university governance. And one of the phrases he often uses is where he says, “We need to make the university more political, less ideological.” What he means by that, I think, is that insofar as you get the legislatures more active, more involved in the governance of the university, that’s more political. But that will have the effect of reflecting public values, more than some sort of insane ideology that just a very small handful of faculty believe in. I’m just curious to have your opinion on that idea. More political, less ideological. Do you think that works or partly?

James Hankins:

Yeah, again, I largely agree with that, but I think it’s got to be done in a very wise way. And I think the lessons of classical liberalism is that the university or the institutions allow things to happen. They create conditions for things to change in freedom. They provide legal frameworks, institutional frameworks for freedom. That’s what we mean by ordered liberty in classical liberalism. So what I think that they should do is to change accreditation regimes and change testing regimes, do the things that are appropriate to a state legislature, but do them in a way that foster change. I’ll give you an example. The state of Florida last year allowed a testing agency called CLT, the Classical Learning Test, to be accepted for entry to state universities. So I’m on the board, so I should state that I guess, but I’m on the board because I believe it’s a great thing.

And what CLT does is content testing. What the College Board has done for a long time is basically try to determine raw intelligence by setting problem sets on college admissions tests. There are achievement tests, which are much better, but the basic SAT tests and ACT tests are tests of raw intelligence. So I think America should start using something more like the British A-levels—O- levels and A-levels— which are really content tests, tests that ask: what do you know? What have you learned? If instead of emphasizing skills and raw intelligence and problem solving, you had content tests, that could lead to a lot of positive changes.

And it’s a legitimate public purpose, again, to demand that high school students graduate with adequate knowledge of American history, government and Western history. So if you had a content tests, asking what do you know? What authors have you read? Do you understand the American constitution? Do you understand the history of the amendments to the American constitution? Do you know anything about what a republic is, the republican tradition in the West, how it’s different from a democracy? Do you know about the story of human rights? Those kind of questions. And also literature questions too. Do you know who Shakespeare is? Have you read Milton and Jane Austen? This is what the British do on their tests, and they’re very effective. It would have knock-on effects because, as they’ve discovered in Britain, if you have A-level test, a test on some particular area of content like English literature or Latin or something like that, students develop a lifelong interest in those subjects. And when they go to university, they want to study them.

If they had content tests, universities would be faced with large numbers of people who wanted to continue their studies and they wouldn’t be able to fill up the curriculum with all of these niche subjects and political indoctrination programs because they have students demanding something else. Student demand does count, especially in universities where enrollments count. There are some universities where enrollment doesn’t count like Harvard, and in most of the Ivy League enrollments don’t really count, they don’t pay attention to numbers very much. But I’d say the vast majority of universities pay attention to enrollments. So this is just to give you an example of how changing a testing regime and an accreditation regime could really have positive effects.

John Grove:

Yeah, and I’m going to want to circle back a little bit too to some of the stuff you were talking about, K-12 a little bit later. Right now though, why don’t we zoom out the conversation a little bit? We’ve been talking about specific reforms. I want to talk a little bit about what you see as, ultimately, what reformers should really be aiming for. So, what do you see as the essential mission of the university? And how far off are modern American universities from that? What should the university be about? What should it be doing?

James Hankins:

Well, first of all, it depends on the type of university. We have many different institutions. We have Christian institutions and secular institutions. We have state universities, public and private. We have research universities and liberal arts universities and colleges. We have institutions small and large. So, every university is going to have a slightly different set of objectives. But one thing I think all universities ought to be doing, that should be part of their raison d’etre, is fostering meritocracy. They should be training students for professions and for business, and for all sorts of future careers, but they also need to be encouraging, in a more general way, intellectual excellence of all kinds—and I’d include excellence in entrepreneurship, by the way. We have to consider the needs of the country as well as of the world. It’s one of the things that’s happened in universities, especially elite universities in the last 30 years: as they’ve gone global, and the students have become more global, and the faculty and the administration have become more international, they have are less likely to consist of people born in the country.

I’m not a nativist, but I think that globalization can have positive effects and can have negative effects. And right now, it’s having a negative effect because the national interest is being neglected. But my view is that, in general, the university ought to be encouraging intellectual excellence of all kinds. In the admissions offices around the US today, especially in elite universities, they think they’re job is to bring about social justice, right wrongs, practice restorative justice. Restorative justice means that you’re unjust to some people in the present in order to be to people who died 100 years ago. So the admissions offices are afraid of being bastions of privilege. And I think, instead, they should be thinking of themselves as bastions of excellence.

They should be creating communities of outstanding teachers, students, researchers with a higher purpose. They’re the kind of place that an outstanding young person, a gifted young person, wants to go to so they can develop their own excellence. I think they should have pride in this. This is something that I noted very early when I got to Harvard in 1985. One thing that immediately struck me was the tremendous pride people took in the institution. Of course, it’s often read by outsiders as arrogant.

John Grove:

Right.

James Hankins:

I understand that, but it’s a good thing if it means you have standards, right? People would say, “We do things differently here.” And we had administrators back then who, if the students acted up, they would be out the door the next day because “we are not a institution that trains protesters.” We are an institution that fosters excellence in science and in humanities and social sciences. This is what we do. And unfortunately, we’ve lost that sort of inspiration and that sort of pride, which I think is a real loss.

So that’s one thing I would think we should be doing, is encouraging meritocracy, encourage a love of excellence and proper pride in the institution. The other thing I think we should be doing is paying more attention to what students want to learn. In elite universities we should give more weight to enrollments. A lot of these departments that are the incubators of political radicalism are very small and they have very few enrollments. Now, in our department, the most … Well, I won’t talk about my department, but the Women’s Studies programs and some of the other programs, which I won’t mention by name, they’re the ones have all the radicals, but they’ve got relatively few students. The less radical departments have got hundreds of students. So I think if you paid more attention to what students want to learn and give those areas more resources, you can do a lot to right the ship.

John Grove:

That’s a remarkably hopeful observation.

James Hankins:

Yeah. One of the things I say about this, they should be giving resources to departments that can show that they’ve improved the knowledge and skills of their students. You’re probably aware of all these surveys that have shown that people go to college for four years and haven’t learned anything. That’s a total disgrace, especially for an elite university that has really wonderful students and faculty. Not everybody at Harvard is a genius, but we do have highly intelligent people who are capable of learning a tremendous amount, developing amazing skills. We’ve got, I would say at least 10 really world-class geniuses on the faculty, which is a lot, comparatively speaking. And students aren’t learning from them. A lot of this is the faculty’s fault. The departments have given up sequencing. They’re just a buffet of courses. The idea that you could actually improve in the study of history or literature or the social sciences is pretty much out the window now. Only in the sciences have they really kept the idea of sequencing: that you’re going to have greater mastery when you graduate than when you came in the door. So I think that’s something that universities, administrators, and state governments even could learn to pay attention to.

John Grove:

Yeah. So you’ve mentioned a few times the departments that become bastions of political ideology and get captured by political agendas. When do you think the university … when did things start to really go wrong with that? You opened one of your pieces for us, “A Training in the Contemplative Life,” —it was a book review—with a quote by Edward Said, and you said: “Guess who said this? And you’ll never guess.” Right? And it was a quote about … I’m not going to read the whole quote, but it was basically about how the classroom is not the place for advancing your political agenda. And coming from that source, it’s a sort of shocking thing to us today, because Said is seen today as this incredibly hard left radical, and you would never expect that type of person to sees education apolitically.

So, at what point did this change? Was it the 60s? There’s some people who go back further and say: once universities started to be interested in outside funding and taking government grants for this and that political project, that sort of made them lose faith in their mission. A lot of people would point to the 60s. When do you think the university really, really got off track, when they stopped having good sense about they were supposed to be doing in the classroom? Where did we lose that? Is that really recent or is that a longer term problem?

James Hankins:

Yeah, I’ve had this discussion with a number of people about this, and I think that the tipping point was around the year 2000, rather recently. There have always been activists in university, but the weight of the university was behind research and teaching, and it was assumed that’s the primary purpose of the institution. When I came into the profession 40 years ago, it was an unquestioned assumption that American universities were the jewel in the crown of American democracy. Other countries envied our 3,000 universities, and there was very high level of public support for them from both parties. The goal of K-12 education was to get people into higher ed, more and more people into universities. You got kudos if you were a guidance counselor at a high school and got people into elite universities. Maybe that’s still true. And there was great support for student loan programs. All of that stuff has been weakened, I think, in the last 25 years in particular, that the level of public support for universities has really gone down, especially in the last 10 years.

So why is that? One thing I think that’s happened is that, especially in elite universities, we all just got a little bit too fat and happy. We had too much money. And when you get that successful, and American elite universities are very successful … They’re very wealthy, and rightly so in many ways. I don’t want to give the impression that they’re all dens of political iniquity. They’re not. They’re doing marvelous things and they’re still doing marvelous things, and they can continue to do marvelous things if they just get their heads a little bit straight about their real mission. But anyway, what happens when they’re fat and happy is that they think they can do anything. They can do nothing wrong, nothing will go badly for them. And they develop all these parasites who want to use the institution’s prestige to further their own agenda. So you get a lot of featherbedding, get the multiplication of institutes and centers. Harvard is lousy with all of these centers.

And when you get too much attention to interdisciplinary experiments and cross-cultural investigations, you’re no longer training people in the disciplines. University administrators love the word “interdisciplinary,” but they don’t love the word “disciplinary” because they don’t understand what a discipline is, that it takes time and effort to produce a great historian, a great literary critic, or a great scientist. They don’t get that it doesn’t happen all at once and you need time and careful training to build up knowledge and skills.

So there was this period, and I guess it still continues, that anybody with an idea in their head and a couple of donors could set up a center. No one was thinking about the ultimate effects on the entire institution of having these centers everywhere. Professors love spending time at the centers where they can find people who were doing exactly the same thing as they were, where there were people they could talk to. So research becomes too specialized for any normal, well-educated person to understand, and they kind of hollowed out the departments, which is where disciplinary education takes place.

One of my very witty colleges who’s now dead, unfortunately, Mark Kishlansky, used to say that a center was like Noah’s Ark. It couldn’t hire just one professor. There always had to be two. And then once they had two, they had to have an assistant professor and a staff. So in our department, just for example, we have many area studies centers with multiple professors in them. It’s very easy to find donors to endow specialized centers, especially at a place like Harvard. For example, we have a center for Ukrainian studies, which was a very sleepy for a long time—until a couple of years ago. But some wealthy Ukrainian gave money to found Ukraine studies. So we have all these wealthy partners who want to establish the study of their country or special interest at Harvard, and we do research in all those areas. But we have lost a sense of what is most important for students to learn. No one ever thought that we needed an endowment for French history, for example, because no one imagined that we would ever stop teaching French history in preference to, say, Afghani history.

Another point: because we have faculty in these areas, we have courses in them, but they have microscopic enrollments. So now the “exotics” (as my friend Kishlansky used to call them) outnumber the professors in American and European history and can outvote them when it comes to setting departmental priorities. That’s how we end up teaching subjects few students want to study and neglect subjects of major importance that interest students, like the history of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the history of the presidency and the constitution, American military and diplomatic history, and so forth.

Maybe this is a little bit too much inside baseball for this podcast-

John Grove:

No, it’s interesting.

James Hankins:

… but I’m just trying to explain how expansion generates a lot of time-servers and a lot of distractions from the central mission of the university. I really believe that teaching and learning should go together, but with all these specialized centers teaching and research have taken separate paths. You have professors off doing their specialized research and not really focused on their departmental teaching and the life of the department.

John Grove:

Right. I’ll ask one more question on this question of politicized education and combating that, and then we’ll shift. You had a line in a piece you wrote for us called ‘A Centrist Strategy for Higher Education Reform.” This was an interesting exchange between you and Mike Gonzalez, and you two had a lot of overlap in your views of higher ed reform, but also some important differences. And one of the things you warned about there is you said, “It’s important that reformers, whatever approach they take, you said, “that they don’t turn the curriculum into a catechism of American values.” So this is a concern about the pendulum swinging too far in the other way when you’re trying to combat one thing. Say a little bit about that. Is that something that reformers need to avoid? How can you balance that? Because I sense that you are okay with a certain idea of a civic obligation for the university, but you want to make sure we don’t go too far. How do you find that balance between feeling like you do have a civic obligation that you’re fulfilling, but at the same time, not just, as you say, turning education into a catechism of American values?

James Hankins:

Well, universities are meant to be sites for free investigation and free study and freedom of thought, and we need to preserve that. They will cease to be universities if they don’t. We can’t have a required list of things that students must believe. I mean, I’m sure Gonzales doesn’t thought that either; I don’t want to make him into a straw man.

John Grove:

Right.

James Hankins:

Maybe some people in a state legislature somewhere want that. But the whole point of ordered liberty is to give people the liberty to think and write in ways that benefit the community. And I have enough confidence in the values of America to believe that if they’re presented fairly and compared fairly with other potential value systems, that they will win out. This is like Aquinas on the studying the pagan philosophers. The Christians can read Aristotle because Christians will ultimately be in agreement with what’s right in Aristotle and be able to correct Aristotle in things where they don’t agree.

I’m writing a history of Western tradition right now with Allen Guelzo, a huge 2 volume work, and I’m certainly not trying to be conceal the faults of the West. Knowing the faults of the West is required if you’re going to ever reform things, make things better. If you want to improve morally, you can’t conceal from yourself what your faults are. So, if you believe in the principles of the Revolution and the principles of the Constitution, you have to be willing to look at the criticism of them. You need to understand that not everything has always gone well in America. And that, despite our very noble founding principles, we haven’t done a good job of living up t our ideals. The true patriot wants to emend our country’s every flaw. And you can’t do that if you’re catechizing people on whether their values are correct or not.

John Grove:

Time for one more question. I mentioned I would circle back to this. You briefly started talking a little bit about K12 education and specifically, talking about these tests that people take for college admissions and the influence that those have. And clearly they have an influence: schools focus on how they can prepare their students to take these tests. Is there a hard cap on what university reform, higher education reform can accomplish, unless and until there’s some significant change in K12 education? Because one of the questions—and maybe there’s even a little bit of a distinction here between elite higher ed and maybe more mid-level and lower tier higher education—is that not only do you have some students who haven’t read essential texts, and they’re not familiar with things that we would consider to be basics of Western civilization, but even—as I say, going down into more middle tier and lower tier of higher education—but you even have a lot of students who lack basic skills to succeed in a college course. The ability to read a difficult text for example.

Do all of the efforts at higher education reform… well, I won’t say all, but do a lot of them hinge on us somehow getting K12 right? Or getting it at least a little bit better, so that the students coming into the university are ready for the sorts of things they will study there? You’re talking about the pursuit of excellence, but if you ask most students, freshmen coming into any university, whether they’re ready to pursue excellence or virtue, wouldn’t a lot of them look at you cross-eyed and say, “What are you even talking about? I want a job, whatever it may be.” So, what are the sorts of things at the K12 level, do you think, that need to change in order to get the universities a little bit back on track and do what they’re supposed to be doing? I know that’s a big question.

James Hankins:

It is a big question, but again, there’s a lot of change going on, and as I say, I think there’s a renaissance in American K12 education going on. Conservatives create renaissances, progressives create revolutions. So we’re having a renaissance rather than a revolution.

John Grove:

I like that.

James Hankins:

But there are a lot of reforming energies right now in the classical education movement, which is increasing by leaps and bounds. And there’s a million people doing classical education now, and it’s going to be 3 million in 10 years or less. Of course, the total population of K12 students is something like 55 million, and 45 million of those people are now in district public schools, as opposed to charter schools, which are public schools, but they’re not run by school districts and unions. The number of people in district public education has fallen from 95% to 88% since 2010. People are leaving district public education, mostly because they’re just not performing very well, providing basic literacy and reading skills and math skills. Scores in those basic areas are declining, and at the same time there’s politicization and there’s defiance of parental rights. But I think that things are moving in the right direction there, and that will eventually have an impact on the universities.

One of the problems that the classical school movement has had up until now is: where are our high school graduates going to go to college? There are not that many places that you want to send someone who has more traditional ideas in their head about religion and culture. Politicized universities are not welcoming places for people who have had a traditional education, people who are serious about their religious beliefs.

There are things that are being done at elite universities to help such students. I wrote about this in a piece for Law & Liberty a few year back. There are the FEHE Institutes for example—the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education—which has established about 20 institutions that are in the penumbra of elite universities—they’re private institutions that live near university campuses. The Canterbury Institute at Oxford is another one. And they help students at major universities find like-minded people, but also sometimes help them study things that are not being taught anymore. At Harvard we have finally hired a Dantista after many years without one, but for a long time no one was teaching Dante at Harvard. The could do so at the Abigail Adams Center, which is a FEHE institute near the Harvard campus, where Harvard students could read Dante or Thomas Aquinas or other writers and philosophers scanted in the Harvard course catalogue. They sometimes want to read authors that they can’t read anymore because the university English departments find them repulsive. I have serious doubts whether there’s any course in America on Kipling, for example, because he’s seen as an evil colonialist, though he’s a great writer.

John Grove:

He’d be radioactive for a lot of people in those departments.

James Hankins:

Yeah. So what I think is that we’re moving in the right direction and that universities are going to have to change if they want to open their doors to the brilliant students coming out of classical education now. They’re going to have to accept classically-trained students if they want the best students, because the public schools are not creating excellence. I’m writing an article right now for National Affairs about this. So I think things are bound to move in the right direction just because the undergraduates attending universities are going to be different. I think the new civics institutes will want to welcome a lot of these students as majors, provided they offer majors, and that will help the overall culture of the university. The elite universities are going to have to get smarter about what their mission is and about the population of students they need to serve. They will eventually understand that there’s a lot of excellence out there in K12 education that may not be coming from public schools.

John Grove:

Well, we are about out of time. I think that’s a great place to stop because one of the things I always like about reading your essays for us and for other outlets on higher education is that you’re very realistic about the problems, but you always come away with a little bit of a hopeful feel about it. And I feel like that has been true of this conversation too. I hope others will take hope from it. So anybody who has not read Professor Hankins’s materials on Law & Liberty on higher ed, we’re going to have links to pretty much everything he’s written on higher education for the past couple of years in our show notes, so please take a look at those. And Jim, thank you so much for joining us. I enjoyed this conversation.

James Hankins:

I did too. It’s been a pleasure. Interviews are always fun for professors, we love to be asked questions. And I had some particularly interesting ones today!

John Grove:

All right. Well, thanks again.

James Hankins:

Thank you.

James Patterson:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.