Harry Targ
(The story below
appeared in the Purdue University periodical electronic newsletter “Purdue
Today” on September 19, 2024. It
celebrates the new Liberal Arts program, Cornerstone, established during the administration of
former Purdue President Mitch Daniels. It describes ACTA’s recognition of the
Liberal Arts program as a “hidden gem.” Also hidden was the political
background of ACTA and its affiliates, ALEC and the State Policy Network.
In the
recent book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical
Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Nancy MacLean traces the
intellectual development of the libertarian right and its connection with the
Koch Brothers and state programs to promote an ideologically-driven policy
agenda. She argues that many of the libertarian right’s policy proposals
would be opposed if public discourse and majoritarian democracy prevailed.
Consequently, she suggests, efforts are made to limit transparency, public discussion,
and legislative and electoral participation in major public policies.
Public universities are among the institutions in which the
lack of transparency is becoming the norm. The tradition of shared governance
is being trampled on. Educational decisions are being made by politicians,
administrators and boards of trustees without any advice and consent from
educators and taxpayers. Under the guise of a “business model” driven by
metrics and profit-making, many years of educational practices are being
overturned by administrators with little educational experience. Great state universities
such as those in Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, North Carolina, and Indiana are
being reconstructed. Programs of teaching and research are being uprooted.
Sometimes ongoing programs are abolished. And new liberal arts curricula
measure success by creating narrowly trained job seekers. Research is
increasingly channeled to meet the needs of corporations or the military.
The
Vision of the 21st Century University
The President of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels, on
October 12, 2018 received the Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding
Contributions to Liberal Arts Education presented by the American Council of
Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Daniels reported with enthusiasm that Purdue
University is the third “most STEM-centric school in the country,” with over 60
percent of its undergraduate students matriculating in engineering, chemistry,
physics, and agricultural and biological sciences. And he implied that there is
a struggle going on in great universities everywhere about what should
constitute liberal arts (Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. “Re-liberalizing the Liberal
Arts,” Washington, October 12, 2018, goacta.org.) From Daniels’ point of view,
administrators cannot wait for liberal arts programs in the twenty-first
century to transform themselves. This is so because liberal arts education
today consists of “conformity of thought, intolerance of dissent and sometimes
an authoritarian tendency to quash it, a rejection of the finest of the Western
and Enlightenment traditions in favor of unscholarly revisionism and
pseudo-disciplines.”
Daniels
then railed against the “one-sided view of the world” being presented in
liberal arts classrooms in opposition to critical thinking. He appropriately
celebrated the “clash of competing ideas,” but characterized liberal arts
curricula and research as dogmatic and authoritarian. (Many liberal arts
educators would argue that old ideas are always revisited bringing new,
diverse, perspectives to bear on traditional disciplinary formulations in the
social sciences and humanities). In other words, while most scholars
and students appreciate the openness and creativity of education and
scholarship that has resulted from the last fifty years of ferment, debate, and
thought characteristic of the intellectual life of higher education, Daniels
advocates to the contrary that the newer scholarship and education should be
challenged and expunged (Daniels referred in his lecture to some of
his intellectual mentors including Charles Murray and Jeb Bush).
Daniels added that the tenure system protects dogmatists
rather than what he would regard as free thinkers. He characterized modern
liberal arts education as “the celebration of mediocrity;” the liberal arts as
the home of “illiberal viewpoints;” and as the transmitter of “conformity of
thought.” He condemned what he called “shoddy scholarship” as well. “Hopelessly
abstruse, jargon-laden papers from so-called ‘studies’ programs read like
self-parodies.” He claimed, with no evidence, that “…fewer than half the
published studies across the social sciences can be replicated.”
And
the final and most damaging claim Daniels made was that practitioners of
liberal arts make their subject matter boring. He asserted that histories are
written without heroes, excitement, “…glory, the human elements…”
All this, Daniels suggested, requires reform of liberal
arts from outside the clutches of the educators in the various fields he
condemned. At Purdue University change is occurring because of a program called
Cornerstone which brings STEM students to specially crafted liberal arts
courses. “Enrollees will read Locke, Hobbes, and Jefferson as well as other
works in the Great Books tradition.” Reading the great books, which according
to Daniels are not already being taught in existing courses, and offering various
dual degree and fast track three-year degrees, he said, are responses to the
needs of the business community for liberal arts graduates.
And as
to free speech on campus, Daniels castigated students who, he asserted were
coached by faculty, made unwarranted demands on him to denounce fascist and
racist flyers on campus. And without any sense of irony, Daniels quoted 1960s
Chancellor of the University of California system of higher education Clark
Kerr who said that a proper university “is not engaged in making ideas safe for
students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas.” He apparently did
not recall that students at the University of California launched the Free
Speech Movement on their campus in 1964 because Kerr’s administration banned
literature tables on campus.
Discussions of Higher Education Are Held in Secret
Lastly,
Daniels praised the work of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).
ACTA, formed in 1995, says it works “…to support liberal arts education, uphold
high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and
ensure that the next generation receives a philosophically rich, high-quality
college education at an affordable price.” Henry Giroux has characterized ACTA
as “…not a friend of academic freedom, nor is it comfortable with John Dewey’s
notion that education should be responsive to the deepest conflicts of our
time…” (Henry Giroux, The University in Chains, Paragon
Publishers, 2007, p. 161).
ACTA, while claiming to be independent, is an associate
member of the State Policy Network. SPN is a “think tank” with affiliates in 49
states. SPN groups are affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC) which was a creation of the billionaire Koch brothers and
rightwing organizations such as the Bradley Foundation, to promote a radical
libertarian policy agenda in virtually every state. Jane Mayer, Nancy MacLean
and others have shown that ALEC, SPN, and ACTA leaders realized that public
discourse and transparency in political and other institutions might lead
publics, often majorities, to reject their anti-government, “free-market”
agendas.
Universities
historically have had public discussions about curricula and most universities,
including Purdue University, have institutionalized mechanisms for
decision-making on educational policy matters. Faculty Senates, curricula
committees, and promotion and tenure committees, have been the lifeblood of
higher education. And, appropriately enough, as a result of student movements
on college campuses, students have been included in conversations about
educational matters as well. And, some state universities value the input of
citizens and a broad representative array of alumni from their universities,
not just the wealthy who become the core of boards of trustees or the small
number who can afford to donate millions of dollars.
What the Daniels speech represents is a capsule summary of
the Daniels vision of what liberal arts should be. It is largely a series of
claims about modern liberal arts programs, diametrically opposed to the
reality. It is a policy brief for his campus that Daniels presented to the
non-transparent ACTA, an affiliate of a larger covert institutional network
with a presence in every state. The network is committed to a radical
transformation of economic, political, and educational institutions, a radical libertarian
America. Since the liberal arts tradition includes a rigorous conversation
about this and other visions, questions of the direction of higher education at
Purdue University deserve a rich diverse public conversation among educators,
students, and citizens. Private conversations within and between organizations
that restrict this conversation violate the spirit of higher education.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Council_of_Trustees_and_Alumni
