Around the country, Republican legislatures have been taking a greater interest in the affairs of their state universities to counteract what they see as excessive liberalism on campus, from quarrels over conservative speakers to national anthem protests to the very substance of what students are taught.
In Arizona, the Legislature has taken a direct role, fostering academic programs directly from the state budget and sidestepping the usual arrangement in which universities decide how to spend the money. Lawmakers are bankrolling the new School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State, and the University of Arizonas Department of Political Economy and Moral Science. Locally, they are better known as the freedom schools, and not always admiringly.
Their creation reflects a cultural struggle within academia, one that some conservatives believe requires government intervention to counter a liberal professoriate. Their goal is to promote the study of Western civilization, once a core requirement at many colleges, contending that a well-educated society must understand its roots the Delphic maxim know thyself.
The new courses at Arizona State focus on Western thinking from the ancient Greeks to the Founding Fathers and beyond, with an emphasis on free-market philosophy. They draw heavily from original texts rather than modern interpretations.
There is too much revisionism being taught in universities today, said State Representative Jay Lawrence, a Republican from Scottsdale who backed the new programs. Its a big deal to those of us who feel very strongly about a more conservative education.
But many liberal arts professors view these efforts as reviving an antiquated and Eurocentric version of history, one that they have tried to balance with viewpoints of women and racial minorities.
A number of longtime Arizona State faculty members, as well as Democrats in the Legislature, also complain that the millions appropriated for the new programs could have been better spent. Steady cuts left state universities with $390 million less in taxpayer support in 2017 than they had before the 2008 recession, requiring steep tuition increases. Here you want to create these freedom schools for whatever reason, and there are so many other pressing needs, said State Representative David Bradley, a Democrat from Tucson. ... I think part of the problem is a perception or reality that we got a bunch of libs indoctrinating your children, and theres not a lot of balance, said Margaret Spellings, the president of the University of North Carolina system, which has asked to send a delegation to observe the Arizona State program. ... Private donors, including the Charles Koch Foundation and the Jack Miller Center, have been funding conservative campus programs around the country for years, and the programs at both Arizona universities are absorbing earlier Koch-funded initiatives at each school.
The Legislature has approved $7 million for the Arizona State school so far. In addition to paying for six new professors with intellectually conservative pedigrees, $430,000 has been set aside for attention-grabbing rare manuscript acquisitions, including first editions of the Federalist Papers and Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations.
An additional $75,000 is paying for spring break trips to India for 12 students, a carrot to encourage enrollment in the school, which stands at about 50. Students had to take at least one of the schools classes as a condition of winning a spot on the trip.
Smh big government trying to indoctrinate students ---
If we accept that universities have a strong liberal bias, and if we agree that diversity of thought is valuable to a society, then tying state-funded school money to a balanced (<- key word) curriculum seems fair. That's a lot of conditionals, but I wouldn't go as far as call this dystopian. If it's acceptable to mandate or desire that schools have diversity of skin color, then mandating or desiring diversity of perspective shouldn't be seen as a bad thing. ---
"History Is Much Like An Endless Waltz. The Three Beats Of War, Peace And Revolution Continue On Forever." - Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz
