By Donald Robert McConnell, J.D.
The current Insurgency in our cities has started to make more people aware of the greater crisis in education. With a handful of exceptions our colleges and Universities have become political indoctrination and revolutionary training centers spreading neo-Marxist and radically post-modern ideology to the malleable, and failing to provide true information, education, or critical thinking skills to the scholarly. Many of us, conservative Christians in higher education, have seen this coming for decades; but few listened. Call me Casandra. Just a few years ago I was asking candidates for governor of a red state what they would do about the problem of the radical takeover of public education. They all looked confused and denied there was any real problem. Either they had all attended unusually conservative private schools, paid no real attention in school to anything but hard science, business, and sports, or they had unknowingly absorbed the false worldview propagated by their professors. This is one root of our problems: many of our “conservative” leaders never really learned or believed the deep truths that support and explain conservative moral practices and policies. They just want change to be slow and structured. They have no idea why any change is good or bad. When push comes to shove, they give in to the worst sorts of changes.
Other causes of our troubles come from our American character that emphasizes the pragmatic, the quick buck, and athletic life over things like theology and philosophy. Because we tend to be an anti-intellectual people where the humanities are concerned there will be some resistance to undertaking the effort needed to reform education. But to stop the revolutionaries, we must reform education. This will be an undertaking that makes the second world war look like a game of capture the flag. It is too complicated for a simple solution. But I have five points of action for the realm of higher education.
1. We need to reject the current accreditation system. Accreditation is supposed to make certain schools are real schools instead of fly by night confidence schemes. Instead, it has accomplished several bad things:
a. Intuitions have been forced to hire only professors with narrow degrees from the major universities. In other words, if you want a Western Civilization professor, the accreditors will frown on you if you hire a lawyer or an architect, even though these people may know more than enough about western civilization. Instead, you will need to hire someone with a PhD in Western Civilization (which will be hard to find. The graduates will all be studying third world culture or world culture or African culture etc.) or a specific related humanity. Nearly all of them will come from major universities. To get their PhD they had to be chosen and approved by most of the faculty in their department. This faculty almost certainly held worldviews contrary to Christianity. Some of them may have been tolerant. Many will not have been. Getting conservative Christians through this eye of a needle without conscious or unconscious conformity is a long shot. In the end the requirement of specific PhD’s means you tend to hire more left-wing faculty.
b. Institutions have been forced to waste time and money on endless “assessment.” The idea is supposed to be that your institution is always improving. But the whole assessment regime is based on the false Hegelian notions that endless improvement is possible, and the old ways are not best. I am sorry, but making students listen to lectures, watch audio-visual presentations, read books, write about the ideas they are studying, and discuss what they are studying works well. Messing with it endlessly with goals upon goals and assessments on assessments is a waste of time and effort. In fact it rewards those who are bad teachers but are good at bureaucracy – a deadly academic sin in my book. It also encourages dumbing the program down because small goals are easier to reach and record thorough simple means like quizzes. Assessment also requires the use of “rubrics” to evaluate everything. I have lost track of how many papers and essays I have written. I have read far more than I have written. When I read something, I consider a thousand tangible and intangible qualities evident in the work. I cannot quantify and explain them all. But I know an “85” from a “96” when I see them. Trying to lay out all the factors in a paper helps the students who want to check the boxes, but it does not encourage the writing of “good” papers, let alone great ones. Return to the old ways. Set the professors free from assessment.
c. Assessment intimidates institutions into adopting whatever the current fads are in higher education. I remember attending conventions of a regional accreditor. Seeing all the colleges scramble to change their missions to incorporate the latest and most trendy phrases announced in the convention breakout sessions was heartbreaking. If you are a student trying to find an institution in tune with your own goals it is no doubt frustrating when they all seek to “empower leaders for life-long learning in a global and culturally aware high tech milieu” – or the same thing in the same words reshuffled in a new order. I think the group-think focus on “promoting diversity” is a similar product of the accreditation regime. The law school I ran had many minorities – far better numbers than the state schools. We never sought them or hired special staff, we just tried to produce lawyers who understood the law and kept our doors open to all. If you do not want colleges to follow the spirit of the age like sheep, free them from the current accreditation regime.
2. Run our own PhD programs in all the arts of free peoples. If you want faculty that will teach the truth and not turn your students into unforgiving Molotov cocktail makers you are going to need PhD programs run by conservative faculty who turn out conservative teachers for the future for every liberal arts discipline. Today it is almost impossible to find a PhD program in Philosophy, English Literature, Sociology or History at theologically and politically conservative Evangelical protestant institution. There are some, but not many. By contrast it is easy to find nursing or “leadership” graduate degrees. This deficit must be corrected to recapture education from the so-called progressives.
3. Stop using the German model of higher education. In the 1800’s America admired the Universities of Germany. Thankfully we never picked up the dueling with sharp sabers. But the beer drinking and the “research university” model took over by storm. Under the research university model, the primary goal of a professor is not to teach well, it is to do “cutting edge” research and get it published in a “peer reviewed journal.” If faculty fail to do such research or fail to get it published in the appropriate places, they are fired. It takes five to six years, but excellent teaching is never enough to keep your job. In the world of physics or computer design, this sort of makes sense. You want students to learn how to do research, To stay on top of things, faculty need to model cutting edge thought and action. But what if you are teaching “English Literature in the Romantic Period” or “The Philosophy of the Good”, well, then the trouble starts. To do “cutting edge research” a professor must come up with some new and different idea about her subject. To get published in a peer reviewed journal it must be acceptable to the faculty peers from less conservative universities who run those journals, and it needs to fit in with the direction of the academic fads currently in vogue. This is how mild-mannered Christian professors end up writing articles on things like “A Post-Structuralist Interpretation of Bardic Instruments in Dark Age Welsh Literature: Harps as the divine feminine and horns as misogynist/racist oppression” or “A Critical Theory Approach to Queer thought in Plato’s Republic.” If you are forced to devote your effort to such things in order to keep your job, it prevents you from using your time for other, more edifying studies. It also leads to you and your students beginning to think that Post Structural analysis of meaning, Critical Theory, and LGBTQ based categories are in some way useful and worth knowing how to apply – more useful than just trying to figure out the boring old knowledge of what the dialogues of Plato or the legends of Myrddin are really trying to say. In the end, these writing expectations drive faculty to the left and reward radicalism. The more extreme and sillier your views are, the more “original” and “cutting edge” your research. Dump the German model. Once humanities faculty are judged by the quality of their teaching you will slowly have better faculty teaching better things. Academics will always want to write. By the way, I am not saying everything Critical Theory, or any other philosophy, says is false. Even Stalin ate breakfast, arrested bank robbers, and promoted childbearing. No human is wrong all the time. What I am saying is we need to focus more on the good, the true, and the beautiful and less on applying anti-Christian world views.
4. Be sure you teach the truth as well as falsehood. I remember going to a lecture by a faculty member at a “conservative evangelical Christian college.” The lecture was about what the professor taught about epistemology (the study of knowledge and knowing). In the lecture he covered the dangers of modernist and post-modernist epistemologies rather well. Afterward I approached the professor and asked what resources he used to explain Augustinian epistemology (one of the three great distinctively Christian approaches to the problem of how we know things and what we can know) to his students. His response shocked me: “Oh I don’t bother with that, the students get that at church.” I don’t know where the professor attended church, but I am not aware of any that effectively teaches an academic level Christian philosophy of knowledge. This man taught his students views that were wrong but left them to find the truth in the dark. All students who attend college need to be taught why truth is knowable; give them the Augustinian, Thomistic, and Common Sense realism views without saying one is better than the others – but let them know the ideas that support their faith and their civilization. Students need to learn the things that equip them to be free people. They need to understand why they have rights and what real rights are. They need to know the roots of the law. They need to be able to give an answer for the faith that is in them or at least know why Christians say that faith should be in them. They need to know why Socialism and Communism don’t work and why Marx and Gramsci and the Frankfurt School are wrong and free markets, Natural law, and objective faith based rational critical thinking are right. They need to know why living is hard and why it is worthwhile. They need to know the arts of free peoples as they really are; not as they are distorted by the spirits of our age.
5. Doing point three requires point four: End public education and re-create private education. The way the courts have mis-interpreted the first amendment public schools are never going to teach the real truth; they are never going to equip students in the arts of free peoples, nor will they explain any other discipline truthfully because they leave God out of the equation. God, the real one from the Bible, not all the fake ones from Islam or therapeutic deism, is the most central and important reality in the Universe. Without him you cannot really understand anything else. I know this is hard for pragmatic tolerant Americans to accept, but it is an unavoidable truth. So to teach the truth, you are going to need private education for everyone. School choice, with no public run choice. I know some people will try to force public educators to teach the truth. But this will not work. Just look at England: For the whole history of England Christianity has been taught in the government schools. But they have not communicated the truth. As I recall a chapel speaker noting in my own college days “British students get an inoculation against Christianity. They are exposed to a weak or dead version of Christianity, so they never catch the real thing.” Public schools run by socialists and post-modernists, but forced to teach a good curriculum, will only be inoculation centers.
I know, you are thinking this is going to be expensive and difficult. It will be. But can we afford the alternative? Students educated as they are today will eventually vote out our republic and persecute Christianity. They will pull down the wrath of God on their heads and harm their neighbors. Life is never easy, and truth is never cheap – even when it is a gift. So let us gird up our loins and join the battle like happy warriors till truth is taught throughout our land.
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