Save NEH, Save St. Ignatius
Battles in the war.

By Stanley Kurtz, a fellow at the Hudson Institute
February 12, 2001 9:15 a.m.

ast Friday I wrote a piece for NRO urging the Bush administration to help "take back the academy." I called for the appointment of a chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities who would use the bully pulpit to ask for fair play in colleges and universities now utterly dominated by the Left. I followed this with an appeal for support of small, high quality, and entirely voluntary great-books programs in which not only liberal, but also conservative views could be represented. Was I a fool to hope that even such modest steps might be taken in response to the near-total loss of the academy to the forces of political correctness? Maybe so. Events that Friday seemed almost deliberately to mock my hopes.

Even before my piece was posted, the New York Times reported that several conservative Republican senators had voiced support for the retention of President Clinton's NEH Chairman, William Ferris. Jesse Helms, Trent Lott, and Dick Armey supporting the retention of Clinton's man at NEH! How could this possibly have happened? Apparently Ferris, a past head of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in Mississippi, had been clever enough to support the publication of books and encyclopedias on the culture of states with powerful Republican senators.

What a tale that tells. If the calumny hurled at Ashcroft by the mis-educated Left reflects the banning of respectable conservative religious voices from the academy, that same troubling act of intellectual segregation is reflected in the patent inability of Republican conservatives to understand what's at stake in the choice of an NEH chairman. Having been so completely shut out of the academy, many conservatives have simply written it off, naively telling themselves that the ideologues who run it are politically irrelevant. Yet every movement that stands uncompromisingly against traditional values has its base in the academy. What utter naivete to trade a last chance — a golden opportunity — to restore some semblance of balance to that universal socializer of America's governing elite, for a mess of pottage.

Disturbing as this is, the situation may not be as bad as the story in the Times made it seem. The Times's obfuscating headline spoke only of Republicans asking President Bush to "keep" Clinton's NEH chairman. Reading the fine print makes it clear that only one of these senators, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, actually called for President Bush to reappoint William Ferris to a new term. The others merely voiced support for Ferris finishing out the final year of his current term. But the Times is evidently eager to whip up a boomlet for Ferris in hopes of preventing Bush from appointing someone who might actually criticize Leftist bias in the academy. As the Times tells it, Ferris has the merit of being apolitical. Now that all dissenters have been expelled from the academy, a neutral NEH chairman suits the Times well. But let's not pretend this has anything to do with fairness.

And that was only Friday morning. Late that afternoon I received another blow — this time when a student called from California asking for help. The young gentleman had read my plea for support of small, high-quality, and voluntary great-books programs that make space for conservative as well as liberal voices. He was part of one such program, he said. Yet only days before that program been effectively destroyed by his liberal college president. I had argued Friday on NRO that small voluntary great-books programs would be protected from attack by the Left in ways that large compulsory programs would not. Apparently I was wrong.

The program in question was the Saint Ignatius Institute, a widely respected course in the great books at the University of San Francisco, a Catholic institution. Although it enrolls well under five percent of the students at USF, the great-books curriculum at the Saint Ignatius Institute regularly attracts a disproportionate number of the brightest students at the university. In 1998, SII received an award from the prestigious Templeton Foundation declaring it one of the finest great-books programs in the country. Yet just months after his installation as president of the University of San Francisco, Father Steven A. Privett summarily dismissed the two key administrators of the program, and announced steps to consolidate SII with another, and far different program at the university. Ostensibly, this was a move to save money. But no one believes this. Privett's coup, undertaken in secrecy, without the usual consultation, capped years of hostility toward the Saint Ignatius great-books program from USF's liberal theology faculty.

The liberal Jesuits who dominate at the University of San Francisco — of which Father Privett is one — are supposed afficionados of "diversity," and of such neo-Marxist movements as "liberation theology." These leftist theologians reserve the right to disregard the ordinary teachings of the Catholic Church. They frequently avail themselves of that right. The Catholic faculty at Saint Ignatius Institute, on the other hand, consider themselves bound by the ordinary teachings of the Church. That does not make them simplistic dogmatists. Far from it. SII boasts numerous non-Catholics and non-believers on its faculty. And SII's students, in addition to studying Augustine and Aquinas, must read and master such scourges of traditional Catholicism as Hume, Nietzsche, and Freud. In fact, several years ago, SII added the Koran, the Analects of Confucius, and the Hindu Ramayana to its great-books curriculum. But that is simply not good enough for Father Privett and the liberal Jesuits at USF. Why, then, did SII have to go?

My student friend explained it best. He told me how he and his comrades loved to shift back and forth between the liberal theology department at USF and the conservative SII, putting faculty members on both sides "on the hot seat," by forcing them to confront the arguments of their opposites. That's what's going on here — a shameful attack on true moral, intellectual, and theological diversity from ideologues who cannot bear to have students challenging their dogmas. And the dogmatists here are on the Left, not the Right. Ironically, Father President Privett, in his tireless opposition to American involvement in El Salvador, eulogized liberal Catholic martyrs to the guns of El Salvadorian militias by lauding the dangerous obligation of intellectuals to force uncomfortable truths upon those in power. Yet Father Privett has killed off the Saint Ignatius Institute for the uncomfortable truths it spoke to the liberal powers at his university. Father Privett claims that SII will go on, but it is all too evident that his plans for SII will prevent it from ever again standing as either an intellectual or theological counterweight to his liberal Jesuit brethren.

The religious dimension of the SII battle marks it out as special. Clearly, those liberal Jesuits who have placed a Catholic veneer upon an essentially secular dogma take the mere existence of a traditionalist Catholic program at their university as a standing affront. The comparison reveals too much. Worse, these traditionalists cannot be dismissed as narrow ideologues. Worse still, they attract the finest students at the university. You can see why SII had to go. But for all its theological interest, this case has much to tell us about the battle for the soul of the academy. I may have been wrong last Friday when I argued that small and purely voluntary great-books programs would be safe from attack. But I was right to believe in the power of even one such program — however small — to shake the foundations of the Left's control over a college or university. Even the smallest island on which to nourish thoughtful doubt about the dogmas of the day strikes fear into the heart of the new Inquisitors.

If you would like to protest the travesty at the University of San Francisco, go to the website of the Friends of the Saint Ignatius Institute. Read about what happened, and consider sending a letter of protest to the USF Board of Trustees. That's easy. Winning the battle on the national level will be far more difficult. Perhaps it was foolish of me not to see that. But my basic premise still stands — and is even strengthened. Even a single thoughtful person speaking out as the head of NEH, allied with even one small chorus of thoughtful challengers from within our universities, might bring the walls all tumbling down.