The Federal Higher Education Act has a provision for channeling grants to programs in the American Founding and other such outré subjects.
One can’t say the Republicans lack ideas about spending other people’s money. Too bad they haven’t the faintest inkling about spending money on ideas.
Hidden away in the federal code is a program that might restore some parity to the culture wars that the conservative movement — of which the Republican party is ostensibly a part — has long been losing. It’s therefore stunning that amid the prodigality of the last omnibus spending bill, with its billions in tribute to vested interests and boondoggles, the party couldn’t find a cent for a program central to American culture’s defense.
NRO readers will hardly need reminding that most of our campuses have become closed ideological shops where the radical Left dominates what students hear and learn. Visible, spirited, and organized centers of intellectual opposition are virtually absent. Since people tend to learn what they’ve been taught, our civic life has been steadily radicalized and polarized at the taxpayer’s expense. Having gained command of the federal purse strings, our conservative party would be, one might think, looking to administer a corrective. Alas, so far no.
When in 2008 the Federal Higher Education Act was last reauthorized, a new provision was slipped into its language. Called “American History for Freedom,” it aimed to channel grant money to politically incorrect academic programs, conceivably in amounts that would allow them to begin hiring their own dissident faculty — a sine qua non if some semblance of intellectual sobriety is to be restored to our universities.
AHF’s language was carefully crafted, defining potential grant recipients with exceeding care — programs about Western civilization, the study of free institutions, the American Founding, and other now outré subjects, run by scholars with well-established credentials. In other words, it would support the very programs and scholars academic radicals have been busily consigning to oblivion. Unfortunately, its enactment was almost immediately followed by Obama’s election, and funding for AHF was put on hold lest his underlings mangle it in its cradle. Now, however, the window of opportunity has reopened.
There are upward of 50 existing programs that could justly receive AHF grants, many at major universities. Most are small and struggling, with little or no impact on faculty hiring or classroom instruction. Yet their situation could rapidly change if AHF grants were made, as they could be, on endowment scale, perhaps at something like $5 million a pop. Twenty such grants would total $100 million per year, not a particularly outsized chunk of change for the feds, indeed less than 0.002 percent of the Department of Education’s present budget. Yet that might be enough to start a significant remake of the landscape of American higher education, with small centers of philosophical heterodoxy substantially ramping up and new ones brought to birth.
America’s universities are unlikely to devote much of their own resources to projects focused on Western civilization, the study of free institutions, and traditional American history. “Found money,” on the other hand, is unlikely to be rejected. In Phoenix, the state legislature recently appropriated about $7 million for a School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. Although they were unsought, ASU took the funds, and the new school has been hiring conservative and libertarian scholars as well as attracting supplementary private gifts. A few other universities have done similar things at the behest of individual donors, but the process has been as slow as the disintegration of our civic culture has been rapid. The feds now stand in a position to open the sluicegates.
Is there a downside to federal action? To ask that question is certainly the conservative instinct. Once big bucks are in play, won’t the academic establishment find stratagems for directing some leftward? Sure. But the Left already owns academe, while its campus opponents scramble for crumbs. Even a 50–50 split of AHF grants would represent a far higher marginal return for the latter than for the former.
Won’t the Democrats eventually regain Congress and the White House? A dead certainty. But with immediate prospects for retrieving a desperate situation, why not strike while we can?
Won’t new dissident programs, even if well endowed and hiring, still be small compared with their leftist rivals? To be sure. Yet insurgent programs should be able to punch well above their weight.
Won’t new dissident programs, even if well endowed and hiring, still be small compared with their leftist rivals? To be sure. Yet the academic Left itself initially advanced from modest beachheads and, given its contemporary folly and incoherence, presents many an inviting target. Insurgent programs should be able to punch well above their weight.
Of course some will oppose new federal spending simply on principle. I sympathize. But with so many signs of civic dissolution, is this really an occasion for green eyeshades? An earlier danger to our republic called forth the Manhattan Project. Perhaps American History for Freedom should be seen as something analogous, albeit suited to very different circumstances and costing a lot less. If congressional Republicans really want to give away the nation’s store, perhaps they should also take care that it doesn’t burn down around their ears.
When the current budget deal expires in September, there will be one more opportunity for congressional Republicans to fund AHF before the 2018 elections. And it needn’t be with a hundred million dollars, just getting AHF off the ground will represent a gain. If the GOP genuinely wants to do well for itself while doing good for the nation, here is a spending opportunity in which it can worthily indulge.