In a perfect world, the federal government would never have gotten into higher education and now that it has blundered in, would get completely out.
In our very imperfect world, however, we should look for ways of changing the federal role in higher education so it does less harm, or possibly even some good. And there is one (and I think only one) instance where more spending would be good — American History for Freedom grants. I discuss the AHF program in today’s Martin Center article.
The concept is to use federal grants to seed programs at our colleges and universities that would focus on our history and institutions from a traditional or classical-liberal perspective. Most students get a steady diet of progressive blather about what is wrong with America. Adding more programs that take something other than leftist views would increase diversity in a good way — diversity of thought.
That would be good for students and also good for the academic enterprise itself, since the intellectual monoculture that we find in many colleges is unhealthy. Professors never get any pushback against their statist ideas.
AHF is already in statute, but no funds were ever appropriated while President Obama was in charge, for obvious reasons. Now that he and his Department of Education minions are gone, there is a window of opportunity to fund AHF and start the grant process. There is no time to lose.