Heather Mac Donald has written a superlative article for City Journal on the Teaching Company. (The company now is called Great Courses, but most people probably still refer to it by its original name.) She recounts the interesting history of the company (which I heard years ago from Alan Kors as well): Tom Rollins was a liberal working on Ted Kennedy’s staff who decided back in 1989 to leave and start a firm that would find top college professors and pay them to create high-quality lecture series in their fields, then sell the sets to a knowledge-hungry public.

It was tough going at first, and Rollins soon learned that his customers had no tolerance for the kind of snooty leftism that some of his lecturers exhibited. Mac Donald writes of one of the early courses, “The professors made little effort to conceal their contempt for the presumed racism and sexism of their audience and the authors they were discussing. Within a month of the course’s release, customers were calling the company to complain about the lecturers’ condescending tone.” Rollins wisely destroyed the tapes and dropped that offering. Mac Donald quotes him as saying, “Teaching shouldn’t be an opportunity for a professor to get off his chest burning issues that no one would listen to except students.” I think what he means is that it’s unfortunate that professors take advantage of their captive market. But being in business, he could not afford to alienate customers and waste their time with tendentious blather.

Having learned his lesson, Rollins has since steered away from professors who can’t conceal their politics. That has led to complaints from some that his courses are too “canonical” and don’t include “silenced voices.” Mac Donald acidly comments, “It is not enough, apparently, that identity politics dominate college humanities departments; they must also rule outside the academy.” Also most revealing is the e-mail exchange she had with one professor, who refused to discuss anything with her once he found out that she writes for Manhattan Institute. It speaks volumes about the close-mindedness of some academics that they refuse to continue a discussion with a writer (even one as well educated as Heather Mac Donald) simply because they so hate any person or organization that dissents from the pieties of statism.

The success of this venture (and others like it) shows that people want to learn about an array of academic subjects. The free market enables them to get a terrific product — usually far better than they would get by signing up for a course taught at an area college — that is lower in price and much more convenient. Kids who sleep through an indifferent college class on ancient history or Dutch painting or American literature at age 19 often find that they want to learn about such things decades later.