I’ve continued my tour of American colleges and universities with a visit to Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Ala. You’ll remember that one thing I’m looking for is niches or safe spaces for liberal education in these techno-vocational and politically correct times.

Well, at Jacksonville, I met a very sharp and classy libertarian African American student. He’s been to many a libertarian conference associated with the various foundations. I asked him whether he was so libertarian that he didn’t have any sympathy for Rand Paul’s drawing the line when it comes to abortion at seven-pound babies. The young man added that, of course, he was pro-life. He went on to explain that he was evolving away from being a somewhat consistent libertarian to becoming a more moderate classical liberal. The reason: He learned a lot about statesmanship, citizenship, philosophy, and all that from taking a class, on Cicero, team-taught by a historian and a political scientist. In that class all they did is discuss the Loeb editions of texts with no technology in the classroom whatsoever.

So it turns out that there’s liberal education going on at Jacksonville, and that the history department is particular is distinguished by rather traditional concerns and a genuine diversity in approaches and points of view. The humanities faculty I met were obviously much more than “collegial”; most of them seem to be close friends with shared intellectual interests and a high level of erudition beyond narrow scholarly specializations.

Not only that, Jacksonville has a Tocqueville Society with a good number of students who share an interest in political philosophy and who have been invited to long and luxurious dinners at a faculty member’s home with the various guest speakers in the Antigone lecture series on the development of freedom (funded by the Koch brothers but with nary a libertarian or even an economist). I gave the last talk in the series. You won’t be surprised that I talked about the postmodern idea of freedom, deploying Tocqueville, Solzhenitsyn, and that disciplined technique of selective nostalgia that’s sweeping country.

A student in search of a truly higher education could do a lot worse than go to Jacksonville State in Alabama. And a philanthropist who wants to do a lot of educational good for a modest investment might do well to endow a liberal-arts honors college centered around the fine faculty in history and political science (and, I’m sure, others) there.

Just to be clear: I’m talking about only a tiny niche at this large and growing university. For the most part, Jacksonville is too much online, too enamored with technology, too top-down in governance, too obsessed with irrelevant amenities such as athletic upgrades, too concerned with documenting everything, and too close to reducing (by never giving raises) the pay of their non-technical tenured faculty to subsistence. That is: It has the usual weaknesses of regional public colleges and universities these days. One exception: It seems relatively unplagued by political correctness. That might be one thing to love about parts of the South.

Also very educational is Lauren Weiner’s savvy and pop-erudite analysis of John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club. A big question: Was John Hughes a libertarian? He was all about showing that kids know more than, and are typically bored or worse by, clueless and insensitive teachers and especially administrators. He catered to the “libertarian” pretension of the young, especially in democracies, about dissing all personal authority. He was also libertarian in the sense that his characters are too “realistic” to take seriously idealistic causes beyond themselves. Despite the abortion, there are reasons to prefer Fast Times at Ridgemont High to all the Hughes films on high school. At least Mr. Hand (the history teacher) and Mr. Vargas (the science teacher) are basically good guys who really teach stuff and actually care about their students.