Philanthropists must aim for total and unconditional victory.
The Mellon Foundation and its peers have recently come under sustained attack for their role in radicalizing higher education. Headlines like “Mellon Foundation Awards Morgan State University $500,000 Grant to Cultivate the Next Generation of Black, LGBTQ+ Scholar-Activists” are now a dime a dozen. Notable contributors to this wave of critiques include Tao Tan, who put together data-driven analysis for the American Enterprise Institute on the effect of grants from private foundations, and Tyler Austin Harper, who wrote a withering profile of the Mellon Foundation for The Atlantic. These and other writers provide chapter and verse on how the financial incentives provided by Mellon and its lesser brethren have transformed America’s humanities and social science professors into leftist activists.
To revive higher education, tradition-minded philanthropists must play an essential role in reforming what radical philanthropists have tried their best to wreck. They should not attempt to create counter-Mellons, but instead provide professors with financial incentives to move away from radical activism. Mellon’s task was to radicalize a liberal establishment willing to be radicalized. Because it worked with the philosophical grain of the academy, its task was easier than what tradition-minded education reformers currently face.
An ideological immunodeficiency syndrome afflicts the white blood cells of higher education. The education establishment fundamentally regards tradition-minded professors as intellectually and morally illegitimate; while it may dislike radical activists, it regards them as acceptable. This fundamental asymmetry must govern the strategies of tradition-minded philanthropists. They must jointly fund both higher education reform structures and the means to defend them from the education establishment’s destructive fury.
Traditional higher education must re-establish itself within the American academy by putting up temporary encampments, or cantonments. Philanthropists should staff them with platoons equally adept at using the scholar’s pen and the bureaucrat’s knife, because the education establishment will annihilate defenseless colonies.
The education establishment, after all, was ferociously hostile to tradition-minded professors, administrators, and students long before the Mellon Foundation made Elizabeth Alexander its president in 2018. In 1995, Yale famously rejected a $20 million gift from Lee Bass to promote the study of Western civilization—even though doing so likely meant foregoing a further $500 million gift from Bass’s father. And in the face of hysterical opposition such as the UnKoch My Campus movement, grants from the Koch brothers’ foundation and other grantmaking entities have been able to establish only classical-liberal enclaves within the existing academy.
Tradition-minded philanthropists should first precisely articulate their overarching goals and then lay out a plan showing how they can be achieved. “Let’s make the humanities and social sciences better” is too woolly a mission statement.
Higher education reform must aim at the strategic center of gravity in our universities: what is being taught in the humanities and social science classrooms. Philanthropists need to build a new cohort of professors who will teach rather than indoctrinate. This must be their enduring priority and their strategic goal.
They must also look to increase the number of teaching professors in the humanities and social sciences—which is perhaps the chief problem philanthropists must rectify. Humanities research is not directly at issue. What Americans need are professors who can convey to their students what our country’s ideals, history, and civilization are, and why America deserves our love and our allegiance. Tradition-minded professors are needed to teach undergraduate students, future K-12 teachers (who can then reach students while they are still young), and future professors.
Our nation is desperately short of such professors. America is a country of over 340 million and growing. The largest unit of reform-minded professors in a public university resides at the four-year-old Hamilton School at the University of Florida, which employs barely 50 professors. Some 200,000 professors teach the humanities and social sciences in America, and of those, perhaps 10,000 could be described as tradition-minded. The number of such professors under 50 is even lower, and there are scarcely any such professors and graduate students under 30.
Rather than measuring success by research and publications, philanthropists must focus on the number of professors and K-12 teachers educated and employed, and the number of students in the classrooms of tradition-minded professors.
If they fund professors with 2-2 teaching loads and a half-dozen worthy books to their credit, they will have wasted their money. Their dollars will be far more effective if they create a corps of professors with a vocation for teaching, have 4-4 teaching loads, and have no more than a handful of published articles to their name. They should not subsidize the luxury of research until Americans have enough tradition-minded teachers.
Toward that end, philanthropists must ascertain the number of tradition-minded professors America needs and make funding decisions to achieve that goal. They might decide that it is a strategic priority to create a cohort of tradition-minded historians and political scientists to staff our nation’s colleges and universities—that is, 1,800 historians and 1,500 political scientists, or one-tenth of the total number of professors currently in those fields. If these new professors concentrated on areas such as American political history and political thought, they would make up a larger proportion of those smaller subdisciplines.
Additionally, rather than supporting individual professors, philanthropists must focus on supporting autonomous schools in public universities, such as the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University or the aforementioned Hamilton School at the University of Florida. The odds are against a tradition-minded professor getting hired in an establishment department, and even more strongly against such a professor getting tenure. The current campaign builds on the intuition that tradition-minded professors can only establish themselves and flourish behind the administrative walls of the new crop of civics schools that are being established.
To provide sustained and effective support for these schools, philanthropists must seek to fund larger versions of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ collaborative research grant program. They should provide support on the scale of the partnership grants handed out by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which provides funds up to $2.5 million over several years. Such funds are used to support collaborative work by a large number of professors and graduate students.
Grants at that level could provide multi-year funding for much or all of an autonomous school, including an explicit provision to support academics throughout their career cycle, from graduate students to tenured professors. Flexible, interdisciplinary grant remits would make it possible for autonomous schools to apply for and receive grants suited to their professors’ specialties. Revocable grant programs also would allow philanthropists to ensure that their money would not support institutions captured by the radical establishment. Such time-limited grants would also deter the radical establishment from attempting to seize control of autonomous schools.
We must aim ultimately for total and unconditional victory—that is, taking back control of our colleges and universities and not being satisfied with surviving in a ghetto. We will not redeem the academy in this generation. For now, we must support intelligent, strategic campaigns to seize discrete portions of academic territory, cantonment by cantonment, and build up our platoons.
With steady funding, we can build up the forces we need to reclaim our colleges and universities.
The American Mind presents a range of perspectives. Views are writers’ own and do not necessarily represent those of The Claremont Institute.
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