General Eisenhower rejected advice to land hardened veterans of the Italian campaigns on the beaches of Normandy. They knew too much. They had seen the dangers and could weigh the risks. Many would dig in, choosing whatever safety they could find. Success in that desperate gamble, Ike concluded, was more likely with men who had not yet grappled with the enemy. To do the implausible required men who did not understand the challenge so well. There is a lesson here for those who hope to redeem higher education.
The National Association of Scholars, founded in 1987, has been grappling with its opponents for a very long time. Its cause is defending academic freedom, the principles of free society — liberty, equality, and responsible citizenship — and the heritage of Western civilization.
In its earliest days, the association spoke out against declining academic standards, multiculturalism, and political correctness in higher education. It has been a vocal and articulate opponent of the promiscuous application of critical race theory, racial and ethnic preferences taking the place of merit in college admissions, administrative bloat in our colleges and universities, and the emergence of large, generously funded bureaucracies to impose diversity, equity, and inclusion, an Orwellian euphemism for a pernicious system of racial, ethnic, and sex discrimination. It champions the Western tradition of intellectual exchange and the liberal ideal of a color blind society.
The association has the scars that go with many years in the arena. Critics have charged it — falsely — with racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism. Others have called its advocacy mean-spirited because the association is not reluctant to name names, outing some of the worst offenders in a series of reports documenting, in depressing detail, the degeneration of higher education.
Many of these reports are the work of Dr. David Randall, the association’s director of research. He has spent a long time in the trenches, studying the state of higher education, important aspects of history and civics education in public schools, and the advanced placement examinations in European and American history, which have considerable influence over how history is taught in high schools.
His reports include The Disappearing Continent: A Critique of the Revised AP European History Examination (2016), Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics (2017), Social Justice Education in America (2019), Disfigured History: How the College Board Demolishes the Past (2020), Learning for Self-Government: A K-12 Civics Report Card (2022), Taken for a RIDE: Rhode Island’s Social Studies Standards Shortchange Students (2023), and a complementary study, Disowned Yankees: How Connecticut’s Social Studies Standards Shortchange Students (2024).
It’s an impressive body of work by a scholar who treasures the academy as it once was and should be again — “excitingly demanding, dangerously free, generous to invite all to share in an ancient, wise, and beautiful conversation.” The reports present grim insights about the state of education, particularly history education, so vital to shaping culturally literate Americans.
On March 19 the association released a new report by Dr. Randall titled Curriculum of Liberty, a summary description of the troubled state of American higher education and a proposed curriculum to provide young Americans with the kind of education most colleges and universities no longer offer.
The report begins with a withering indictment. According to Dr. Randall, our colleges and universities are failing “to educate our young in the scientific and engineering disciplines whose technological fruit forms the modern sinews of power.” The specter of Chinese domination looms over the report. Instead of preparing students to protect our national independence from predatory powers, he says, the modern university is training personnel for the “managerial-therapeutic state” while indoctrinating students in a “perverse ideology of ‘liberation’” that is at once tyrannical and depraved. Higher education, he writes, is now dominated by “activist barbarians who seek to destroy the very memory of Western civilization.”
The curriculum he proposes is extraordinarily ambitious and, in its salient features, familiar to anyone acquainted with the contours of a fine liberal arts education in the second third of the twentieth century. To that rich combination of philosophy, history, literature, and language, he adds a fuller course of mathematics and physics, chemistry, and biology. On this he layers more, including military science, engineering, computer science, musicology, and what he calls “Eastern Humanities” — embracing the cultures of the Islamic world, India, and the Far East — as well as practical knowledge of law, business, medicine, and self-defense.
He knows it’s too much. A student who completed his general education requirements would have no time left for advanced work in a chosen major field. But having spent a decade analyzing a failing enterprise, he offers the Curriculum of Liberty to stimulate discussion. “I give these recommendations to the invisible colleges formed by private conversations,” he says, “and to the quiet Americans planning a new system of higher education.”
Some of his recommendations will prompt vigorous dissent, even from allies. I bristled at his assertion that students should analyze poetry “independent of historicizing crutches such as biographical knowledge of the poet or knowledge of the time and place it was produced.” No one who appreciates Christopher Hill’s Milton and the English Revolution or Lucien Febvre’s sparkling The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais could refer to historical analysis of literature with such disdain. I disagree with his assertion that American universities should foster American nationalism. I draw a distinction between nationalism and patriotism and argue that our institutions should encourage patriotism and avoid nationalism’s vices.
David Randall welcomes this kind of debate. Indeed preparing students to “think and argue well” is his highest purpose. The curriculum is designed to cultivate self-reliance, reverence for liberty, and virtuous citizenship, and to equip the nation with scientists and engineers to sustain the United States against international rivals.
His tone is militant, but his trumpet sounds retreat. Like the wary veteran of too many battles, he doesn’t believe that our failing universities can be retaken, at least in this generation. The enemy is simply too well entrenched.
“The advocates of American higher education must continue to support the nation and the republic,” he writes, “but from a position of exile from its institutions — above all, from its colleges and universities. American higher education must provide Americans the ability to endure this regime and the tools to reclaim the republic.”
The curriculum he proposes is designed for a mountaintop or a desert island to which the true believers, a remnant in the conservative sense of that word, have withdrawn to train a new generation — to do what, exactly?
He imagines a kind of higher education, for whatever college or university might adopt some or all of his ideas, that equips young people to endure the present regime and provides them with “tools” to redeem the country. The curriculum defines the contours of a first-rate education. But our universities aren’t going to be redeemed by educating a remnant in the Great Books and immersing them in the economics of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek. We aren’t going to redeem higher education from a mountaintop, a desert island . . . or a foxhole.
We’re going to do it by marching forward — by persuading Americans of the basic truths about freedom and exposing freedom’s enemies at home and abroad. This will require securing a sufficient share of popular media to articulate the message in language so plain and clear as to win the assent of the large proportion of moderate, patriotic Americans and relying on their sovereign power to reform our existing institutions of higher education, most of which are funded by taxation and can be subordinated to the public will.
We will redeem higher education by reviving moderation, renewing our lost commitment to institutional neutrality in the marketplace of ideas, and providing a congenial intellectual environment for scholarship of all sorts.
We must distinguish between scholarship and activism and reward faculty members who understand that distinction. To professors who want to dabble in politics we say: the streets, the popular press, and the polling places await — take your partisanship to the free market of ideas. Demonstrate the courage of your convictions in the public arena. Imposing your partisanship on captive audiences in our classrooms is cowardice. We aren’t going to tolerate it and we aren’t going to pay for it.
We must end activism on campus by students, who (David Randall expresses this beautifully) ought to have too much studying to do to devote time to hanging out in crowds on campus expressing their opinions about the political cause of the moment. We must revive the simple truth that college is about learning from people who know more than you rather than about self-expression. Students determined to protest can take their chances on city streets off campus.
Redeeming higher education won’t be easy. We have to begin by peeling away layers of privilege we have bestowed on academics and academic institutions in the name of academic freedom. Academic freedom is a trust — an expression of faith that our best educated women and men are the best judges of what young people should be taught.
In their arrogance our universities have ignored, betrayed, and abused that trust. We must strengthen institutional oversight and safeguards against partisanship. We must examine the independence of state-supported universities and, where necessary, curtail it. We must hold public university leaders accountable to the public. We must strip academic departments that pack their faculties with ideological fellow travelers of their role in hiring and replace the deans who go along with this pernicious nonsense.
We must also start treating college professors like adults, holding them accountable for their performance and paying them like professionals. The idea of paying a newly appointed assistant professor less than the market pays the manager of a coffee shop is appalling. It’s also stupid because self-defeating. A tiny number of people dedicated to the life of the mind and willing to do without security and comfort will accept such terms. The rest who accept them are mediocrities and activists, and they will continue to be frustrated, angry, and alienated. In the marketplace of ideas, as in any other, you get what you pay for.
We can redeem higher education without retreat. We can create institutions where the brightest academics develop and exchange ideas. We can admit truly qualified young people chosen on the basis of merit to study under their guidance. We can treat the professors like professionals and hold them to professional standards. And we can accomplish all of this in our generation.
That David Randall does not share this confidence is readily understood. The National Association of Scholars has been fighting this battle for a long time without sufficient support, documenting the degeneration of American education without the resources to stop it. It’s time for the many millions of Americans who value their freedom to join the battle.
