The reactions to Ward Churchill and the uprisings among conservative students appear to be indicators that the campus is changing. Is it? Or is the university the Left's last bastion, and, even more than the media, impervious to the market? To discuss these issues with us today, Frontpage has assembled a distinguished panel. Our guests today:

Larry Schweikart, a history professor at the University of Dayton. He is the co-author (with Michael Allen) of the new book,  A Patriot's History of the United States;

David Warren Saxe, as associate professor of education at Penn State University. He is finishing a book-length critique on how the teaching of American history has changed in the past thirty years. He is also a member of the Pennsylvania State Board of Education, a Heritage Fellow, and served as a consultant for state history standards throughout the nation. 

and

Bill Kerney, a businessman directing how Teaching American History grant (TAH) money is spent. In the past 19 months he has developed 9 TAH grants and won four of them. He designed the $9.6 million dollar BorderLink Project in which Advanced Placement (AP/college credit) courses were made available via broadband communication using distance learning. His goal in developing TAH grants is to enable K12 students and teachers the means to deal with bias they will find in college education as well as reform how American history is taught. 

FP: Larry Schweikart, David Saxe and Bill Kerney, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.

Dr. Schweikart, let’s begin with you.

First, let’s start with the basics. We are asking if universities can be fixed. But first, tell us briefly what is broken. Then tell us what you think some of the potential solutions are for remedying the problem.

Schweikart: First, and most obvious, universities operate, for all functional purposes, outside the market. They trumpet their "competitive" positions, but in fact most of them are immune to any real market influences. For example, they don't respond to price, because there is absolutely no price competition among universities. Oh, you see some differential among "tiers" of providers---much the way you'd see a difference in price between a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and one in Cincinnati---but among the major state schools and the large non-Ivy privates, virtually all of the so-called "competition" comes in the form of "student support" that they provide. This "support," of course, is no different than what happens in jewellery stores in malls, where the prices are jacked up double or triple, then prices "slashed" back to where they would normally be. Universities overprice themselves by 30%, then essentially rebate to a majority of students some form of "support" that is already built into the pricing structure.

Second, a corollary of the pricing system is that it has reshaped the way students and parents see costs at the university and the way legislatures fund schools. When you talk to anyone in university advancement, or development, or enrolment, and you argue for cutting tuitions, they all say the same thing: "Students expect support. It's part of our marketing and advertising." Again, that might be well and good in a normal functioning market, because there would always be a high-quality, low-cost alternative that would attract large numbers of top students. But a two-fold "snob" factor is at work: 1) students judge their worth on how much (largely bogus) support they get from a school, and 2) universities measure their success largely by how many top students they attract, regardless of what they have to give away to get them. My own midwestern university just revels in the fact that it is recruiting actively in Florida and Puerto Rico---when kids right here in Dayton might otherwise be able to afford to attend school here if the prices were lower.

I think it is fruitless to be concerned about what is taught on university campuses unless or until we can somehow make schools once again sensitive to costs that are substantially borne by the majority of the consumers.

Kerney: Advanced Placement (AP) courses taken in high school address some of the issues Dr. Schweikart raised and can also advance general reform in education.  Unfortunately, 40% of high schools in America don't even offer them.  There are a variety of benefits to AP classes.  Many high school students are ready for college work and aren't being challenged by regular high school curriculum.  An AP class can stimulate interest in learning when a student might otherwise be losing interest in higher education.

   
AP classes will more likely fit the community standards of the high school system and education standards in general so you don't see a Ward Churchill approach to education in AP classes.  In my own case ...  both my kids went to UCSD and each avoided over a year of classes on campus there because of the AP courses they took while in high school.  Their AP classes prepared them for college level work and made the transition from high school to college very easy for them.

President Bush and the governors of the 50 states are proposing increased emphasis on AP classes and if they follow through on that it will create economic pressure on colleges in addition to supplying colleges with better students who are more capable of independent thought.

The BorderLink Project (www.borderlink.org) has many success stories where children of field workers are now attending top notch colleges because of the opportunity that AP courses afforded them.  Expectations were raised and many students rose to that challenge. Through the BorderLink grant high schools were connected to existing unused fiber optic (owned by the Imperial Irrigation District).  And through that communication channels students were exposed to a broader world of quality education.  That in turn enabled raised expectations and improved educational results. Distance learning solves problems that otherwise defy solutions.   Lack of vision is the real barrier to reforming education. 

Saxe: Fixing universities? That depends on what you want them to do. As a place for young people to spend four years or so mixing and mingling, watching a little football, no, higher education is not broken. For learning and research? The times do need some changing.

Simply put, the enormous amount of resources we put into bricks and mortar learning to bring students to colleges and universities to sit at the feet of professors is about as useful as monks copying books by hand. Just as technology put the monks out of the hand-made book business, technology has the potential to dismantle and reconfigure universities as we know them. But before we go into this brave new world, where students with advanced technologies could access any knowledge or skill from whoever, whenever, and wherever, we have to deal with the issues Larry and Bill raise.

Only a university not worried about the bottom line would spend resources recruiting students from distant places when all the students they could handle are nearby. What does it profit a university in state A to recruit students from state (or region) B? For tuition paying students, out-of-state students are a significant source of income. How it works is that out-of-state are overcharged with the “profits” going to offset other university expenses. However, I suspect the sort of students Larry is talking about do not pay high tuition rates, if they pay anything at all. So who is paying for the out-of-state students who pay little to no tuition? The rest of the students, taxpayers, and parents.

And, how does Ward Churchill fit into this?

Just as higher education officials believe it is vital to recruit students who might not otherwise be admitted to college (either from lack of money or lack of qualifications), administrators have the same devotion to hiring professors who might otherwise not be hired to teach in colleges and universities (either from lack of opportunity or lack of qualifications). While higher education surely has room (and resources) for bright, but financially struggling young people and likewise they should have some place for bright and talented young faculty, administrators have sold their souls by opening doors for the unqualified.

Letting rest affirmative action for students, I think the more serious problem is affirmative action for faculty.

In brief, like it or not, people like Ward Churchill would have never been hired to teach at a university with the stature and reputation of the University of Colorado unless somebody lowered the standards. And how did this “Irish-English” white man get in, he claimed he was an Indian. Letting rest the Indian claim, Mr. Churchill’s case raises a serious issue about credentials. As stuffy as it sounds, professors typically have lots of letters attached to their names. They also have a pedigree of sorts, meaning they have been vetted by rounds of committees, where their work, disposition, intelligence, and worthiness were constantly put to the test. The better the university, the tougher the gatekeepers, and consequently, the harder it was to finish. At end, if you survived the ordeal, they called you Doctor, everyone shook hands, and your advisor “placed” you in a good school where you could continue your research.

For Mr. Churchill he had none of that, but for the new university, all that was needed was passion, a cause for social justice. In his case, Indians. It was not research and knowledge that was important. And I would think that an Indian doing serious research about Indian causes or any other academic effort would be a valuable contribution to the university. However, for Mr. Churchill and his forty five-minutes of hate lecture, it was not pushing the envelop to seek out new truths and dismantle false ones. The modern professor in the line of Ward Churchill was simply there to agitate for hate. The old-line radicals of the past, agitated with the best of them (and they had causes too), but every one I knew of was also a scholar in every sense of the word and many were fine scholars. Mr. Churchill is not a scholar and thanks to technology, anyone with an Internet connection can learn all they want about the amount and quality of his “research.”

That a university committee of professor-scholars offered this man tenure and promotion to full professor and department head is telling. And now that the cat is getting out of the bag and the rest of the English speaking world is recognizing that universities may have a serious problem, some of these emperors had better start thinking about putting on some clothes.

Schweikart: That is all correct. Let me add a slightly different twist to Bill Kerney's question about why recruit someone from Florida to Dayton, Ohio: the answer is, in part, that it gives the school an appearance of a "national" (as opposed to regional or, God forbid, provincial) institution. Recruiters, presidents, and PR people can all say, "Here at Sasquatch College, we have students from all 50 states!" He is absolutely right that wealthier kids, or, more appropriately, their parents, foot most of the bill for these out-of-state recruits. But I would probably disagree with Bill about how much aid they receive. In the late Middle Ages, it was common for nobles to boast about the amount that their ransoms brought. Well, to an extent that's true of our recruits from faraway places. They are given "aid" to attend a school far from home and it becomes something of a feather in one's cap as to how much "aid" you get from mysterious and faraway schools, even when one just down the road might be superior in all respects.

Here, I think Vedder is right. The simplest, quickest reform is to find some way to end the phoney "rebates" known as student aid. But that takes a heckuva lot of political courage by state legislatures and by university administrators, and right now I see no inclination in the direction by either group.

As to the value of AP, I taught high school AP courses, and it was a rewarding experience, and my students were fantastic. This is an innovative means to chip away at the ideological control of the universities, and should indeed be pursued and explored. Perhaps we've been looking for the single silver bullet when, in fact, fixing universities will require a broad mix of many different types of "ammunition," AP, internet universities, and new startup colleges all playing a role.

Now, good old Ward Churchill. David Saxe hits the nail on the head when he identifies the screening process as the root of the problem in this case. (Indeed, does this not remind many here, especially frontpagemagazine veterans like Ronald Radosh and David Horowitz, about the scandals involving the "New Left" histories exposed by Robert James Maddox, namely that the problem was less that these scholars published such flawed stuff, but that editors and readers routinely stamped their approval on the work before it was published?) Personally, in the dozen or so search committees I've served on, I can honestly say that an incompetent candidate was never knowingly hired---not even close. From time to time you have people who are hired because of "promise," and, of course, they all don't pan out. But I've never personally seen as egregious a hire as the employment of Ward Churchill. It was totally a "quota" hire for a quota program, and this raises, perhaps, the most critical issue of all for this roundtable.

It seems to me that we are at the point in most universities where structurally the inmates are running the asylum. Every position involving a "women's history," for example, requires not only a woman on the committee (if not as its chairwoman), but usually one or more who by virtue of the wording of the job search are radical feminists who can hire none other than a radical feminist. The same is seen with "ethnic" or "minority" hires. This, of course, proceeds from the liberal dogma that only a black can teach or evaluate a black, and so on. Functionally, what this does is to further radicalize the radical departments, because it ensures that no pro-life woman who emphasizes the role of women in families, for example, will ever be considered. And I can say that just as I have never seen a truly incompetent candidate hired deliberately, I have also never seen---not one time in 20 years and many searches---a conservative, pro-life woman even make it to the "cut down" interviews of a dozen or more candidates at the big conventions. Put another way, I have never seen one pro-life women's historian even interviewed.

This means that the academy has defined itself out of all reality (given that some recent polls show that a majority of American women now oppose abortion in most cases) and without question has made a mockery of "diversity" of opinions. The implications for the broader academy are staggering, because it means, de facto, that what few conservatives that might ever have existed on a campus have no chance, ever, of increasing their numbers. In fields where a conservative might either get to first base on his own scholarship or "sneak by" hiring committees (say, "period" histories or military---if it's still taught---or business/economic), the odds are still one-in-twelve against him or her; but the odds in the "quota" categories are 100% against a conservative ever winning a slot. So say you start with a faculty of 20 with two conservatives and a normal retirement cycle, even if fairly handled there is still a good chance the conservatives won't be replaced by other conservatives, but it is guaranteed in the "quota" or "race/class/gender" searches that a conservative won't be hired. The only hope a student has, then, of getting an opposing viewpoint is if a leftist "gets religion" and has a divine change-of-direction after being hired.

Kerney: Colleges and universities in no small measure reflect the culture.  Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA, was recently on C-Span asking college kids not to pirate music.  Jack seemed to miss the irony that his own industry of movie making played a role in the values of music pirates. There should be an online resource center that documents the origins of the ideas that produce the values that have created the current dominant Red and Blue cultures in America.   David Horowitz has already established  a guide to the contemporary political left at DiscoverTheNetwork.org.

Step One in reforming colleges and universties:

Someone should finance an effort to complement David's work.  There is a need to trace back and disclose the origins of the ideas that create the Ward Churchills in colleges and universities.  Utopian socialism has a long history in America  New Harmony Indiana was founded by Robert Owen in 1825, well before Marx rose to prominence.  However, the influence from this pattern of thinking on the culture is seldom if ever discussed. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have solidly documented the case for Soviet espionage  here in America yet their work has not been accepted widely by American historians   so much so that they have written a book on the process: In Denial: Historians, Communism, & Espionage.

Few Americans connect the Haymarket Riots of 1886 to Socialism, yet Lowell Ponte wrote an Frontpagemag.com article making the case that American socialists tried to make May Day an American holiday and how this effort led to the Haymarket Riot of 1866.

A reform of colleges and universities requires an online resource where the impact of the left on the culture over time is fully described and documented.  Drs. Saxe and Schweikart are the type of scholars that should run such a resource.  I've repeatedly heard students calling talk show hosts (talk radio is a new use of an old communications technology that is impacting the culture) for advice on how to deal with a professor.  Having a professional resource that can supply accurate information INDEPENDENT of current suppliers is a much needed step towards reform.

Technology drivers in our society are enabling a dramatic power shift in who can provide the information gate-keeping function for society.  Dan Rather would confirm this shift in power.

The next step for technology is to dramatically increase the speed of broadband communications.  Currently the Internet is only supplying information at the speed sufficient to support a Gutenberg technology level --> text and graphics.  So-called "broadband communications" of DSL and cable modem are still very slow.  Many cities are planning Wi-Fi clouds which will greatly accelerate how fast the average person can upload and download information (20 to 60 times faster than DSL and cable modem).

This speed increase will turn the Internet into an advanced distribution system for television (displacing cable TV distribution systems) as well as supporting voice and data.  ABC, CBS and NBC (and all current cable TV channels) will become just another hyperlink under this robust distribution system.  Blockbuster will vanish.  Hollywood will wonder what hit them.  The cell phone business will collapse. 

The future of wireless -- proposed new wireless standards for unlicensed (Wi-Fi and WiMax) spectrum call for an 8 to 10 times increase in speed over the current 54 megabits/sec of the current Wi-Fi standard of 802.11(g) and broader ranges of coverage.  The carrying capacity of fiber optic doubles every 8 months and most fiber optic is unused (dark fiber) so there is plenty of spare capacity to carry the increase in traffic.

There are ways to accelerate the deployment of ubiquitous fast wireless as well as use this technology to improve education. The BorderLink Project was built to demonstrate how to use speedy communications to improve education. STEP TWO is getting to work building at this level.

When kids come to college with values far removed from that of their professors (from watching an entirely different quality of (new) media/entertainment through new faster broadband communication systems) and are equipped with sufficient knowledge to deal with the ideas of their professors, then the reform will quickly proceed from the bottom up.

Last summer my wife conducted a training session for around sixty kids to use a desktop virtual reality environment for college recruitment (part of the BorderLink Project). What struck me about the exercise was that 10 years ago kids like these might have expected to become field workers like their parents   but these kids were all computer literate and far more comfortable with technology than their teachers.

Saxe: I really think Bill is on to something with technology applications undermining certain proselytizing professors and unseating their lock on higher education. Shining light on these dark places is one of the best remedies for reducing ignorance while revealing truth and leveling falsehoods. If Gutenberg with a little technology was enough to overwhelm the hand-made book industry circa 1450s to usher in a knowledge revolution, surely putting the power of readily available computers and the Internet into the hands of able educators could do the same to learning, as we presently know it. The virtual classroom that Bill advocates seems as likely a place as any to begin this work. 

In advance of this effort, perhaps conservatives should abandon all hope for a meaningful presence in higher education. Larry informs us that unseating or approaching parity with the reigning educational princes is unlikely, if not impossible. This question is begged; if university rhetoric trumpets diversity, why do they cling to closed-shop tactics?

The answer to this rhetorical question is obvious. It doesn't matter what constitutes our new majorities, the reality of higher education is that the left has captured the educational high ground and they are prepared to defend it.

Through this gloom however, I do see some light: students. Having been handed the “diversity message” since elementary school, they are often stunned that the rhetoric of diversity does not apply to all. Like any good backwoods settler from our early nation era, they higher resent special cases, special favors, special privileges, and especially what they consider government intrusion. In brief, many of our young college students have already begun to signal that if the university insists on diversity, they must actually practice it. That’s a tough one for the harried university administrator who has to walk the fine line of placating the local homosexual lobby with increasingly provocative student religious groups who are beginning to demand “equal” rights.

Perhaps, like most ingeniously devised social justice programs, these programs will eventually be hung out to dry by their own diversity ropes. Until then, putting our efforts and resources into Trojan horse technological projects should keep us busy.  

Schweikart: Yes, technology can help. Indeed, I hear kids call Rush Limbaugh's show all the time asking for help in refuting leftist teachers and profs, and his own website is a treasure trove of news articles over the years that form a solid starting point, though clearly one needs resources such as studies by the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, plus real academic works---and they are out there---to support an argument. One of the strong points of our Patriot's History of the United States is that Mike and I decided it had to reflect the most recent scholarship across the board, and that meant numerous studies that absolutely support "conservative" positions, especially when it comes to periods like the New Deal or the Reagan years.

But again, neither technology nor on-line universities nor "resources" narrowly defined nor a growing number of AP courses are going to change the university, because the fundamental problem remains one of a chasm between those who receive the goods (students and, indirectly parents) and those who pay for the goods (in many cases, the state, and "student aid," which we know means parents, but that disconnect is huge).

Might there be some incredible new technology or social force out there I don't see? Of course. Few---including Rush Limbaugh himself---really thought that the "new media" would overthrow the MainstreamMedia (MSM) . . . but it has happened. So I don't want to exclude the possibility of something no one sees right now. And it took about 20 years from when the Washington Times first became a viable alternative news source in D.C. to the unraveling of the MSM's monopoly in the late 1990s, so if there is a bubbling discontent with universities now, we are likely only seeing the beginning of a 20-year reform process, or even longer.

All that said, "follow the money." It is very hard to overcome the culture of recruitment, rebates, and kickbacks that are driving the modern universities. It's akin to trying to reform the college athletic system: we either have to admit that 90% of these "student athletes" have no business whatsoever in college and to satisfy ourselves that a true "liberal arts" background is an impossibility for some; or to offer vouchers that allow athletes to get their education at any time in the future, say, after they blow out a knee or are cut by the Los Angeles Clippers and have nowhere else to turn but an education. At that time, they would take their schooling seriously, and my guess is that their work, and grades, would dramatically improve. (By the way, this isn't my idea: it was first advanced in the early 1980s by former Phoenix Suns guard Paul Westphal).

Staying with the sports metaphor, changing the liberal climate of universities will require a full-court press: technology and better information for students attending schools; on-line alternatives for those who don't need the "Charlotte Simmons" personal experience; AP classes to move instruction out of the hands of leftist college profs; new conservative books such as Patriot's History of the United States or Star Parker's Uncle Sam's Plantation or classics such as Atlas Shrugged; strong alternative professional associations like the National Association of Scholars and the History Society; and the founding of more traditional and conservative schools like Hillsdale College and Garden City College. Still, it all comes down to the funding, and this means a political battle to reclaim control of schools through the state legislatures, and most important, parental involvement in confronting looney teachers and leftist administrators and presidents.

If we haven't yet won the battle of the media, I think we've achieved a "Midway"-type victory where we can see victory down the line. But in terms of universities, we are still stuck in England, waiting on the tides to shift.