Republicans inject conservative thought into Arizona universities
TEMPE, Ariz. — In a classroom designed for 32, five students listened attentively last month to an analysis of Aristophanes’ play “The Clouds.” Nine students in another course took in a detailed lecture about the Peloponnesian War, while yet another class pondered the concept of happiness as defined by Aristotle.
Small classes, deep engagement with professors, and a focus on the classics — they could be scenes from an elite and expensive liberal arts college. Instead, these classes are taking place at one of America’s largest public universities, Arizona State, courtesy of a pet project generously funded by the state’s conservative leaders.
Across the country, Republican legislatures have been taking a greater interest in the affairs of their state universities to counteract what they see as excessive liberalism on campus, from quarrels over conservative speakers to national anthem protests to the very substance of what students are taught.
In Arizona, the Legislature has taken a direct role, fostering academic programs directly from the state budget and sidestepping the usual arrangement in which universities decide how to spend the money. Lawmakers are bankrolling the new School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State, and the University of Arizona’s Department of Political Economy and Moral Science. Locally, they are better known as the “freedom schools,” and not always admiringly.
Their creation reflects a cultural struggle within academia, one that some conservatives believe requires government intervention to counter a liberal professoriate. Their goal is to promote the study of Western civilization, once a core requirement at many colleges, contending that a well-educated society must understand its roots — the Delphic maxim “know thyself.”
The new courses at Arizona State focus on Western thinking from the ancient Greeks to the Founding Fathers and beyond, with an emphasis on free-market philosophy. They draw heavily from original texts rather than modern interpretations.
“There is too much revisionism being taught in universities today,” said state Rep. Jay Lawrence, R-scottsdale, who backed the new programs. “It’s a big deal to those of us who feel very strongly about a more conservative education.”
But many liberal arts professors view these efforts as reviving an antiquated and Eurocentric version of history, one that they have tried to balance with viewpoints of women and racial minorities.
As universities go, Arizona State hardly appears to be a liberal bastion. The palm-shaded main campus in Tempe, which has about 52,000 students, has been immune from the divisive protests at places such as Berkeley, Evergreen State University and Middlebury. Students wander around in military garb, evidence of a sizable ROTC presence. On a recent day, students zoomed through the center of campus on skateboards, taking little notice as a pro-gun group set up a booth nearby on a manicured plaza.
Private donors, including the Charles Koch Foundation and the Jack Miller Center, have been funding conservative campus programs across the country for years, and the programs at Arizona’s two largest universities are absorbing earlier Koch-funded initiatives at each school.
The Legislature has approved $7 million for Arizona State. In addition to paying for six new professors with intellectually conservative pedigrees, $430,000 has been set aside for attention-grabbing rare manuscript acquisitions, including first editions of the Federalist Papers and Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations.”
An additional $75,000 is paying for spring break trips to India for 12 students, a carrot to encourage enrollment in the school, which stands at about 50. Students had to take at least one of the school’s classes as a condition of winning a spot on the trip.
Officials of the school, which operates in the university’s Social Sciences building, said they expected enrollment to increase once its major was fully approved by the Board of Regents, permitting the school to grant degrees.
The new program has not been well received by some professors elsewhere at Arizona State, who view it as duplicating classes and too heavily focused on white male thinkers from the United States and Europe.
“They don’t seem to be interested in looking at diverse political theorists in this country, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, Ida B. Wells, Native scholars or Asian-american scholars,” said Karen Kuo, a professor of Asian Pacific American Studies.
With the school cognizant of concerns that it focuses only on “dead white men,” its director, Paul Carrese, has sought to diversify the curriculum, adding women and minority thinkers to the readings. Last month, the school sponsored an unveiling of two more rare books, inscribed editions of works by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“The program is not pursing a party line or dogma,” said Carrese, who was recruited from the Air Force Academy. “It’s making space for debate.”
A look at two economics courses — one in the new school and another offered by the university’s School of Social Transformation — provides an example of the contrasting approaches.
In the new school, Peter Mcnamara, who has published on the free-market economist F.A. Hayek, teaches “Classics of Modern Economic Thought,” a survey of 20th-century economists. Four of the 30 sessions are devoted to inequality and moral issues, according to the syllabus.
The other class, “Globalization and Socioeconomic Justice,” covers some of the same thinkers but focuses on why “inequality and poverty exist,” with discussions that include colonialism and imperialism, “enduring economic injustice” and environmental issues associated with capitalism.
“I teach the students to actually look at what’s happening around the world when these economic theories are applied in practice,” said Ladawn Haglund, who teaches the globalization course.
Michael Crow, the university’s president, has embraced the program. “They were interested in having a broader set of curricular offerings than the one we presently have, particularly as it related to economic thought or political theory, philosophy,” Crow said.
“The fact that someone from the state came along and gave us money for it, OK, good,” he said. Yet, he complained, the Legislature has not fulfilled his request to pay half the cost of the university’s in-state students. “The fact that they weren’t giving us money for other things, bad.”
Bradley, the Democratic lawmaker, said there was some mystery surrounding the origin of the funding request for the schools. “The governor’s budget appears at 11 o’clock at night and we vote two hours later,” he said.
A spokesman for Gov. Doug Ducey said he did not think the request was generated by their office. But in the governor’s most recent State of the State speech, on Jan. 8, he said he was pleased with the efforts to promote a range of viewpoints at state schools.
“Here in Arizona, on our campuses, debate is encouraged, free speech is protected, and diversity of thought isn’t just a platitude,” Ducey said. “It’s alive and well in lecture halls, on debate stages and in the pages of college newspapers.”