The Civic Failure of American Higher Education

First Things
Feb 23, 2010
R. R. Reno

Excerpt:
The civic function of higher education is therefore obvious. A serious intellectual encounter with alternative views of morality, culture, and politics—an encounter given flesh and blood on a campus populated by faculty who carry forward these alternatives—prepares the mind for intelligent partisanship. If a liberal, for example, knows why a conservative opposes government run health care or abortion, he has the basis for discerning common ground on the margins of these disagreements, and perhaps on other issues as well. At an even more basic level, the liberal will find it difficult to simply pigeonhole conservatives as greedy, ignorant, and mean-spirited.

Unfortunately, this does not happen in higher education. As civic institutions, our colleges and universities have become closed communities of the like-minded. Conservative ideas are never engaged but only ignored and dismissed.

The raw numbers are shocking. As a 2007 study by Neil Gross at Harvard and Solon Simmons at George Mason shows, the professoriate has become ideologically homogeneous. the rest
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