The Time to Fund New Universities Is Now James M. Patterson
I recommend a third option: conservatives should abandon reform and build new colleges. Blueprints to build entirely new institutions do exist. Conservatives should focus on this endeavor rather than supporting the hiring of the lonely conservative at one institution.
Last year, AEI scholars Frederick Hess and Brendan Bell published a proposal for an ivory tower of our own. They argue scholars of a politically conservative or intellectually traditional bent should simply opt out of the American college ecosystem. Instead, conservatives should build a comprehensive alternative which would replicate many of the features of existing institutions, but without the social and political entanglements that have made them so inhospitable.
One obstacle to this plan is cost. Hess and Bell calculated that the price tag for building a world-class conservative institution would be around $3 billion. That s a lot of money. In our plutocratic age, though, it is not inconceivable that some mogul of finance or tech might be willing to devote his fortune to the academic enterprise. Such a commitment would be impressive but not unprecedented. Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and the University of Chicago were founded in the late 19th century with the support of business tycoons. For example, as Thelin shows, John D. Rockefeller gave the founding gift of $12 million in cooperation with the American Baptist Education society to create an eminent Baptist institution in the Midwest, that later became the University of Chicago.
Another challenge, which Hess and Bell do not discuss, is accreditation. One reason for the degradation of the American academy is accreditors imposition of burdensome, opaque, and woke criteria on the university. The university accepting these criteria would be expensive and possibly inconsistent with its mission, but rejecting accreditation would limit the university s ability to compete for students and faculty.
With sufficient financial resources, accreditation might be a manageable difficulty. But there are also cheaper options. Building on arguments by historian Warren Treadgold, Jacob Howland argues that it should be possible to purchase and repurpose an existing campus at considerably lower cost than starting from scratch. For as little as $500 million, he calculates, one of the many small liberal arts colleges facing closure could be turned to a new purpose.
This strategy is less ambitious and more realistic than founding a challenger to Harvard or Berkeley. Establishing conservative research universities with science and engineering schools is an important goal, but the foundation of the university is the liberal arts curriculum. Moreover, as the late Peter A. Lawler liked to point out, the liberal arts and humanities are cheap, meaning that financing conservative higher education in these fields will require comparatively little fundraising.
A possible objection is that there are already several such institutions, mostly mission-driven religious liberal arts schools, including Yeshiva University, Ave Maria University, and Grove City College. Perhaps the most well-known is Hillsdale College. The very success of Hillsdale suggests that there is still unmet demand. Short of founding a new university or college, conservative philanthropy should support these institutions to the point where they can achieve financial independence from government interference.
At minimum, political conservatives and religious traditionalists should stop cut
via lawliberty.org
This is a good idea for law schools as well. My small and formerly cute law school used to be considered relatively conservative/libertarian because there were perhaps 8 or so of us on the faculty. That number has fallen a bit and young whippersnappers have emerged determined to impose on all of us the new wokeness or close enough. Resistance may be futile, though that won’t stop some of us from trying.
Peter Thiel could endow a law school of his own — Stanford is as lost as anywhere and his billions won’t buy it back. He should start afresh. So could Elon Musk with an engineering school. In the meantime, give your money to Hillsdale or perhaps Pepperdine Law School — they’re still pretty conservative* I think.
*By “conservative” I mean anything to the right of a middle-of-the-road Democrat, c. 1980 or so.