Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Arizona Republicans Inject Schools of Conservative Thought Into State Universities

A course titled “Statesmanship and American Grand Strategy” in the new School of Civic and Economic Thought at Arizona State University. The school is funded by the conservative Arizona State Legislature.Credit...Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times

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.

Around 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 Representative Jay Lawrence, a Republican from 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.

A number of longtime Arizona State faculty members, as well as Democrats in the Legislature, also complain that the millions appropriated for the new programs could have been better spent. Steady cuts left state universities with $390 million less in taxpayer support in 2017 than they had before the 2008 recession, requiring steep tuition increases. “Here you want to create these freedom schools for whatever reason, and there are so many other pressing needs,” said State Representative David Bradley, a Democrat from Tucson.

The initial debate over funding the Arizona State program broke along party lines, reflecting the increasing polarization around higher education nationwide.

A Pew Research Center poll last year found that 58 percent of Republicans or Republican-leaning respondents believed that colleges had a negative effect on the country, up from 37 percent just two years earlier. Among Democrats last year, 72 percent believed colleges had a positive effect.

Image
A student in the “Statesmanship and American Grand Strategy” course. The new program at Arizona State focuses on Western thinking from the ancient Greeks to the Founding Fathers and beyond.Credit...Caitlin O’Hara for The New York Times

“I think part of the problem is a perception or reality that we got a bunch of libs indoctrinating your children, and there’s not a lot of balance,” said Margaret Spellings, the president of the University of North Carolina system, which has asked to send a delegation to observe the Arizona State program.

Lawmakers are also reacting to protests that have roiled college campuses in recent years.

In Nebraska, a bill introduced last month would establish a special committee to monitor “barriers or incidents of disruption” to free speech on campus. It and similar bills in other states are modeled after a proposal by the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, inspired by episodes in which conservative speakers on campus were heckled or disrupted.

Louisiana State University said its president, F. King Alexander, received a phone call from someone in the Legislature threatening to withhold funding if football players “took a knee” during the national anthem. “That’s the type of intrusion that we deal with politically even on something that’s the issue of the week, or the issue of the month,” Dr. Alexander said.

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 College and Middlebury. Students wander around in military garb, evidence of a sizable R.O.T.C. 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 around the country for years, and the programs at both Arizona universities are absorbing earlier Koch-funded initiatives at each school.

The Legislature has approved $7 million for the Arizona State school so far. 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 currently 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 existing 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 Dr. Carrese, who was recruited from the Air Force Academy. “It’s making space for debate.”

Image
Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, in his office last month. Dr. Crow has embraced the new program.Credit...Caitlin O’Hara for The New York Times

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.

Among students in the new program is Justin Heywood, a sophomore from Phoenix who took a course titled “Great Debates in American Politics and Economics” last fall. This semester, he is enrolled in “Federalists and Anti-Federalists.”

Mr. Heywood, 20, who wrote in House Speaker Paul D. Ryan for president, said that he was drawn to the program by its deep exploration of topics, and that he believed the new school was attracting a political mix of students.

Some, he acknowledged, were enticed by the chance for the free India trip. “I know a lot of students who signed up just for that,” he said.

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,” Dr. Crow said.

“The fact that someone from the state came along and gave us money for it, O.K., 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.”

Mr. 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 that 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,” Mr. Ducey said. “It’s alive and well in lecture halls, on debate stages and in the pages of college newspapers.”

A correction was made on 
Feb. 26, 2018

An earlier version of this article incorrectly named a college that has experienced student protests. The college is Evergreen State College, not Evergreen State University.

How we handle corrections

Follow Stephanie Saul on Twitter @stefsaul

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Arizona Pays to Push Conservative Studies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT