Back to School:
Rob Koons, a University of Texas at Austin philosophy professor and a Christian, poured six years into development of a UT Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions. Then administrators yanked it away from him | Marvin Olasky
Bowen Rodkey for World
AUSTIN, Texas—"And Jesus said to His disciples . . . 'it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.' When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished, saying, 'Who then can be saved?'" (Matthew 19:23-25).
"Work your fingers to the bone, what do you get? Boney fingers" (Hoyt Axton).
I try to leave myself out of news/feature stories. I need to be in this one, slightly. That's because, from the viewpoint of some university administrators, I was Mr. Wrong—and without an exhibition of my good/bad record, what happened to Mr. Right might not seem so bizarre.
For two decades I was a highly rated (by students) professor at the University of Texas at Austin, one of the U.S. academic leaders as measured by size, endowment, and influence. But secular liberal professors and administrators hated the way I spent my non-classroom working time: I wrote pointed columns and books from a Christian perspective, edited WORLD, and consorted with conservative politicians.
Fighting the uncurriculum
Back to School:
Professor Rob Koons addresses the downfall of UT's Western Civilization program and suggests a way to get around "the tyranny of the faculty majority" | Marvin Olasky
0 Enough is enough! Rob Koons finally broke his public silence last month and wrote (on the website of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy) an analysis of what happened:
"In retrospect, we overestimated the value of strong support from outsiders such as private donors, legislators, and policy groups, while we underestimated the determination of our internal opponents.
"The main obstacle to our success was the idée fixe of unbridled faculty governance over the curriculum, which dominates at UT and elsewhere. In practice, that means the tyranny of the faculty majority.
"Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a 'distribution' standard—a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences. . . .
'Centers' of attention
Back to School:
| Marvin Olasky
Beachheads at some other major universities exist. Among them are The Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy at the University of Virginia, The Center for the Foundations of Free Societies at Cornell, The Program in American Citizenship at Emory University, The Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College, and The Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy at Georgetown.
They vary in quality and intent, but typical beachhead activities include public lectures and debates, research by young faculty members, and visits by senior professors. The programs are typically "centers": That puts them in a weak position in relation to "departments" that have their own professorial staffs, student majors, and regular funding from university coffers. "Centers" largely depend on the kindness of strangers and the willingness of uncollegial colleagues to let them survive. Humanities and social sciences students still have to major in fields that typically offer two competing points of view: liberal and radical.
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