How to Storm and Save an Ivory Tower

On Richard Corcoran's 'Storming the Ivory Tower: How a Florida College Became Ground Zero in the Struggle to Take Back Our Campuses'
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Not until quite recently did American colleges cease being free expression zones. After University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom sounded the alarm with his bestselling The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students in 1987, the intellectual aperture diminished gradually until it atrophied, during the last couple of years, to a mere sliver. According to the latest survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), 87% of college faculty report finding it “difficult to have an open and honest conversation on campus on at least one hot button political topic.” Hardly a headline grabber, the only surprises are the huge number of the respondents, few of whom are conservative, and their candor.

Speaking at a symposium on “Reversing the Ideological Capture of Universities and Institutions,” organized by the New College of Florida (NCF) and the Global Liberty Institute on June 1, 2024, Stanford professor Scott W. Atlas told the audience:

Academia, institutions, and indeed entire systems fundamental to American society that we presumed were objective and evidence-based – law, economics, health care, scientific research – have become contaminated, focused on social advocacy rather than seeking truth, and unabashedly flaunting their advocacy and political biases, as they deviate from their expected roles.

The seminar came a year after Dr. Atlas had given the Commencement Address at the NCF to a less-than-respectful audience. Today, it is a changed campus. “[I]n a mere ten months, NCF went from one of the most progressively captured universities to the freest university in the nation,” writes Corcoran in his newly published book illustrating this remarkable achievement. No mere idle boast, it is meant for others to emulate. Neither minimizing the challenges nor overestimating the impact of the achievement, the story is both encouraging and sobering.

As usual one must start with correcting an impression widespread in the mainstream media that NCF was set up merely a couple of years ago by a reviled right-wing governor, as a “Hillsdale of the South.” Untrue. Unlike the uncompromisingly private Michiganian Christian college, NCF has no religious affiliation. What Governor Ron DeSantis is indeed determined to do is match the small but highly successful Michiganian school’s educational quality and success. Nor is NCF just out of diapers: it has been called New for about seven decades.

Admittedly, it was originally private - founded in the late 1950s at the behest of the local Chamber of Commerce by “citizens banded together to create a local college.” Their aim: to complement the growing city’s art museum, symphony orchestra, and theaters.” At a time of post-war renewal and optimism, “new” referred to the vision of “a group of educators who believed in the power of the mind and wanted to free both students and faculty from the limits of lock-step curriculum,” convinced that the approach “appealed to the very best students across the country.” And for a while, it did.

The far-seeing idealists, however, could not have seen far enough into the political and cultural upheaval of the late 60s and early 70s, when the promising New College began floundering. In 1975, on the brink of bankruptcy, the desperate college became affiliated with the University of South Florida. But still the downward spiral continued, unabated. Losing money and students at an alarming rate, DeSantis decided to save the increasingly politicized institution from imminent demise by going back to basics. His approach was to take seriously its original vision of robust education instead of “lockstep” indoctrination. By appointing new trustees and acquiring a new president, in 2023 the school was set upon the old path, whereby, ironically, it could live up to its name once again: New.

Fittingly, the introduction is by Manhattan Institute’s Christopher F. Rufo, renowned for his groundbreaking research on the alarming state of higher education and its ideological origins. While not the first to unmask the problem, Rufo has uniquely awakened the public and is determined to make a difference. No more mere kvetching.  “Now, we need action,” writes Rufo, applauding DeSantis’s choice of Corcoran as “a man who exemplifies this new spirit of politics.”

But while necessary, spirit alone is far from sufficient. Corcoran’s book describes the complex, intricate process whereby this small but important school was rescued in record time. Its subtitle, “How a Florida College Became Ground Zero in the Struggle to Take Back Our Campuses,” is hopeful. Yet it avoids declaring victory; ground zero is still that.

Taking back sounds conservative enough, but also clearly radical - in just the way the American founding was radical, committed to the original liberal principles that led to its founding. If storming towers is what revolutionaries do, fueled by hatred they invariably end up destroying rather than building. Their inchoate goals are “u-topian” (no-place) rather than “eu-topian,” (a good place). Perhaps that’s where they want to be. Most people do not.

Demagogic shibboleths like “equity” as synonym for equality of outcome deftly obscure reality. By the time the Babelian tower of mono-think is revealed to serve only its hubristic architects, it is often too far gone. In the modern world, higher education is necessary. For as our founders had amply warned us, unless the people are duly informed in order to govern themselves properly, they are bound to lose their hard-won liberties. Restoring that hallowed tower to its proper dimensions, however, must be accomplished not through violence but its precise opposite: respect for the rule of law, and prudent guidance by competent leaders. Neither assuming nor ruling out divine assistance, Corcoran’s team followed a rigorous nine step road map.

Step 1: Leadership is everything. Alignment among strong leaders that include the governor, the board, and the president is ideal. In Florida, a bill was passed to require public colleges to change accreditors every five years, which addressed the problem of a politicized accreditation agency. The new board includes acclaimed academics long involved in the pursuit of liberal education, notably Dr. Mark Bauerlein, Dr. Ryan Anderson, Dr. Charles R. Kesler, and Dr. Matthew Spalding, alongside distinguished lawyers, scientists, and businessmen.

Step 2: Litigate, litigate, litigate.  Not engage in “lawfare” using the law to punish, harass, and demoralize opponents for no strong legal reason, but seek to enforce constitutional and legal rights. 

Step 3: Ensure actual shared governance. At most universities, the trustees or their designee, usually, the president, have the final say concerning admissions, hiring, and curriculum. Union contracts require that faculty be consulted, but no more. Yet invariably they are left unchecked, resulting in the ideological slant shared by the overwhelming majority of professors.

Step 4: Presidents should have CEO capabilities. Raising money, managing hundreds or even thousands of employees, real estate acquisition, are skills that do not come by osmosis while doing library research, any more than does knowing how to handle a Congressional hearing.

Step 5: Enforce the rule of law. It is not enough for colleges to have a Student Code of Conduct on paper; a Student Conduct Board must be (a) appointed and (b) convened. At NCF, after this was done, and discipline was enforced upon two students who had violated both state law and the code, they ended up withdrawing rather than have the discipline on their record. “It was a game-changer,” writes Corcoran. Order and civility became far easier to impose.

Step 6: Curriculum should teach students how to think, not what to think. This is the key goal of reform, its heart and soul, absent which there is no point in even talking about education but merely indoctrination. In truth, this step should guide all the others.

Step 7: Personnel are policy. In less than one year, every leadership position and over a half of NCF’s two hundred employees were legally replaced. The result was a far more competent workforce.

Step 8: Do not abolish the US Department of Education. While deploring the Department’s creation by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, it may be politically unrealistic to abolish it now. And even if it were, imagine if the funds went “straight to Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul, and Gretchen Whitmer,” writes Corcoran; pity their hapless constituents. Instead, use currently existing legal powers to achieve the constituents’ desired goals by compelling school districts to comply with the state’s decrees. For example, Florida’s pushback against masking in schools, with salutary outcomes for the fortunate youngsters.

Step 9: Give no quarter. Don’t underestimate the challenges: they are daunting and constant. Fixing moldy dorms, adding sports, choosing a mascot, no issue is too trivial to become a source of partisan contention, draining time and energy. Not to mention the constant stream of misinformation spread by the headline-hunting media and its accomplices. 

The stakes are far higher than keeping a college from going bankrupt. “We are born into a conversation that has been happening for thousands of years,” writes Robert Corcoran, adding our own voices to precious more that “speak across cultures and times and social status to the biggest questions of existence.” This ineffable conversation has often been the privilege of too few, residents of an “ivory tower” that has come to imply seclusion from the real world. Its origin is often traced to the Song of Songs, 7.5, where a beloved’s exquisite neck is likened to “a tower of ivory;” during the Middle Ages it would be applied by artists and poets to the Virgin Mary to symbolize her holy purity. Today’s ideologically infected Ivory Tower has disgraced that aura. The white-purity is simply ideological rigidity – a politically banal plainsong that silences the vibrant human conversation of the ages and stultifies the soul. Storming back to intellectual polyphony seems the only reasonable remedy.

Juliana Geran Pilon is a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. She is the author of several books, including The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom (2019) and her newest book, An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism, and the American Left (2023).