Charter Colleges?

Amid the heavy-handed bureaucracies that dominate our nation’s colleges and universities, there are seeds of opportunity.

Professor Marvin Olasky noted in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education that a move toward Charter Colleges might be the answer.

Dr. Olasky, editor-in-chief of the news magazine World and a journalism professor at the U. of Texas, Austin, hails Rob Koons, “the University of Texas professor removed last fall as head of a UT Western Civilization program, who is proposing that Texas legislators back the creation of charter colleges, as they now support the creation of charter schools.”

Professor Olasky suggests that charter colleges could restore intellectual credibility to higher education by offering “at least eighteen semester hours in ethics and the classics of Western civilization and of American thought.”

Their curricula might also include a healthy dose of the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution and books by DeTocqueville, Thoreau and Booker T. Washingon.

The development of a charter college system would vastly improve the quality of education by introducing true competition—and breaking the “unchecked and innovation-stifling educational control by faculty majorities. Competition would push academic specialists to consider the interests and goals of students instead of offering fragmented and hyper-specialized courses that merely fulfill their own research objectives.”

Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.