Avoiding Academia=Greatness

There is probably a reason that the higher education establishment does not seek a second opinion on its efforts. Educators are very likely not to like what they are liable to hear.

“Political science is badly taught at most American universities these days,” author and policy analyst Steven F. Hayward said in a lecture sponsored by the Fund for American Studies late last Fall. “A recent survey designed to measure civic literacy developed by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the University of Connecticut and given to 14,000 college students—found extraordinary ignorance among students.”

“Almost half couldn’t identify the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ as coming from the Declaration of Independence.” A resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Hayward is at work on a multivolume series on Ronald Reagan. He has already published The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980.

“When comparing freshmen to seniors, the seniors often know less than the incoming freshman, which means that at many universities, the political or civic education the students receive results in a net subtraction of valuable knowledge about how our country ought to work,” Hayward avers.

Hayward, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, is also the author of Churchill on Leadership. As well, he drew a comparative study of Sir Winston and the Gipper in Greatness: Reagan, Churchill and the Making of Extraordinary Leaders.

“Reagan also had a self-education, although it came later in life than Lincoln or Churchill,” Hayward found. “He read quite a bit in the 1950s, while touring the country for General Electric—traveling entirely by train because he was afraid to fly.”

“Though he didn’t leave much of a record of what he was reading, we know from what appeared in his speeches at the time that he read early modern classics of the conservative movement like Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.”

Hayward made another startling discovery. The two leaders who arguably saved the remnants of Western Civilization did so with a knowledge base built upon works either ignored or proscribed by most so-called university scholars.

For example, Reagan “also studied Bastiat, the French libertarian economist, quoted by both Reagan and Churchill, making them the only two modern chief executives to reference this obscure French economist,” Hayward notes. “Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, also read by both leaders, led them to take very interesting views on domestic political economy.”

“So self-education and an ability to form their own views explains why people like Lincoln, Reagan and Churchill end up having utterly independent imaginations. I think people who have conventional educations, whether it’s at Harvard or Michigan State, often have conventional views.”

And simply buying and reading the books is much cheaper than paying the tuition that keeps tenured professors living in the style to which they would like to be accustomed. But homeschooling yourself won’t give you the opportunity to meet people like Ward Churchill (no relation to the late British statesman) or Cornell West.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.