Federalism 101

Critics of higher education who say American colleges do not prepare students for life after graduation may be way off base: Among federal judges, the problem may be that they do try to apply their education to the post-graduate day jobs that they hold.

“At a seminar for federal judges in Kansas City, one of the more conservative judges said, ‘Isn’t it a shame that people don’t know the five rights in the first amendment,’” historian John Kaminski remembered in a recent forum at the Cato Institute. “One of the more activist judges said, ‘Five rights, I’ve been giving 25 rights.’”

Professor Kaminski has been giving seminars for federal judges for at least a decade. “In Detroit, a judge ran the city waterworks and got an award from his peers for doing so,” Dr. Kaminski added.

Dr. Kaminski founded and directs the Center for the Study of the American Constitution, in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “I’ve been living in the 18th Century for the past 35 years,” he said at Cato. Currently he is sifting through 100,000 documents in order to complete a multi-volume history of the constitution. He has just finished work on The Quotable Jefferson, which he signed copies of at Cato.

The professor did not want to add to the public acclaim heaped on another, more widely known, historian—David McCullough. “Good writing covers a multitude of sins,” Dr. Kaminski says of McCullough, but adds that he finds him guilty of “sins of omission rather than sins of commission.”

He gives an example from McCullough’s best-selling biography of President John Adams. “McCullough falls in love with Adams, which is understandable for a biographer,” Dr. Kaminski points out. “But he makes a big deal of Adams getting a loan [to finance the American Revolution] from the Netherlands.”

“But he only mentions the Patriot victory in the battle of Yorktown as an event that made the loan less risky.” What McCullough misses is the two successful Patriot attacks on Boston and the Colonies’ official declaration of war, Dr. Kuminski argues that would be the opening salvo at Lexington and Concord that Senator Kennedy referred to as “The shirt heard round the world” in his address to the 2004 Democratic Convention.

“Also, Benjamin Franklin got backing from France to secure the loan making the Dutch investment much less risky,” Dr, Kaminski notes.

The academic historian is much less definite on what the Ivory Tower produces to fill in the void left by McCullough’s alleged “sins of omission.” “It’s been an unfortunate thing that the Academy has decided to write to itself,” Dr. Kaminski said at Cato. “Nowadays historians are writing to each other.”

“That’s a circulation of four to five hundred people.” Dr. Kaminski is fond of the work of Joseph P. Ellis, although the controversial Mt. Holyoke historian has spawned a cottage industry of detractors.

What Ellis did was claim service in Vietnam when his active duty was all stateside. He was an ROTC cadet as an undergraduate and taught history at West Point.

Back to the subject of Dr. Kaminski’s current offering. The sage of Monticello offered insights on education more than two centuries ago which are startlingly relevant to the controversies that engulf America’s colleges and universities today. “[Universities are] based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind,” Jefferson wrote in a letter in 1820. “For here we are not afraid to allow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

The language is not that far removed from that of David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights, or for that matter, Accuracy in Academia’s own mission statement. Then there is the perspective he shared in a letter to John Adams in 1814:

“Every folly must run its round, and so, I suppose, must that of self-learning, & self-sufficiency; of rejecting the knowledge, acquired in past ages, and starting on the new ground of intuition,” Jefferson wrote. “When sobered by experience I hope our successors will turn their attention to the advantages of education.”

And Jefferson even seemed to predict the rise of some of the ersatz studies that consume much academic effort these days, even at his own beloved University of Virginia. “The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the tracts which favor that theory,” Jefferson wrote in a letter in 1787.

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