Annie
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- Nov 22, 2003
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http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_higher_education.html
http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_higher_education.html
City Journal
What Colleges Forget to Teach
Higher education could heal itself by teaching civicsnot race, class, and gender.
Robert P. George
Winter 2006
The university is worth fighting for. No other institution can carry the burden of educating our young people. Thats why we must redouble our efforts to restore integrity, civility, and rigorous standards in American higher educationparticularly in the area of civic education.
Ill be the first to admit that the situation is dire. I sympathize when critics throw up their hands in despair. I sometimes feel that way myself. Darkness often prevails in places where the light of learning should shine. I often trade horror stories with my friend Hadley Arkes, a distinguished scholar of jurisprudence and political theory at Amherst. On one occasion, I explained that the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton was sponsoring a viciously anti-Catholic art exhibitone that it would never even permit were some favored faith or cause, such as Islam or gay rights, its target. Every year, some outrage along these lines seems to prove that anti-Catholicism really is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals, though anyone familiar with academic life today knows that anti-Semitism itself is making a run at being the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.
Professor Arkes listened sympathetically and said, Things have gotten pretty bad here at Amherst, too: weve granted tenure in political science to a guy promoting a theory explaining the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush by reference to his alleged homoerotic attraction to Ronald Reagan. Well, I replied, Princeton has topped that. Weve given a distinguished chair in bioethics to a fellow who insists that eating animals is morally wrong, but that killing newborn human infants can be a perfectly moral choice. (This professor has since gone on to say that there would be nothing wrong with a society in which large numbers of children were conceived, born, and then killed in infancy to obtain transplantable organs.)
And so we go back and forth with each other, in a macabre game of one-upmanship.
Still, teaching at Princeton is in many ways a joy. I have the privilege of instructing students who actually know when the Civil War took place. Even before arriving at Princeton, they know that Lee surrendered to Grant, not to Eisenhower, at Appomattox Court House. Most know that Philadelphia, not Washington, D.C., played host to the constitutional convention. Few would list Alexander Hamilton among the most important presidents, because they know that he was never president. Some can identify the cabinet office that he held and even give a decent account of his differences with Thomas Jefferson. Speaking of whom, all my students know that Jefferson owned slavesbut then, everybody seems to know that, even those who know nothing else about him. My students, though, also know that it was Franklin D. Roosevelt, not his cousin Teddy, or Harry Truman, or JFK, who promised Americans a New Deal. Some can even tell you that the Supreme Court invalidated some early New Deal legislation and that FDR responded with a plan to pack the Court. Yes, my students and students at elite universities around the country come to campus knowing American history pretty welland wanting to know it a lot better.
Many of these young men and women value historical knowledge not merely for its own sake but because they want to be good citizens. More, they seek to be of genuine service to fellow citizens. Many hope to be legislators, judges, even president. They know that knowledge of American history is vital to effective citizenship and service.
But they also need an understanding of American civicsparticularly the principles of the Constitution. For all their academic achievement, students at Princeton and Yale and Stanford and Harvard and other schools that attract Americas most talented young people rarely come to campus with a sound grasp of the philosophy of Americas constitutional government. How did the Founding Fathers seek, via the institutions that the Constitution created, to build and maintain a regime of ordered liberty? Even some of our best-informed students think something along these lines: the Framers set down a list of basic freedoms in a Bill of Rights, which an independent judiciary, protected from the vicissitudes of politics, would then enforce.
Its the rare student indeed who enters the classroom already aware that the Framers believed that the true bulwark of liberty was limited government. Few students comprehend the crucial distinction between (on the one hand) the national government as one of delegated and enumerated powers, and (on the other) the states as governments of general jurisdiction, exercising police powers to protect public health, safety, and morals, and to advance the general welfare. If anything, they imagine that its the other way around. Thus they have no comprehension as to why leading supporters of the Constitution objected to a Bill of Rights, worried that it could compromise the delegated-powers doctrine and thus undermine the true liberty-securing principle of limited government.
Good students these days have heard of federalism, yet they have little appreciation of how it works or why the Founders thought it so vital. Theyve heard of the separation of powers and often can sketch how the system of checks and balances should work. But if one asks, for example, Who checks the courts? they cannot give a satisfactory answer.
The students lack of awareness flows partly from the conception of the American civic order that they have drunk in, which treats courts as if they arent really part of the government. Judges, on this view, are non-political actors whose job is to keep politicians in line with what elite circles regard as enlightened opinions. Judicial supremacy, of the kind that Jefferson and Lincoln stingingly condemned, thus winds up uncritically assumed to be sound constitutional law. The idea that the courts themselves could violate the Constitution by, for example, usurping authority that the Constitution vests in other branches of government, is off the radar screen.
Lacking basic knowledge of the American Founders political philosophy and of the principles that they enshrined in the Constitution, students often fall prey to the notion that ours is a Living Constitution, whose actual words matter little. On the Living Constitution theory, judgesespecially Supreme Court justicesserve as members of a kind of standing constitutional convention whose role is to invalidate legislation that progressive circles regard as antiquated or retrograde, all in the name of adapting the Constitution to keep up with the times.
It doesnt take much to expose the absurdity of this theory. The purpose of enshrining principles in a constitution is to ensure that the nations fundamental values remain honored even if they fall out of fashion. As for adapting the nations laws to keep up with the times, legislators canand shouldtake care of that task. The proper role of courts when they exercise the power of judicial review is essentially a conserving (you could even say conservative) one. It is not to change anything but rather to place limits on what one can change.
Does this mean that our Constitution is dead? No: the Constitutions principles are living in the sense that they can apply validly even to matters that the Founders themselves could not have anticipated. The original understanding of Fourth Amendment principles governing searches and seizures, for example, can reliably extend to cover todays controversies about computer files, cyber-storage, and electronic surveillance. So to reject, as we should, the Living Constitution and its anticonstitutional doctrine of virtually unlimited judicial power is by no means to treat our Constitution as a dead letter. Rather, it is to treat the Constitution as lawsupreme lawbinding on, and limiting the power of, every branch of government and agency of the state, including the courts.
What is the source of this educational breakdown? The trouble isnt the studentstheyre bright and eager to learn. Its that too few teachers are presenting students with the Founders philosophy, much less introducing them to the great issues, some still with us today, that divided the Founders.
And if teachers arent teaching the Foundings principles, where will students learn them? Theyre not likely to get any sense of the distinction between the delegated powers of the national government and the general jurisdiction of the states from any newspapers, national magazines, or television news networks, thats for sure. Have the editors of the New York Times and the folks at CBS News even heard of that distinction yet? News travels slowly, true; but it shouldnt take 218 years.
The solution to this educational breakdown is straightforward: we need to make a commitment at every level of schooling and within the public media to promote a deep awareness of the principles of the American Founding. Why educate students into archaism? some will doubtless object. Surely governing principles set forth in the eighteenth century have little relevance to us in the twenty-first. But American ideals, as embodied preeminently in the Declaration of Independence, are universal and timeless. They have force wherever there are human beings, fallible (indeed, as the Founders recognized, fallen) creatures, yet images of God in their possession of reason and freedombeings, as the Declaration says, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.
The constitutional scheme that the Founders devised for the lawful governance of human beings and for the preservation of their sacred rights is the worlds greatest triumph of practical political science. Of course, we shouldnt treat our institutions as if theyre perfectthe Founders provided, after all, for their possible revision by constitutional amendment. True civic education isnt indoctrination. The Founders themselves werent of one mind as to the proper interpretation of their handiwork in every respect. And reasonable people of goodwill, of course, disagree about key matters of constitutional interpretation. We do our students a wonderful service when we invite them into the great historical and contemporary debates about the meaning of our fundamental law in controversial cases. To do that, though, we must equip them with the historical knowledge and the philosophical understanding necessary if theyre to evaluate intelligently the competing arguments.
We neednt teach that our institutions are uniquely justthat any polity that seeks to respect peoples rights and preserve liberties must copy them precisely. But anyone who sincerely seeks the truth will see that ours are indeed worthy institutions that have served Americans well whenever our people and leaders have shown the wisdom and mustered the fortitude to honor and live by them. The fact is, freedom-loving people throughout the worldeven in an age darkened by widespread anti-Americanismdraw inspiration from American ideals and look to American institutions as the gold standard of republican government. Even critics of American policy feel that they must pay lip service to our ideals of democracy, limited government, equality before the law, civil liberty, private property, the free economy, and the rule of law....
