Reagan's Legacy in Academe

The new Chronicle of Higher Education, a leading source of information on higher ed., carries an article (subscription) on President Reagan's legacy in academe. By and large it's a fair overview, more historical than polemical. It includes quotations from both sides of the aisle, including that of David W. Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education at UVA, who takes the hackneyed view that Reagan was a mere ideologue:

"The whole policy discussion about higher education that had been so active in the '70s really seemed to end with the budget approach that Reagan took," said Breneman. "Suddenly I had this sinking feeling that empirical policy analysis was going to become passé, that ideology was in the saddle. The attack on higher education wasn't so much on educational policy per se as it was on price, inefficiency, and on arrogance."

Chester Finn counters: "'He energized ... people who actually had ideas, to actually do something about them,' Mr. Finn says. 'It was a tone set at the top. The Education Department was a pretty happy ship, with a sense of team camaraderie, and of a team pulling together.'"

The reader is also reminded of the opposition to "Star Wars," which every sophisticate knew wouldn't work -- no ideology or arrogance needed, of course. And that Reagan's clashes with higher education officials began with Clark Kerr back in California and continued through his efforts to reign in affirmative action.

The article doesn't quite capture the seething hatred for Reagan common among professors nationwide. Much of this was based on his attempts to reduce universities' dependence on federal largess, but it also stemmed from his hard-line stance against the spread of communism. No anti-anti-Soviet professors are interviewed, perhaps because, as I argued last week, it's embarrassing for such folks to admit just how profoundly wrong they were.

A better understanding for the reasons behind Reagan's clashes with the intelligentsia is offered by Victor Davis Hanson, who writes in the June 28 issue of National Review: "In the end Reaganism encompassed the very strange ideas that a conservative who wished to cut government entitlements could be more popular with the People than their liberal benefactors; that a wealthy, self-made man could feel more at home with a ranch hand or a policeman than would a Marxist Harvard professor; than an 'aw shucks' naïf could out-debate the best-prepped policy wonk; and that a Hollywood actor could take the measure of a Soviet apparatchik or a Third World cutthroat far better than the brain trust of the U.S. State department. Only in America."