Hopeful Signs

There has been the usual run of depressing stories of late about the ideological tilt (if "tilt" is a strong enough word for it) of American academe. Just this past week, we had stories on the viciously anti-Semitic department chairman at Columbia who thinks CNN should be tried for "war crimes," and the New York Times discovering, for the umpteenth time, that there are almost no Republicans or conservatives on campus. And so it goes.

But there are some very good things going on, and those deserve some sympathetic attention on Thanksgiving eve. The National Endowment for the Humanities under the impressive leadership of the distinguished art historian Bruce Cole has established a program, called "We the People," that has sought to return the serious study of American history and American political institutions to the forefront of scholarly interest. The National Endowment for the Arts, under the equally inspired leadership of poet Dana Gioia, has overcome its controversial "transgressive" past, and reoriented itself around a splendid and unabashedly patriotic motto: "A great nation deserves great art." Amen to that! Not that anyone's noticed, but the cretinous George W. Bush has somehow managed to appoint the best NEH and NEA chairmen in those agencies' history. They are slowly but surely becoming important agents for the renewal of American culture.

And another agent for change, just emerging on the horizon, but whose strength is growing daily, is a movement to create centers for the study of free institutions on campuses around the country. Patterned in part on Robert George's wildly successful James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, the movement now has a clearing house, the Association for the Study of Free Institutions and Free Societies, also located in Princeton. Readers of the Democracy Project website will be especially interest in browsing the ASFIFS website, and acquainting themselves with the programs that have already been established at campuses of all shapes and sizes, all over the country. (Aficionados of the web will notice that, for example, the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, which is well-known as an almost constant stream of excellent web-based content and commentary, is a part of this movement.) We have barely begun to see the effects of such centers, but their potential is enormous. It almost seems too much to hope that the culture of American academia could be reformed and revitalized. But stranger things have happened. Contemplate that possibility as you give thanks tomorrow.