Killing Off Competition, Bigoted, or Just Plain Ignorant?
Yesterday, I noted a recent article by Smith College economist James Miller, in which he warns bloggers that an unholy alliance between big government and big business -- in this case the media -- may spell trouble for bloggers. Business, he says, often appeals to government use its strong regulatory arm to squelch competition.
This morning, we see that odious model extended to the realm of higher education. It seems that former NYU president John Brademas, who's now a member of the New York State Board of Regents, is using that regulatory body's power to destroy a small Christian college he doesn't like. Adding insult to injury are these facts: the school has been operating with Board approval for years; Brademas is only a first-year regent; and, despite having reams of information about the school in his possession, he has displayed a degree of ignorance that should cause his ejection from the Board for malfeasance in office.
All of this is explored in an excellent op-ed in this morning's New York Post by Naomi Schaefer Riley, author of God on the Quad, a book about the role of religious colleges and universities.
Established in Briarcliff Manor, King's College had been authorized to confer degrees by the Board of Regents since 1955. About 10 years ago, it ceased operation; then, in 1999, was purchased by Campus Crusade for Christ, which moved it to the Empire State Building.
Today the college has about 260 students, who attend classes on two floors of the building and live in apartments nearby. The freshman class has an average SAT score of 1,140 and a high school GPA of 3.5 — better than most colleges in the state-run SUNY system.
The school's mission is to offer a high-caliber academic program with a biblical worldview in order to train students to be national leaders. (Students can choose between a politics, philosophy and economics degree and business, but business majors must still devote their first two years to PPE.) It now has nine full-time and 17 part-time faculty, including alumni of Cornell, Yale, Fordham and Wharton.
Peter Wood is giving up a tenured position in the anthropology department at Boston University to become the provost at King's this fall.
But he's stepping into a crisis.
Out of the blue, at what should have been a routine Regents meeting in January, Brademas began casting baseless aspersions on the school's legitimacy.
The state Education Department's evaluation team and staff (including an NYU prof) recommended a five-year extension of accreditation for King's. (The minimum is three years, the maximum is 10).
Brademas, former president of NYU and a onetime congressman from Indiana, is a new member of the board. He's already gotten that extension reduced to one year, thereby severely impairing the college's ability to recruit students and faculty.
The Regents accredit such institutions as the Salvation Army School for Officer Training and the Utica School of Commerce. So why hang out to dry a selective college with plenty of resources and a rigorous curriculum in the heart of New York City?
Here's Brademas at the January meeting: "I have never heard of this institution. What is supposed to be the annual operating budget? And how many students are there?"
It seems the Regents don't bother to do their own homework: Those questions were answered in the 30-page evaluation report and other materials given to board members prior to the meeting.
Naomi goes on to report that Brademus even questioned whether or not the school could use the name "King," given that Columbia University went by that name -- before the Revolution! And she reports a phone conversation she had with him in which he flippantly claimed that his upbringing in Indiana by a Greek Orthodox father and Disciples of Christ mother insulated him from criticism of being anti-Christian. He speculated that King's discriminates on the basis of religion, which it doesn't do (also in the report he hasn't bothered to read), but of course, as a religious college it can choose its students based on their religious beliefs. After all, an Orthodox Jewish seminary has no obligation to admit practicing Catholics.
Naomi also reports that Joseph Frey, the state Education Department's Assistant Commissioner of Quality Assurance, reiterated the evaluation team's assessment. "Let me be clear. Our judgment is that they meet the standards."
So, is John Brademus, who was much-heralded for helping transform NYU into a major institution, simply killing off the competition? Or is he genuinely a bigot who wants to stamp out small Christian colleges that he considers beneath contempt? Either way, the result of his actions is a reduction in the true diversity of higher education in New York City.
This effort is hardly new, of course, and I hope you'll forgive me if I say that the best description of it in practice I've read in some time appeared on this blog in late January. Written by Chuck Chalberg, "A Homogeneous Diversity" relates his experience of visiting colleges with his son. Chuck describes the pitiful results that occur when colleges with a long religious tradition decide that the characteristics that made them distinctive, and therefore worth considering, need to be abandoned. In the case of The King's College, it's an outside force that wants to destroy them because they didn't follow the secularization model. Brademas shouldn't be allowed to set this dangerous precedent.
| Mar. 29, 2005 | 7:28 AM