At their finest, universities are places where the best minds and the best ideas compete, where students are presented with the breadth and depth of science, history, philosophy and art, and where they are guided through rigorous study to reach conclusions that, in time, will again advance human knowledge.
John Henry Cardinal Newman outlined this vision of higher education in what was once a seminal text, “The Idea of a University.”
He urged students to “compare one idea with another; adjust truths and facts; form them into one whole, or notice the obstacles which occur in doing so.”
These things come to mind now because a certain number of the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin are worked up over a plan to establish a new think tank on campus called the Liberty Institute that will be “dedicated to the study and teaching of individual liberty, limited government, private enterprise and free markets.”
These faculty members are concerned the institute will be politicized and that its scholarship won’t be rigorous. Those are, in themselves, fair concerns, but we have to take them in the context of our present reality, where many college campuses and much of their faculties are fully politicized. The vision Newman suggests of a place where ideas compete among students in search of truth is often stillborn in classes where professors – almost uniformly from the left – operate in an entirely political frame.