Investing in the ideas of liberty: reflections on the Philanthropic Enterprise in higher education.

• Author: Ealy, Lenore T.
• Position: Essay

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage.... Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark.

F. A. Hayek, "The Intellectuals and Socialism"

During the past twenty years, fueled by a growing sense of crisis about the deterioration and politicization of university curricula, many donors inspired to renew the philosophic foundations of a free society have focused their philanthropy on efforts to encourage reform at colleges and universities across the nation. Donors have supported individual scholars, funded research, supported student organizations, encouraged specific curricular offerings, and established academic centers on campus in an effort to ensure that classical-liberal ideas--which encompass a commitment to the best traditions of a liberal arts education--are not lost.

These efforts have met with greater and lesser success (and more or less entrenched resistance), contingent on numerous factors, including the stature and quality of the personnel involved, the political climate at each campus, the strategic clarity with which money has been invested, and the extent to which universities have respected donor intent. With significant philanthropic funding targeting higher-education reform of some kind, it is pertinent to ask whether and how private giving to today's institutions of higher education can strategically align with the task of rejuvenating the free society's philosophic foundations.

Classical liberalism largely underwent a rebirth as an intellectual movement in America in the mid-twentieth century in part as a reaction against the expansion of government power under the Progressives by a motley alliance that became known as the Old Right and in part as a consequence of geopolitical turmoil that brought firsthand understanding of the threats of various forms of totalitarianism to bear on the American mind. During the interwar and post-World War II period, European and Russian exiles, including Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, and others, became U.S. residents and had a significant impact on American political and economic thought. The publication successes of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Rand's The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged were important milestones in the revival and popularization of classical liberalism at midcentury. Out of the spreading concern for the fate of liberty in the post-New Deal and Cold War world emerged a group of businessmen who organized their philanthropy to support the intellectual foundations of the classical-liberal movement. Thus classical-liberal philanthropy was born.

We may define classical-liberal philanthropy as the philanthropy that seeks to understand, restate, and amplify the philosophic foundations of a free society and to ground social institutions (including traditional charitable activities) on these philosophic principles. Hayek's seminal essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism" (1949) was a guiding light for many of the early classical-liberal donors. The essay was foremost a reflection on the production and diffusion of ideas. Hayek focused attention on two groups of people: the scholars who define the philosophical foundations and the intellectuals by whose efforts ideas spread. He brought much-needed attention to the role of intellectuals: "It is the intellectuals ... who decide what views and opinions are to reach us, which facts are important enough to be told to us, and in what form and from what angle they are to be presented. Whether we shall ever learn of the results of the work of the expert and the original thinker depends mainly on their decision" ([1949] 1997, 223). In Hayek's account, the free society needed crucial support in two areas: support for those investigating, restating, and amplifying its ideals and support for the effort to convert the intellectuals from a belief in the principles of socialism to a belief in these ideals, which explicitly repudiated the possibility of an "all-comprehensive system of values" ([1944] 1956, 155).

One might think that it would have been natural to turn to America's institutions of higher education as institutional vehicles for this work, but the first generation of classical-liberal philanthropists surprisingly did not look much to colleges and universities as allies in the intellectual tasks they faced. By that time, the universities were already largely the creatures of progressivism. Progressivism, often conceiving itself as a vehicle of "scientific philanthropy," sought to mobilize all social institutions under a banner of broad-scale social reform led by a technocratic elite with strong ties to the administrative state. America's colleges and universities had long been viewed as a training ground for this elite, and in the early twentieth century American universities increasingly became laboratories not only for advancing knowledge of the natural sciences, but also for achieving social reform.

With the passage of the Pendleton Act of 1883, in reaction to the assassination of President James Garfield by a disgruntled job seeker, the umbilical cord from America's top-tier universities to the federal civil service became more firmly tethered. The flow of the educated elite to Washington accelerated in the first half of the twentieth century to keep pace with the demand for personnel to staff World War I bureaus and then the New Deal agencies. Federal funding for research flowed in increasing amounts in the other direction. The historical autonomy of higher education increasingly gave way to a new breed of "public-private partnership" in progressive reform.

Academic purpose, public policy, and philanthropy gradually became entangled in unprecedented ways, diminishing the role of colleges and universities as independent institutions of civil society and turning them instead into instrumentalities of statecraft. The state's conquest of higher education steadily advanced after World War II, marked by two great leaps forward in federal expenditures and entanglements in higher education: the GI Bill (1944) provided access to college for vast numbers of returning servicemen, and the Soviet launch of Sputnik spurred federal infusions of cash for science education through the National Defense Education Act of 1958. In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower cautioned Americans about the future of higher education:

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. (Eisenhower 1961, qtd. in Baehr 2011, 297)

In 1965, however, heedless of Eisenhower's warning, Congress passed a new Higher Education Act authorizing the game-changing scale of federal government involvement in the student aid business. By the early 1970s, federal funding was well on its way to eventually constituting the overwhelming majority of aid to postsecondary students. (For recent statistics, see U.S. Department of Education 2009). (1) This shift toward federal funding and policy has certainly diminished the role and influence of philanthropic funding in higher education, with a concomitant loss of pluralism and the increasing sway of the "all-comprehensive system of values" that Hayek warned about.

The opportunities for classical-liberal influence in the world of American higher education were fading quickly. In the concept paper that outlined the future work of the Institute for Humane Studies, F. A. "Baldy" Harper, observed: "Any attempt to establish a hard core libertarian development on campus, especially since it is a very small minority, would be anathema to the dominant factions in even the best of these institutions.

The colleges and universities should be kept on terms as friendly as possible, of course, for whatever cooperation can be developed in temporary and limited ways by continuous trading" (1961, 9). Harper, working closely with Hayek and numerous other scholars and business leaders, held to a firm pragmatism that recognized the limited possibility of advancing liberty through colleges and universities: "We must face the fact that--due to the nature of the job of education for Liberalism--the main center of strategy development, stimulation, and training of a hard core apparently must be outside the formal halls of learning. This always tends to be true of any minority concept, and above all this is true of liberalism in our time. The formal institutions of learning have their center of gravity elsewhere, and the 'protection of the institution' operates to censor in one way or another most of the effective work for liberalism" (13).

Rekindling a widespread belief in liberty and a confidence in the creative powers of a free people in the years after World War II would have to be accomplished largely outside the society's predominant educational institutions. The core strategy of the donors who sought to revive classical-liberal philosophy thus became one of investing primarily in people and private institutions. Essential in the development of this strategy was the William F...