Florida’s Intellectual Lifeboats

The Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida has just established two Ph.D. programs: “History of Ideas” and “War, Statecraft and Strategy.” I believe these are the first Ph.D. programs to be offered by the new generation of intellectual-freedom centers that education reformers have seeded these last few years in public universities. They are extraordinarily important as pilot programs for how the movement to revive traditional scholarship can establish an ecosystem to train and credential new professors. For that, you need Ph.D. programs—and the Hamilton School can now show the nation how that should be done.

We have no more valuable currency than the teaching load of a tradition-minded Ph.D. The Hamilton School (formerly the Hamilton Center) is focusing on the most desperate need in higher-education reform: creating an education infrastructure to produce tradition-minded Ph.D.s. We need those Ph.D.s to teach undergraduates properly, to educate future K-12 teachers in master’s programs, and to educate future Ph.D.s in Ph.D. programs. We have no more valuable currency than the teaching load of a tradition-minded Ph.D. Indeed, although the reputational coin of the realm is research and monographs, we would be better off investing in Ph.D.s with a vocational dedication to teaching 4-4 loads of mixed graduate and undergraduate courses, with just enough of a publication record to prove they know what is needed to do research.

Creating new Ph.D. programs to educate a new generation of tradition-minded professors is absolutely crucial. Policymakers who want to restore higher education now face the terrible situation that there is more money to pay salaries for tradition-minded professors than there are actual tradition-minded professors. The radical activists started to seize control of the professor-production machinery generations ago, and, to the best of their ability, they have squeezed out of the Ph.D. programs everyone but radical-left pod people. Terribly few conservatives, moderates, or even old-school liberals survive among academics over 50—scarcely any under 50. The Jack Miller Center and its affiliates did heroic work during the desert years to keep a few oasis Ph.D. tracks going in mainstream academia, but they could not perform miracles. The new intellectual-freedom centers now have to hire by cannibalizing the few tradition-minded professors remaining from the nooks they have secured in the academy—or by hiring old-school liberals who at least are not activist radicals. Creating new Ph.D. programs to educate a new generation of tradition-minded professors is absolutely crucial.

That leaves the question of how, exactly, that is to be done. Academia, after all, is a host of different disciplines and specializations. We need to rescue history, and English, and art history, and the sciences, and everything. Within history, you really want a distinctive concentration for medieval Europe and, in English, a distinctive concentration for 19th-century American literature—among hundreds, thousands, of such concentrations. Each concentration means at least a handful of salaried professors in a single institution who can serve on a Ph.D. committee, all the attendant administrative help one needs—and, ideally, a $50,000 annual stipend for each graduate student, along with a realistic chance for employment as a professor one day.

We need all that, and we face a catastrophic “lifeboat ethics” scenario. We have perhaps 10 intellectual-freedom centers at public universities, added to a scattering of tracks and programs in private universities. If we have to make choices, maybe we should just concentrate on educating a minimum of American political theory Ph.D.s, who at least can tell students why the American republic was created the way it is. As a second priority, let us have enough American history Ph.D.s who can teach the skeleton of real American history rather than the familiar hate-reading of the activist establishment. Everything else may have to be abandoned in this generation and rebuilt when we are through the desert years.

The Hamilton School’s two programs offer us the possibility of crafting more capacious lifeboats. The History of Ideas program appears to be an interdisciplinary Great Books humanities program, aimed not least for graduates to work in the classical-education school system. The War, Statecraft and Strategy program appears similarly interdisciplinary, aiming to educate Ph.D.s for a variety of public policy–related academic disciplines—a tradition-minded equivalent of the Harvard Kennedy School. Both these programs focus on plausible career tracks outside the academy: the classical K-12 school system and government service. These external career tracks should make it more attractive for students to enter these programs.

“Flexible and interdisciplinary” fits the Hamilton School’s limitations. The school has grown extraordinarily, but it still has only 50 professors to cover all the humanities and the social sciences. It cannot provide a Ph.D. program for every specialization. Two interdisciplinary remits, to put matters in the most practical of terms, will allow the school to assemble dissertation committees for a wide range of subject matters. They also will allow the school to continue to hire in a wide variety of different specializations while continuing to offer its Ph.D. programs. The interdisciplinary remit prevents professional rigidities that would weaken the school’s ability to restore a broad range of the humanities and social sciences.

The Hamilton School’s two programs offer us the possibility of crafting more capacious lifeboats. Yet an interdisciplinary remit does come with a cost. Graduate study still will be effectively limited to the specializations of the faculty as a whole. Interdisciplinary graduate study, moreover, will be necessarily less acute; specialization, study in depth, does have rewards. The Hamilton School’s programs’ interdisciplinary remit is more likely to create professorial jacks-of-all-trades than specialists prepared to create intellectual revolutions. Put it in concrete terms: The History of Ideas program might create a professor who can lecture on the entire Great Books tradition, but we cannot expect it to educate an Erich Auerbach prepared to write the magisterial Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. We cannot even expect it to produce professors with the advantages of normal disciplinary specialization.

Higher-education reformers should start thinking now about what other sorts of interdisciplinary Ph.D. programs Americans should create. Lifeboat ethics still apply. Higher-education reformers cannot do everything. Still, we should be aware of the consequences of our choices.

The Hamilton School provides a valuable model for other intellectual-freedom centers. Many of them are and will be much smaller. They still can craft an interdisciplinary remit for a Ph.D. program with only (say) a dozen professors. They should hire with an eye to creating such a future interdisciplinary program. They also should craft their Ph.D. programs with an explicit tie to a career track outside of the academy. The Hamilton School made an excellent decision to focus its intellectual aspirations on training its future graduates to get good jobs.

In the medium term, the Hamilton School also provides a good model for different sorts of interdisciplinary programs. Its two programs necessarily still only cover a small portion of the intellectual map. Higher-education reformers should start thinking now about what other sorts of interdisciplinary Ph.D. programs Americans should create.

My own suggestions for a few more flexible lifeboats, each to have a justifying career track attached, would be:

• Constitutional History. The Hamilton School calls the “History of Ideas” what appears really to be a humanities program focused on classical education. We still need a history Ph.D. program, devoted to the long history of Western civilization. I would suggest framing this as “Constitutional History”—the intellectual and political history of the West’s constitutions of liberty, in a necklace extending from Athens to Rome to Florence to England to America. We need humanities scholars for the classical schools and political theorists to teach the ideals of the republic and put them into practice in our government, but we need historians of Western liberty as the third essential mode of instruction.
• Social Sciences. Quantitative political scientists, economists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists: The whole world of the social sciences ought to be rescued, too. Political theory, history, and the humanities come first, but we also need our Max Webers and our Bronisław Malinowskis.
• Fine Arts. We don’t just need Great Books. We need great music, great art, great architecture, and great dance, all continuing the best of Western and American traditions—both practitioners and professors. Our children should know Monteverdi as well as Montesquieu, Rembrandt as well as Rousseau, Palladio as well as Plato.
• American Studies. We need professors who will teach what is wonderful and distinctive about the American nation and not just the American republic. American Studies was originally created to do this before it was perverted by the radical activists. We need professors to keep alive our memory and our appreciation of John James Audubon and George M. Cohan and George Balanchine.

Everyone will have his own suggestion for the parts of the academy that must be saved. But these really do matter. It would be good if higher-education reformers could save them, somewhere, before they die.

Policymakers and the professors running these new intellectual-freedom centers will have the last say about what the remits of their Ph.D. programs should be. The Hamilton School, however, has provided what I think is a very good model for the structure of such programs, whatever they cover.

In the long run, when we are through the desert years, we can rebuild universities with proper departments and proper specializations. What we do now should have that ultimate goal in mind. For now, we must build the best lifeboats we can. The Hamilton School’s new Ph.D. programs promise to be the Liberty Ships of higher education. We should produce them, and produce them, and produce them, until victory is ours.

David Randall is executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars.