Category Archives: American Education

Remembering an Academic Outlier

06 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by in American Education, American Federalism, Conservatism, Southern History, The Passing Scene, Uncategorized

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Melvin-Bradford

Melvin E. Bradford. Photo: Courtesy of the Fort Worth Independent School District.

Something got me thinking last night about  one of the nation’s late, great academic outliers and mavericks, the late M.E. Bradford, and how, if he had survived into his 80’s, would be regarded today as a pariah on most U.S. college campuses. Bradford was regarded as a “paleoconservative,” one of the leading intellectual lights of the paleocon movement.

 

He was a student of the old Southern Agrarian tradition and a vocal and intrepid defender of the Constitution and the Old Republic.  He was also a searing critic of the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and the 16th president’s efforts to consolidate the American Republic. And while in intellectual terms he was considered an outlier, Bradford was one of a number of traditionalist conservative academics who, once upon a time in America, were valued for the role they served in leavening and balancing out academic discourse. He taught at several prestigious academic institutions, including the U.S. Naval Academy, and served as president of the Philadelphia Society.

 

I cherish two of Bradford’s works – “Remembering Who We Are” and “Original Intentions: On the Making of the Constitution“ – for providing me with critical foundational bricks in my intellectual development and maturation.

 

A vocal Reagan supporter in the 80’s, Bradford was tapped to head the National Endowment for the Humanities. However, due to fierce opposition from neoconservative elements, he ultimately was passed over for William Bennett, the neocons’ candidate, but not before receiving the endorsement of U.S. Senators from every geographic region of the country as well as by a number of prominent leading conservative intellectuals, including Russell Kirk, Jeffrey Hart, William F. Buckley and Harry Jaffa.

 
Bradford’s ignominious upending by the necons played a key role in deepening the already palpable ideological divide between paleocons and neocons intellectuals within the Reagan coalition that culminated in Pat Buchanan’s insurgent presidential candidacy against George H.W. Bush in 1992.

Bradford died while undergoing heart surgery at the relatively young age of 58 in 1993.  In a sense, he is fortunate not to have lived into his eighties to reflect on the intellectual wasteland that characterizes American academia today.

 

It’s one thing to be an outlier, quite another to be a pariah, which is precisely the way Bradford would be regarded today in America’s toxic academic environment. And this is remarkable considering that scarcely a generation ago, academic mavericks and nonconformists such as Bradford were still afforded a place, even an exalted place, in many American institutions of higher learning, valued for the role they served in refining intellectual inquiry and open discourse.

Reinventing Oxbridge and the Ivy League

01 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in American Education, The Passing Scene, Uncategorized

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Oxford

The Merton College Mob Quad at Oxford.  Photo: Courtesy of DWR. 

I may be a deplorable, but I don’t deplore the immense strides that the West, particularly the United States and Britain, have made in higher education within the last couple of centuries.

Oxbridge detractors are calling on Britain’s two elite institutions – Oxford and Cambridge – to scrap undergraduate education altogether and to function exclusively as graduate institutions. This, they contend, would eliminate much of the rank and privilege that are bound up in these ancient institutions and that have allowed its graduates to vault to the very highest reaches of polite society.

I personally perceive this as egalitarian sentiment run amok.

As much a I detest the present-day American ruling class, our civilization has derived immense material advantages from elite educational systems, such as Oxbridge and the Ivy League, that have afforded the most intellectually gifted among us not only an exposure to some of the greatest thinkers of our present day but also a critical means of networking. To put it another way, great benefits have been derived from concentrating our cognitive elites in relatively confined locations. And if undergraduate education were scrapped at Oxbridge and, ultimately, at the Ivy League, we would accomplish nothing aside from dispersing this talent across a wider scale and depriving them of these unusually condensed learning and networking opportunities.

Even so, it’s worth pointing out that many of the this country’s Nobel laureates in Medicine and Chemistry no longer come from the Ivy League. An increasing number come from public Research I universities and, in a few cases, from solid liberal arts colleges – a remarkable fact that author Malcolm Gladwell raises in his book Outliers.The Story of Success. These institutions include Antioch College, DePauw University, Holy Cross College, Hunter College and the University of Illinois.

While I am no academic – only a mere laymen who finds these sorts of discussions fascinating – my hunch is that many Research I universities and quite few of our well-regarded liberal arts colleges ultimately will ascend to levels comparable to the Ivy League.

Indeed, I think that one already can make the case that the honors programs at many Research I universities already are producing students with knowledge and expertise equal to or, perhaps in some cases, even surpassing those of their Ivy League counterparts. And in time, perhaps, these institutions will evolve the dense networking attributes that still tend to distinguish the Ivy League from other institutions.

While many institutions in this country and the West arguably are going to hell in the proverbial hand basket, America and Britain, in particular, have developed one of the most remarkably effective – not to mention, adaptive – institutions the world has ever known: higher education.

Instead of dismantling the best of the best of these higher educational institutions, I would like to see governments and other major sources of funding and endowments working to ensure that the advantages of elite education are extended to more remote parts of the United States.

 

Our Spoiled, Benighted Ruling Class

30 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by in American Education, Patriotism, U.S. Politics

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burning-flagDespite repeated attempts by the left to depict Trump’s new domestic policy adviser, Stephen Bannon, as a witting agent of the alt-right and white nationalism, I see a different picture emerging.

I perceive an Irish-American patriot from the working class who, in the course of acquiring a Harvard MBA and a large measure of material success as a Goldman Sachs employee, gained intimate exposure to many among this nation’s ruling class and ended up detesting what he saw.

Following the 2008 crash, he saw his octogenarian father, Marty Bannon, a retiree,  struggle financially after he was forced to cash out his AT&T stocks – the bulk of his net worth – to tide himself over the hard times.  The elder Bannon was a self-made man who started out as a telephone lineman and worked his way up  his company’s corporate ladder. For Bannon, his father’s late-life financial crisis drove home a searing lesson in what he had come to regard as the “socialism of the wealthy.”   As the 2008 crisis demonstrated, many among the wealthy class are often insulated from deleterious market effects, while little people like has father are forced to bear the risks.

Other lessons were driven home.  One of Bannon’s proudest moments was when his oldest daughter, Maureen, qualified for West Point.  Yet, he soon discovered that among his daughter’s fellow West Point cadets, not was one supplied from the upper reaches of the country’s wealthiest citizens.

I was reminded of all of this last night watching reports of the desecration of the U.S. flag by snowflakes at many of the nation’s elite colleges and universities.

Virtually none of these kids will ever be forced out of a sense of economic necessity to darken the door of a military recruiter’s office. They will go immediately to a leading graduate school, to an elite investment firm, or to an premiere nonprofit or media entity as a writer or researcher . A few of them will go into national politics, feigning regret over their youthful indiscretion,  even as they formulate the policies that send the next generation of patriotic, working-class kids into the world’s danger zones. Ironic, isn’t it?

Many among the Left are still beating their chests over how an intellectual lightweight, corporate real estate brawler and TV showman who affected sympathy for the beleaguered working-class Americans prevailed over one of the nation’s best and brightest, one who had garnered the support of virtually everyone in this country who really counted.

It think a simple appraisal of what is unfolding among the self-indulgent, self-pitying snowflakes on many of this nation’s elite campuses would supply one compelling explanation for this electoral upset.