Commentary on a pending visit of U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon to the Buckley Institute, located on the grounds of Yale University, has been scattered and occasionally scatterbrained.
The Yale Daily News tells us, “In an interview, Yale
President Maurie McInnis lauded the Buckley Institute for scheduling an event
with U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, whose department has investigated
Yale and slashed federal funding for universities.”
Driving the point home, the paper adds, “McMahon is slated
to speak about diversity, gender and the government’s education policies at an
April 16 event hosted by the Buckley Institute, a group that brings
conservative voices to campus. The secretary, a member of President Donald
Trump’s cabinet, oversees a Department of Education that has canceled billions
of dollars’ worth of federal funding grants to universities across the
country.”
Much of Connecticut’s media is in danger in its news
accounts of becoming the nation’s premier pabulum pusher among hard-wired
anti-Trumpists. Like love, conservatives know an anti-Trump bias when they see
it.
Chris
Powell, the former Managing Editor and Editorial Page Editor of the
Journal Inquirer, now retired, though he continues writing a column for the
paper, reminds us that McMahon has not been a politician favored by
Connecticut’s media. Newspapers across the state, once independent and
privately owned, have now been swallowed up by large national and international
chains that push out what some conservatives dismiss as prefabricated media pabulum.
Powell, who has written often on education in Connecticut
and the nation, laid his finger in a recent column on several sore points: “Of
course indications are that education in the United States has declined
substantially since the {Federal Department of Education] was established. For
indeed the department is most of all a source of educator patronage and leftist
ideology, so Republicans have a case for getting rid of it. They also can argue
that Democrats, especially in Connecticut, including Mayor Elicker, who is also
a member of his city’s school board, don’t have much of an educational record
to defend.
“It’s not the fault of Trump and McMahon that about a third
of New Haven’s students and teachers alike are chronically absent, missing 10%
or more of their classes, and that, when they do manage to show up, so many
students chronically misbehave, causing their teachers to burn out faster. Nor
is it the fault of Trump and McMahon that New Haven’s students, like those in
Connecticut’s other cities, perform so poorly on the few proficiency tests the
state dares to give them even as education spending keeps rising while
enrollments fall.”
Powell’s commentary is often dangerously fresh. He is
without doubt an inspired contrarian, unwilling to go along to get along, a
journalistic disturber of the peace such as William Randolph Hearst, the
namesake of the present Hearst media empire. Here are some of Hearst’s notable
quotes on the subject of newspaper independence:
"The
liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state: it
ought not, therefore, to be restrained in this commonwealth."
"The
moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it
possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people
are not informed."
"In
the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it
must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy."
These strictures apply as well – or should apply as well –
to universities, or at least to universities like Yale that are massively
endowed through the generosity of their alumni and other freely contributing
friends of Yale. The university’s endowment is so large it needn’t worry
overmuch about cuts proposed by the U.S. Government.
As stated in her answers to questions presented to her by Yale’s
newspaper staff, Yale’s President Maurie McInnis reinforces and adds weight to
Hearst’s perspective.
“’Buckley does an amazing job, as do many of our other
student groups, of inviting leaders to come speak on consequential topics,’
McInnis said in her interview on Tuesday. ‘I applaud that they have invited her.’”
Asked if she believed the Education Department should be
scrapped, McInnis responded “’… the U.S. Department of Education serves many
wide and diverse functions, many of which serve our students very well,’
mentioning Pell Grants as an example. ‘I certainly think that those functions
are absolutely vital and need to continue,’ she added, emphasizing the word ‘functions.’”
Asked what she would most want to convey to McMahon if given
the chance, McInnis said she would highlight the University’s commitment to
open inquiry. “I would stress what an extraordinary educational opportunity
Yale was able to provide to students who have wide ranges of views” adding,
that Yale offers to its students “open opportunities for debate and dialogue.”
Buckley’s Book God and Man at Yale -- subtitled “The
Superstitions of Academic Freedom,” first published in 1951 and republished
with a new introduction by Buckley in 1977 -- caused an upheaval in academia.
George Will called the book “a lover’s quarrel with his [Buckley’s] alma
mater.”
The new introduction to the book is well worth the price of
admission: “I know why Yale shouldn’t
be turned over to the state. Because there are great historical presumptions
that from time to time the interests of the state and those of civilization
will bifurcate, and unless there is independence, the cause of civilization is
neglected. The critical difference [between Berkley and Yale} is the critical
sense of mission. At Berkley, that sense of mission is as diffuse and inchoate
– and unspecified and unspecifiable – as the resolute pluralism of California
society. At the private college, the sense of mission is distinguishing. It is
however strangled by what goes under the presumptuous designation of academic
freedom. It is a terrible loss, the loss of the sense of mission. It makes the
private university, sad to say, incoherent; and that is what I was trying to
say when, two months out of Yale, I sat down to write this book.”
Buckley is here attacking the levelers, those who believe
that a loss of character and mission is not ruinous. The Buckley Institute’s
mission is to see to it that character, coherence and mission is not swept away
by temporary enthusiasms, such as a distaste bordering on irrational hatred for
things Trumpian.
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