In the wake of the Stanford University debacle, Victor Davis
Hanson (VDH) scores again with “Who Owns The University?” The entire column (at American Greatness) is,
as usual, full of excellent insights, but these paragraphs particularly caught my
eye:
. . . After all, Stanford, and
thousands of private universities like it, are not Hillsdale College. Hillsdale
long ago lost trust in federal and state government due to their efforts to use
their partial funding as a means of politically leveraging the college. And therefore,
it has refused all public monies ever since.
Left-wing major colleges or
universities have not done the same because they rightly assume the federal
government shares their commitment to radical progressive change. And thus,
Washington gives them free rein to discriminate in admission, housing, and hiring,
as well as to suspend constitutional protections for faculty and staff—if in
service to progressive-regressive agendas.
But that was then, and this is now.
If Stanford’s sordid law school psychodrama taught us anything, it was that the
law school mob felt they could threaten, smear, scream, disrupt and shut down a
public speaker and do so with complete impunity. And they were right on all
counts. . . .
Hillsdale College has stood out for years as dedicated to offering
a classical liberal arts education, including American history! They
can do so because they refuse all state and federal funding. Our household subscribes to their newsletter Imprimus, which always contains a
modified version of a recent lecture by a recognized conservative, such as
VDH. Read his column here.
# # #
