With Friends Like These . . . Who Will Defend Liberal Education?

Like free markets and Christianity, liberal education in the United States has more noisy claimants than true friends. Lately, it's conservatives who've been crying hosanna to the humanities and funding campus institutes that conscript classic texts into training future Platonic Guardians for business and national security ventures. At Yale, former Reagan foreign-service of?cer Charles Hill uses Thucydides as a manual for aspiring leaders in a "Studies in Grand Strategy Program" funded partly by former Reagan Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady. The neoconservative ?nancier Roger Hertog is funding "grand strategy" programs at Columbia, Duke, Temple, the University of Texas at Austin, and (until recently) the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Other undergraduate programs, at George Mason University, St. John's in Annapolis, and the Claremont colleges outside Los Angeles, have long been redoubts for conservative humanists with fairly explicit political agendas.