 "Photo: Andrew Rogers/The Daily Texan")
A House bill to turn a program at UT into an independent school has drawn criticism from faculty members.
State Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, introduced a bill to create the School of Ethics, Western Civilization and American Traditions at UT during the House’s Higher Education Committee meeting Wednesday.
Students in the school would be required to take 18 hours of Western civilization studies, including courses covering ancient philosophy and literature, the Bible and Renaissance and Enlightenment classics.
These courses would count for 18 hours of the traditional core curriculum requirement, and students would then have to complete an additional 18 hours of coursework in Western civilization.
Kolkhorst said the $5 million project would resemble the existing UT Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas, in which students study history, literature, philosophy and religion through the “great books” philosophy that classics, not curriculum, should guide students.
Unlike the center, which has no set canon of study, the new school would establish a core of important texts that would focus exclusively on Western traditions and American ideals.
Eli Cox, a business professor who teaches in the center, said he was surprised the Legislature was so involved in academic affairs.
“The Legislature having a hand in academic decisions like this is troubling to me,” Cox said.
The bill would establish the program as an independent school with its own dean, budget and corps of professors.
Thomas and Lorraine Pangle, who lead the center, testified against the bill.
“A center is a good idea,” said Thomas Pangle, a government professor. “A school is not.”
Thomas Pangle said the school’s creation would remove the existing center’s autonomy and limit the pool of professors from which the new school would be able to draw, as it would no longer be able to select faculty from any discipline to teach courses.
Kolkhorst said that in the age of Bernie Madoff, Enron and the economic collapse, a school of ethics is more important than ever.
“We have to study Western civilization to understand Western civilization,” Kolkhorst said. “If we don’t have ethics and study where we come from, we certainly cannot bridge or foresee the future of where we’re going.”
Until Monday, Pangle said, neither he nor his wife had been consulted about the project.
“Many of these people who testified have no idea what’s going on,” he said. “The bill requires a prescribed six-course sequence with no room for things like modern political philosophy or texts on Eastern thought.”
Lorraine Pangle, an associate government professor, criticized establishing a prescribed canon of important literature.
“What constitutes great books is more and more open to be contested about and argued over,” she said. “A canon is just a closed set: ‘These are the great books.’ It’s refreshing to have that as an open question.”
Several faculty members from around the country testified in favor of the bill, including William Allen, formerly of Michigan State University, and Thomas Lindsay, president of Shimer College, a great-books college located in Chicago.
Only one former UT faculty member, Don Davis — a professor emeritus in the School of Information — testified in favor of the bill.
Lindsay said he and several others who testified in favor of the bill did so at the behest of philosophy professor Robert Koons, former leader of the center. Lorraine Pangle said Koons was fired from his position more than a year ago but remains on the faculty.
“Rob Koons did a great job of starting the project,” Thomas Pangle said. “He was less successful at winning allies.”
The center was formerly known as the Program in Western Civilizations and American Institutions, but its name was changed in an effort to clarify its purpose and expunge controversy over its allegedly conservative ideology.
In 2008, The New York Times characterized the center as “mostly financed by conservative organizations and donors, run by conservative professors.”
Koons, a self-described Republican, denied those allegations at the time and said the center was devoted to ethics, not partisan ideology.
“The name ‘Western Civilizations and American [Traditions]’ sounds really right-wing, like there’s an axe to grind,” Thomas Pangle said. “We’re really focusing our efforts on clarity and mending fences.”
Kolkhorst’s chief of staff Chris Steinbach said he had consulted with Koons on the bill when it was drawn up several years ago, at which point Koons was still the center’s director. Steinbach said that while he had spoken to Koons sporadically over the phone and by e-mail before and after Koons was fired from the center, their interaction had not been extensive and he was not aware of the circumstances of Koons’ departure.
Additional reporting by Natalie Ziskind.
Before I comment, I would like to add for the record that I have been a student of both Prof. Pangle and of Prof. Koons. Both men are phenomenal teachers - the best I've had the pleasure to take - and both deserve the highest respect.However, the two programs each professor represents are two different things. They overlap very little and the bill in the leg is legitimate, not simply an oversight. The current Core Text Program run by Prof. Pangle does not closely resembles the original Program for Western Civilization. The original had more of a set curriculum, a solid set of readings of which have transversed and sustained the centuries, as well as a set goal of filling the void the modern University, through its adoption of a vocational and social change focus rather than classical liberal arts focus, has created. The void I speak of is one of the soul, or, if you are skeptical of the soul, the human-ness of humans. The Program is about asking the fundamental questions: What unites us? What is human nature? What makes the good life? What is justice? How should men in society? etc. If those are radical right wing endeavors, then the nation is more off center than I thought. I've also taken an American Studies course here at UT. There, we studied US landmarks. We read a book on Graceland, and another on McDonald’s. I guarantee those are not Great Books and the class did not even enter the atmosphere of the topics a Western Civ Class would discuss. The two are drastically different, Western Civ being historical, philosophical, and most American Studies courses being superficial charlatans of higher learning.
Legislators playing professors!
Professors playing ministers!
I can't stop using exclamation marks about this notion!