In early January, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the appointment of six new members to the board of trustees of New College, a small, public liberal arts institution in Sarasota, Florida. These appointments feature, among others, conservative education activist Christopher Rufo, Hillsdale College professor Matthew Spalding, and the renowned constitutional scholar Charles Kesler. The announcement came after DeSantis accused institutions of higher learning of imposing “trendy” woke ideologies upon students and marked his administration’s latest attempt at a red-state rebuttal to the leftist orthodoxy that dominates American education.
Something remarkable happened in fifth-century Athens when Socrates set up shop, conversed freely on the things of this world, and followed the truth wherever it would lead. It also happened in 1609 when University of Padua professor Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope at the moon and found that the heavenly orb wasn’t as pure and smooth as everyone said. It happened in America as well when in 1940, the American Association of University Professors issued its “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” which hailed “the free search for truth and its free exposition.”
Conservatives today might be surprised to hear that this principle of independent inquiry and free speech lay, too, at the root of that legendary left-wing declaration known as the Port Huron Statement, primarily authored by Tom Hayden, which regretted that a managerial mindset and business interests had blunted “honest searching” and “the liberating heritage of higher learning,” producing a campus big on conformity and “less open
