In defiance of a higher education landscape dominated by progressive ideology, a handful of colleges are seeking to create an alternative. These institutions are following three distinct strategies. First, some religious schools, such as the University of Dallas or Colorado Christian University, have doubled down on a traditional religious identity. Second, startups such as the University of Austin (UATX) are staking out a classical liberal alternative. Finally, a small number of state schools under Republican governors are asserting a new place in the conversation.

　　Some public intellectuals on the right, including Jordan Peterson in a recent podcast episode, are pushing back against what they see as the hyper-politicization of education, specifically in reaction to the third category of public institutions. The clash between those of Peterson’s persuasion and others who want the government to take a central role in driving higher education reveals the crisis of purpose in higher education and points to private institutions to fulfill a role that public ones cannot.

　　Peterson takes aim at the New College of Florida, critiquing the push to create a conservative alternative within state schools. He worries that conservative universities will become echo chambers of their own that merely direct ideological advocacy toward new targets. “The danger,” Peterson says, “is that the political starts to explicitly permeate the educational.”

　　Peterson’s apparent unease reveals a hidden tension between the liberal arts and the conservative impulse to preserve a set of values or institutions. Free inquiry may tend toward directions that do not fit with a certain set of values, leading to controversial lines of inquiry. Peterson’s public spat with the University of Toronto over their policies mandating certain pronoun usage makes him hyper-aware of censorship in any form, conservative or liberal. In other cases, religious schools in particular may see a tension between their statements of doctrine and topics that students want to explore. Are these tensions inherent between the liberal arts and conservatism?

　　Christopher Rufo, a conservative journalist and trustee of the New College of Florida, responds to Peterson:

　　The alternative to “political control” of the universities is not enlightened self-government but bureaucratic rule. The laissez-faire attitude of legislators, who, in recent decades, ceded control of the public universities to unelected administrators and faculty departments, created the precise problem we are now trying to resolve. It is not a betrayal of classical liberal values to insist that political leaders, rather than permanent bureaucrats, govern public institutions—it is, rather, a restoration of those values.

　　Interrogating both Petersons and Rufo’s claims requires an understanding of both the purpose of higher education and how it fits into society in a broader sense. Given competing aims of career preparedness, civic education, and character formation, some institutions are borderline schizophrenic (just ask any university administrator to tell you about their new initiatives). Each department has its own projects and priorities that rarely align with institutional priorities, while schools that have managed to carve out a core curriculum find that it conflicts with the many competing interests across the institution.

　　Truthfully, most institutions lack clarity on their reason for being. Wendell Berry tackles this question in his essay The Loss of the University:

　　The thing being made in a university is humanity. Given the current influence of universities, this is merely inevitable. But what universities, at least the public supported ones, are mandated to make or to help to make is human beings in the fullest sense of those words—not just trained workers or knowledgeable citizens but responsible heirs and members of human culture. … Underlying the idea of the University—the bringing together, the combining into one, of all the disciplines—is the idea that good work and good citizenship are the inevitable by-products of the making of a good—that is, a fully developed—human being.

　　Berry’s vision of the end of education reveals a much more expansive purpose, one that contains political ends, but that is not merely political. Forming humans affects not only the polity of a nation, but also families, the church, and the good of the humans themselves. Rufo is correct to claim that the government has an interest in education, but it is not the only stakeholder.

　　Mandating specific courses from a centralized legislative body is a too-little-too-late strategy that will not shift the core of the underlying problem facing higher education, namely the loss of purpose. Suppose you mandate certain authors or books to be taught at all universities, what guarantees that professors will even present such works in a sympathetic way? This would require further and further control to ensure that institutions are meeting ideological goals. These types of command-and-control policies miss the complexity across disciples and the needs across society. To use politics as an all-encompassing category justifying legislative mandates is to make the same mistake as those on the left who would fold all of human experience into the purview of the state.

　　When the funding source shifts to the state, educational institutions become oriented toward pleasing government officials.

　　The dichotomy that Rufo presents between progressive and conservative politics also omits a third option, namely private schools not run by the state that can better reflect the needs of these stakeholders. Private institutions act as a buffer between political infighting. Narrowing the debate to solely public universities malnourishes our vision of education. Abraham Kuyper’s notion of Sphere Sovereignty, from his lecture of the same title, provides a set of guardrails that prevents all elements of society from collapsing into the political:

　　Now in all of these spheres or circles the cogwheels engage one another, and it is precisely because of the mutual interaction of these spheres that there is an emergence of that rich, many-sided, multi-formed human life; but in that life there is also the danger that one sphere may encroach upon the neighboring sphere; thus causing a wheel to jerk and to break cog upon cog, and interfering with the progress of the whole.

　　Under Kuyper’s framework, governments can impose control over educational institutions only when those institutions fail their core responsibility, and then only in a temporary manner. The threat of encroachment of one sphere upon another calls into question the validity of public universities. Any institution that receives state or federal funding invites government control into its operations. This control will increase political infighting because it raises the factors that could possibly be changed by political actions. The back-and-forth nature of political conflict has the potential to undermine a broader purpose of education to form humans, not in a narrow ideological sense, but toward the good. Kuyper, who was both a theologian and statesman, was not offering a theoretical vision, but one that he practically enacted during his time as the founder of the Free University in Amsterdam where he created space for science to freely explore questions related to their discipline. As the leader of the Anti-Revolutionary Party and eventual Prime Minister of the Netherlands, he was not anti-political, but sought to place politics within a proper purpose.

　　He who pays the piper controls the tune is an incentive that Berry misses when he assumes that public universities will do a better job than private ones at educating the whole person. When the funding source shifts to the state, educational institutions become oriented toward pleasing government officials. Professors who do not fit the narrow ideological band of those who are in power today become liabilities to politicians who are at the whims of the election cycle.

　　Of course, this should also raise the problem of the amount of federal funding that goes to subsidies and loans to private institutions. These institutions should seek to create as much of a buffer from such influence as they can. Grove City College (my alma mater) and Hillsdale College have shown that the model of declining government funding, and the strings attached, can be a successful strategy as donors see this as a signal of their being mission-focused and respond accordingly. A growing list of small religious schools are following this model. More could be written here about the financial viability side of higher education, but I will add only that mission focus must be a part of the plan for financial sustainability. The alternative is a school continuing to exist at the cost of their reason for existing.

　　Those who seek to fulfill that vision of forming fully developed human beings should look to private institutions to accomplish that goal. And they should not be afraid to orient their education towards what is good, an aim of which Peterson is perhaps too wary. The critical concern is that they should ensure that they do not become captured by political actors. In this way, the liberal arts do provide a bulwark against both deficiencies. Although the liberal arts moniker has been watered down, replaced by what Russel Kirk called “cafeteria education,” a true reflection of these ideas can still set institutions apart in the crowded field of higher education.

　　The liberal arts contain both a method and an end. The method is a set of knowledge that has been tested over time, while the end is the formation of virtue in a free people. Much of what institutions claim to be the liberal arts is merely an elective model where students choose from a wide array of classes, many of which have a specific ideological slant. The direction of education might make Peterson nervous, but it shouldn’t. In the tradition of ordered liberty, the end of our freedom is the good of free agents. All other visions of higher education, whether one of advocacy or what Albert Jay Nock calls “training,” will eventually succumb to the profound sameness of Education Inc. If conservative institutions fail to present a positive vision for education, they will eventually become either indistinguishable from their counterparts or extinct.