Several years ago, University of Texas philosophy professor Robert Koons established a new undergrad program centered on the study of Western civ and American institutions. There are a number of such programs at schools across the country (Duke has one, as do Princeton, Brown, and others), and the idea is that they allow undergrads who want to focus their studies in this way to do so. Most colleges and universities have highly diffuse general curricula with few serious core requirements; very, very few require that all undergrads study US history or civics (Texas is an exception). So programs of the sort Koons set up serve a real need, and add a nice layer of diversity to undergrad curricula.

But sometimes, it's exactly that diversity that is the problem. When professors at Hamilton College wanted to set up an on-campus center for the study of Western civ, they were hounded off campus. The resulting Alexander Hamilton Institute is an entirely independent entity--which is good insofar as this allows it to exist, but sad insofar as it says some pretty harsh things about the campus culture. If students can't study something for credit, they just aren't likely to study it.

Anyway, back to Koons. He's got a story to tell.

For six years, I was involved in efforts at the University of Texas at Austin to create a program in Western Civilization and American Institutions. Our vision was to offer to all undergraduates a sequence of Great Books seminars, beginning with the Bible and the works of ancient Greece and Rome, and culminating with the classics of the American founding. We sought approval of a certificate through which students could satisfy eighteen of their forty-two hours of general education requirements.

We made considerable progress. Perhaps as a result of that progress, we faced opposition from the major humanities programs (especially English, history, American studies, and religious studies), beginning in the spring of 2007. A New York Times article on September 22, 2008, "Conservatives Try New Tack on Campuses," accelerated and consolidated that opposition, because it included our program and a quotation from me.

So, even though we secured a "concentration" for our program (a step below but toward a major), introduced a new field of study on campus, raised over $1 million, and hired four postdoctoral teaching fellows, the life of the program was brief.

In November of last year, I was dismissed as director, and in the spring the administration and faculty replaced our program with one on Core Texts and Ideas. The new program lacks any list or criteria for "core texts," and the goal of a required sequence of courses has vanished.

I don't wish to rehearse the history of the program in any detail. (Barbara Moeller's Minding the Campus article covered it very well.) I will, however, record the larger lessons of our experience for others who may wish to start Western civilization programs. In retrospect, we overestimated the value of strong support from outsiders such as private donors, legislators, and policy groups, while we underestimated the determination of our internal opponents.

The main obstacle to our success was the idee fixe of unbridled faculty governance over the curriculum, which dominates at UT and elsewhere. In practice, that means the tyranny of the faculty majority.

Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a "distribution" standard--a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences.

The perfecting of the intellect and the formation of character through the attainment of what John Henry Newman called "liberal knowledge" have given way to engorgement with miscellaneous information. The suggestion that higher education should have something to do with acquiring moral wisdom is invariably met with the sophomoric query, "Whose ethics?" As Anthony Kronman has so well documented in his book The End of Education, nothing in the Uncurriculum encourages students to think through the great questions of life in a systematic manner, with the great minds of the Western tradition as their guides and interlocutors.

The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach.

He ends with some very challenging ideas about governance:

For the academic gatekeepers, it was far easier to keep out the competition.

In addition to underestimating the power of the faculty majority, we also learned that reform-minded trustees cannot count on the appointment of supposedly sound and non-political administrators. Administrators will always side with the faculty majority in defending the Uncurriculum.

Instead, trustees must be willing to do one of two things: (1) get their hands dirty by dictating the details of curricular reform, over the objections of the faculty gatekeepers and their administrative allies, or (2) create alternative mechanisms for the introduction of academic programs.

Our program was a sound alternative to the Uncurriculum. It was privately funded and offered students a coherent way of satisfying many of their general education requirements. Unfortunately, the faculty saw our program as foreign and threatening, and therefore attacked it, much as the human body automatically attacks transplanted organs. We need to prevent that from happening in the future.

One idea, which state legislators could implement, is the creation of "charter colleges" within existing state universities. The state could authorize groups of three or more professors, together with a private foundation or even a for-profit sponsor, to propose charters for innovative programs like ours. If its charter were approved by an outside board, a charter college would be authorized to offer specific courses to satisfy designated components of the state's core, as well as certificates, minors, and majors. Faculty in the rest of the university would not control the decisions of the charter college.

The experience of the Western Civilization and American Institutions program underscores a sad truth about higher education in America--it is mostly run by and for the faculty. What it likes and dislikes trumps what would be best for students. Our system will never fully achieve its promise as long as that remains true.