Bennett, Bloom Seek Curricular Reform

A month after leaving his cabinet post, former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett hasn't given up on his crusade to reform higher education.

Along with University of Chicago professor and best-selling author Allan Bloom, Bennett is laying plans to establish a summer institute aimed at reforming college curricula and exposing undergraduates to the "great books."

Together with a Washington, D.C. public policy center, the summer institute will be called the Madison Center. The public policy side of the center will fund scholars and sponsor seminars on education, drug abuse, law enforcement, and other domestic issues.

The institute, which will begin next summer at a campus that has not yet been chosen, will bring together between 50 and 100 college students to study literature, history and political philosophy under a distinguished group of faculty drawn from across the nation. Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield, who serves on the center's board of directors with Bennett and Bloom, has said he will teach at the new institute.

Conceived Over Dinner

The idea of a summer institute for undergraduates that would promote the study of classical Western thought first arose over a year ago when Bennett was having dinner with Bloom. Bloom, a mordant critic of higher education and author of the best-selling The Closing of the American Mind, and Bennett agreed that it was time to find a new way to bring back more traditional curricula on college campuses.

In his best-seller, which was subtitled "How higher education has failed Democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students," Bloom charges that colleges are responsible for the moral failings of modern youth. Specifically, Bloom argues, students have not received sufficient exposure to classics of Western thought.

"It is difficult to imagine that there is either the wherewithal or the energy within the university to constitute or reconstitute the idea of an educated human being and establish a liberal education again," Bloom wrote in the conclusion.

These conservative critics say they are trying to combat a decline in the quality of the core curriculum at many of the nation's colleges and universities. They argue that, during the last 20 years, colleges and universities have become increasingly politicized, giving way to the demands of special-interest groups.

"We're not trying to create a required curriculum," said John P. Walters, the new executive director of the Madison Center and Bennett's former chief of staff at the Education Department. "What we're trying to do is say that the central question in the higher education community should be, 'what are the most important works for undergradutes?'"

Mansfield said that the purpose of the summer institute is "to do what we can to revive the spirit of higher education in the country."

"It's not so much that we want to go back to values," Mansfield said. "We want to recover an older rationalism which was directed to answering the fundamental question, 'How should I live?', and we want to do this by reading works that give answers to this question."

Bennett has never been a favorite with higher education leaders for his often fruitless attempts to cut federal funding of student aid. The former education secretary further aroused their ire earlier this year when he attacked Stanford University for yielding to the demands of vocal student groups that it change its Western Culture program to a course emphasizing non-Western cultures and ideas.

Bennett charged that the Stanford decision to alter its Western Culture program was "not a product of enlightened debate, but rather an unfortunate capitulation to a campaign of pressure politics and intimidation."

"A great university was brought low by the very forces that modern universities came into being to oppose--ignorance, irrationality, and intimidation," Bennett said in a speech at Stanford earlier this year.

These critics also say that they worry about the increasing emphasis in college curricula, especially in the humanities and social sciences, on courses that promote "moral relativism" which they say merely serve to undermine values and students' perceptions of right and wrong.

"Various disciplines have been taken over by a belief that there's no rational way to solve problems," Mansfield said. "It's a dogmatic moral relativism that we're against."

Unsurprisingly, the confrontational tactics of conservatives such as Bennett have alienated some college presidents and leaders in higher education, who say that Bennett is trying to usurp the universities' traditional role in shaping their own curricula.

"I wish Mr. Bennett well in his efforts to compete with colleges and universities," said Vice President for Governmental and Community Affairs John Shattuck. "He's certainly been trying to do that as Education Secretary."

"His view of curriculum is quite a bit narrower than educators feel is essential," Shattuck said. "Bennett's view is that the classics and a few well-trodden works are essential [to a college curriculum], and while they're essential, they're not enough."

Critics of the Bennett agenda for curriculum reform say that his program represents a return to the ethnocentricity and the narrow-mindedness that prevailed in most college core courses in the humanities half a century ago. Further, they charge, it is as politically motivated as the push for a non-Western curriculum at Stanford which the Secretary condemned.

"It's sad to see that he excludes [from his great books curriculum] the cultural diversity that is the hallmark of modern life," Shattuck said.

But Bennett's allies deny such charges of parochialism. "You can't make those kinds of criticisms if you've read Allen Bloom's book, if you've read Secretary Bennett's speeches," Walters said. "The issue is not ethnocentrism, the issue is what are the best works" for a liberal college education.