Matthew Garcia, a historian at Dartmouth who left Arizona State partly because of the controversy there, noted the shrewdness of the conservative strategy to cultivate like-minded faculty and programs in the humanities. “They want to invest in these disciplines that administrators, especially at public institutions, have left for dead. The Kochs and these conservative entities see that these are the folks who can actually remake government. Tenure is a magical thing — it’s like appointments to the Supreme Court,” he told me. “Once these people are in, they’re in for a long time and can shape institutions, shape the curriculum and steal hearts and minds to create a different future.”
Skeptics are right to watch for threats to academic freedom and transparent governance in initiatives like this. But we owe it to our students to take a serious look at them. What, exactly, is so different about classes in a “conservative” program — and can they offer clues to how all teachers might encourage students to hear out worldviews other than their own?
Students in the Arizona State program praised the trust and candor that become possible in seminars with a low student-teacher ratio — something any program can achieve, if it has generous resources. They appreciated the program’s explicit call to disagree, civilly. “S.C.E.T.L. hammers you over the head with the idea that it’s O.K. to have disagreements,” Mr. Doebbeling said.