They have been created at the University of Florida at Gainesville, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Often they reference the "principles of a free society," meaning a capitalist society, not a society free of wage slavery. The motivation for creating them is plainly political, but in the abstract it's hard to quarrel with more money for faculty lines to teach ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and the history of modern philosophy. Republican legislators are sufficiently ignorant that they do not realize how politically radical many of the so-called "Great Books" are, so the more teaching of them, the better one might think!
The difficulty, of course, is that many of the hires at these programs make them look like they are also using a political litmus test, which is unlawful for the same reason that "diversity statements" are unlawful in faculty hiring at public universities: public universities cannot discriminate based on the political viewpoint of applicants. So if you advertise for scholars to teach ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, a red flag should go up if everyone hired turns out be a political conservative or libertarian. Sooner or later, some rejected candidate will have to sue, and the actual hiring process will be subjected to the sunlight of discovery.
Perhaps it will turn out better, but so far, the worries are real. CHE has a long piece on the behind-the-scenes battles at the University of Florida. An excerpt (I bolded a particularly funny bit):
As some liberal-arts faculty see it, the Hamilton Center’s opaque origins tarnished it from the start.
The center wasn’t UF’s idea. A little-known group called the Council on Public University Reform hired the former chief of staff of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to lobby for the center’s creation, The Chronicle reported last year.
The initial proposal for the center argued that the fundamental mission of higher education — to seek truth — was threatened by “cancel culture and uniformity of opinion on campus.” It called for a “robust and fiercely independent center” at UF that fostered “political and intellectual diversity” and a “traditional liberal education in the Great Books that form the foundation of Western intellectual tradition.”
The Hamilton Center — named for the founding father — would exist outside any departments or colleges and offer its own courses and interdisciplinary degree programs, per the initial proposal. A board of advisers would provide a list of initial faculty hires to the university’s Board of Trustees, which would make final selections. If the center’s faculty were to be hired through existing departments, the proposal said, “the result would be a replication of what already exists.”
After the former DeSantis aide delivered the proposal to the university in January 2022, a lengthy deliberation ensued. Joseph Glover, the then-provost, argued the proposal laid out “a conservative agenda to influence the curriculum” and did “not align well” with administrative and faculty governance structures. Edits were made, the proposal was OK’d, and by July, the center had been established, had a director, and was equipped with a $3 million start-up injection from the Legislature.
The Hamilton Center entered UF in a period of transition. Kent Fuchs, then the president, and Glover were on their way out. Sasse, who succeeded Fuchs in February 2023, became the center’s biggest champion, jockeying to fast-track its development. Less than four months after taking office, he replaced the center’s inaugural director with William Inboden — a close friend of 30 years and a historian of the American presidency and the Cold War at the University of Texas at Austin. Sasse, a former Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska, also leveraged his political acumen with the Florida Legislature to bolster the center’s recurring state funding to $10 million. He even co-taught a course at the center, “The American Idea,” last spring.
While building up the center, he also rejected the notion that it was a partisan project. “It’s just classically liberal,” Sasse said in June of this year. “It’s not right of center. We’re not interested in your politics.…We’re wrestling with big questions here, and political indoctrination is boring"....
Last fall, the center offered 10 courses and housed more than a dozen faculty and staff members. But Republican power brokers have higher aspirations for the center. Beginning in 2025, the center is required by law to report its progress toward becoming a fully fledged school — Hamilton College — within the university. To get majors off the ground by 2025, approvals needed to begin in the spring of 2024 and would require the support of departments where there may be curricular overlap.
In other words: The Hamilton Center had to convince some of its biggest skeptics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to sign off....
Within days of talking to Sasse, Richardson put in place plans to ensure faculty members’ cooperation with the center.
He scheduled emergency meetings for March 2 — a Saturday — with the associate deans and seven humanities chairs to discuss “the general range of their faculty’s thoughts” on the Hamilton Center’s curriculum and if they were aware of “any unprofessional mentoring of graduate students” regarding the center.
Coming out of the meetings, some felt targeted. John A. Palmer, chair of the philosophy department. wrote in an email afterward that he was “frankly, offended at being cast as obstructionist.”
“Not that I imagine anyone will care,” he told an associate dean, to whom Richardson had just assigned all future curricular matters involving the Hamilton Center. Center leaders, Palmer continued, “should be more careful about bad-mouthing UF faculty who have been making genuine efforts since before their arrival at UF to be cooperative with the Hamilton Center.”Sadelli for the pointer.)
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