There is an old idea that excellence in any discipline is difficult to achieve.  Perhaps that idea suggests another similar, though unconnected one: that those who have achieved excellence are difficult to enslave.In the movie 13 Assassins, Shinrokuro Shinmada says, “Ruling is convenient, but only for rulers. The people must learn to serve.” He might have said, “Ruling is possible, but only for rulers. The people must learn to serve.” Notwithstanding that this is the philosophy of the world elite, our reformulation begs two interesting questions: what are the qualities of a ruler? What are the qualities of a servant?

 Historically, there have been many answers offered for both. Mostly, they are unsatisfying, but some answers to the first question include: bloodline, extraordinary wealth, special knowledge, etc. Though the Western inheritance is partly Greek, even the Greek philosophers believed that self-governance was the privilege of a very few. Aristotle believed in natural slaves, people who by their nature would be better off governed by others.

Plato did not believe in self-governance. He was one of the first Western philosophers to articulate the idea that expertise, or possession of special knowledge, is what empowered one to rule over others (instead of the expert, he called such an individual a philosopher-king). Furthermore, if Plato’s conception of the philosopher-king has any validity, then in a Republic governed by the people and for the people, every man must in some sense become a philosopher-king. Unfortunately, that is impractical.

For the Founding Fathers, impracticality was not an option; an experiment in popular government, one in which both poor and rich would vote, educated and uneducated, had to take into account the wildly varying dispositions of the American public.

This is why the American Founders were conservative in their orientation towards institutions.  As long as churches, schools, the free press, and other guardians and educators of public thought and action thrived, the Republic which the Founders established was protected against the inevitable stupidity, vices, and weakness inherent in human nature.  This, in fact, is the point of having strong institutions such as the Church, the free press, etc., and it is also the point of being a conservative—to preserve the institutions which offset the worst of mankind’s tendencies.

On that score, we’ve run into problems, the biggest of them, at the moment, being that our institutions have been stolen from us and corrupted. This is why conservativism is no longer practical; for the near future, populism must be our political orientation.

The founding generation understood this too: there was a time when they realized their freedoms were being taken from them, that they could not preserve them through the usual means of institutions. They realized that they had to become revolutionaries, not for the sake of revolution, but for the sake of winning their freedoms back. It was only then that they could re-assume their natural conservative ethic. Our choice is nothing more or less. A revolutionary moment is upon us; wars are being waged on our freedoms. We cannot conserve what we do not have.

For the remaining paragraphs, I’d like to ponder only one of those wars, perhaps the most important of all for a free and self-governing people: the war on excellence. This war was declared almost 120 years ago with the advent of postmodernity, and what Nietzsche would have called the attack on foundations.

 Like most attacks in most wars, this one was tactical. In order to destroy excellence (and therefore virtue, which is the individual expression of excellence), the enemies of the West first had to destroy the standards which enshrined excellence as good, as desirable.  So gradually there emerged the notion that beauty was not objective; rather, it was a way of pulling the wool over people’s eyes.  It was a clever method of justifying the preferences of white European males at the expense of everyone else’s preferences.

Likewise, truth was not objective.Truth, as a normative concept, emerged out of the institutions established to preserve the status quo—the power of white European males.  Tradition gave Truth the guise of respectability; normativity made sure it could not be questioned.  It followed logically (there’s irony for you) that truth could not be timeless, could not be meaningfully normative or objective, in short; truth changed, if not day to day, at least century to century, or era to era.

In an age of popular government, the post-moderns took advantage of the crumbling philosophical standards and the newly ascendant politics based on consent of the governed.  To hold people to standards which they hadn’t consented to, such as tradition supplied in the forms of objective truth or beauty, was akin to governing another without his consent. Consent became the foundation of every action, from sex (consensual sex is always “good”, no matter how perverse the actual act) to art (what I prefer may not be what you prefer).

The essential problem was never with popular government, but always with postmodernity. Consent can be the basis of the exercise of power over others, especially a community of adult citizens, but it cannot be the basis of what makes knowledge legitimate, because of the very nature of knowledge itself. Namely, that knowledge itself is a commonwealth, added to over time, improved and perfected over time. The “over time” part is where tradition comes in.

 Likewise, consent cannot be what justifies standards of beauty because in order to discern beauty one must have some sort of aesthetic education (though the education need not be formal); all education is rooted in a tradition because—well, because education is meant to impart knowledge, and knowledge is accumulated over time, or as I put it, in a tradition.

Moreover, the artifacts of beauty—artworks—are generated using specific techniques, specific symbols, in short, specific forms of know-how. Again, know-how is a form of knowledge, so we’re back at education which is rooted in the accumulation of knowledge which is preserved and propagated within a tradition. I assume I don’t have to rehearse why consent can’t justify the standard of what is Truth (although I’ll just mention it has something to do with knowledge and tradition).

If only it were that easy. As it turns out, the post-moderns had a simple response. Remember how I said that consent can be the justification of the exercise of power? The post-moderns took that and ran: everything, they said, is a form of power. Love, beauty, truth—they are all functions of power.  The conclusion (ironically again) was only logical: if everything is a form of power, consent can be the justification of everything. It can be the justification for having a baby, for God’s sake; if I, as a woman, don’t want to have a child, abortion is my right. MY RIGHT!

Of course, all of that jabbering about power was only a front Is it any surprise that a group of people so obsessed with power were after power themselves?  The whole postmodern explanation of power and historical oppression was a reverse-justification of taking power and reapportioning it generously to themselves.

After destroying the standards of excellence, excellence itself evaporated. Math is racist, intelligence is racist, logic is racist, truth is racist, beauty is racist, goodness is racist, wanting to be physically fit is racist. Why?  Because all of the above require the cultivation of virtue to achieve, and people who are excellent are not easy to enslave. Fatphobia is bad, but not fatness, because fatness is a form of mediocrity. Unlike fitness, which requires at least discipline and self-control, fatness requires no virtue. It may even require vice (laziness, sloth). Fatness is not an unattractive trait, because unattractive is purely subjective.  You can’t hold me up to your standards (but they can sure as hell hold you down to theirs).

The last problem the post-moderns had to solve was how to spread mediocrity around like butter on bread. The answer: simply reverse the process by which a society cultivates excellence. Take over the institutions and have them form people poorly.

 Let the universities dumb people down instead of smarten them up. Let the press tell falsehoods instead of truths. Let the churches preach the message of anti-christ, instead of Christ. Let them say that virtue is not required to attain salvation, only social justice. Let the entertainment business weaken imagination through graphic images and cliché-ridden stories, rather than stimulate imagination through subtle, refined, symbolic imagery and complex stories.  (I’ve always suspected a connection between when our understanding of the human person became more caricatured and cartoonish and so did our artistic depictions of him.)

Create identity groups and tell people they must belong to them and tell them that they are expected to parrot certain traits to signify their membership within these identities. Let these traits be easy to adopt, hard to get rid of, and absolutely unfulfilling to the deepest needs of the human heart.  Create stereotypes, suggesting that all members of a certain group possess negative traits, such as all white people are oppressive; create stereotypes suggesting all members of a certain group possess positive traits, such as all black people are oppressed.  And these are only examples: the assault is on all fronts.

Friends, we are on the verge of losing this war, as we are with so many others. We need a photo opportunity. We want a shot at redemption. Otherwise, we’re going to end up cartoons in a cartoon graveyard.

“The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2023”.  If you’ve read this far, you have completed HR899, introduced by Rep.Thomas Massie.

Abolishing the DOE isn’t a new idea. The department was created in 1979 by the Carter administration, fulfilling a campaign promise to the NEA, the teachers union, which in turn gave him their first-ever presidential endorsement.

But skepticism over the department was present even at its inception. The bill passed by just four votes in a heavily Democratic House. Ronald Reagan, always concerned about over-centralized power, immediately campaigned to unwind it. Several Republican education leaders since have endorsed its elimination.

But, 1979 hardly marked the beginning of a glorious new age for American education. Per pupil, spending on education since then has more than tripled, inflation adjusted, but there is little to show for it.

Achievement scores have been stagnant and still lag behind many of our peer nations in the developed world. The racial gap in academic achievement persists in spite of the Department’s high-profile efforts. The bureaucrats and interest groups receiving the funding are fine with it, of course, but for the rest of us, it hasn’t accomplished much.

The DOE isn’t really designed to make an impact. It doesn’t establish or approve a curriculum. It doesn’t operate one school or educate one student. It doesn’t administer or create tests. It doesn’t establish standards for colleges and universities. We wouldn’t want it to do any of those things, but it naturally raises the question: is the DOE needed at all?

The Department has over 4000 employees who do research and write policy papers on education that are read mostly by each other. They administer the beleaguered student loan program and federal aid for education.  Over 500 workers toil in the Office of Civil Rights.

Senator Joni Ernst notes that 94% of DOE‘s staff were deemed nonessential during a government shutdown. As one official summarized “It really is just a grant-making entity with a huge bureaucracy.“

Americans rightly respect the importance of education and are apprehensive about failing to support anything labeled “education”.  The Department doesn’t stir public animosities like Justice, Homeland Security, and other cabinet departments often do.

1. Luke Wood, a professor of education at San Diego State University, asserts the attempt to eliminate the DOE has nothing to do with federalism or any legitimate substantive argument. No, the real motivation is…racism!

Yes, those darn Republicans are at it again, advancing unrelated pseudo-arguments to provide cover for their race hatred. They are engaging in “racelighting”, i.e. racial gaslighting which is an “act of psychological manipulation where people of color receive racial messages which distort the realities and lead them to second-guess themselves”.

Opponents claim HR899 is just an attempt to shape curricula that teach a “fairy tale“ history, omitting the ills of slavery as well as ignoring Jim Crow, miscegenation, and redlining. Furthermore, it is purposely intended to strip civil rights protections for minority students.

Yikes! Just being around Republicans, you would never imagine that they are such over-the-top bigots. Then again, maybe it is Professor Wood and his ilk who are the racial dividers, seeing racism as the explanation for nearly everything.

If they are so concerned about the civil rights of minority students, why not embrace school choice and charter schools?  These reforms have demonstrated their capability to actually improve educational outcomes and lift children out of poverty.

Some see HR 899 as a quixotic endeavor. Maybe it is. Bureaucracies, whatever their failings, are skilled, aggressive, and usually successful at defending themselves.

But there is one overarching reason why the DOE needs to go. We can’t afford it.

America is in big trouble financially. We have normalized intergenerational fiscal theft to finance so much wasteful, politically motivated spending that we are now $32 trillion underwater. Interest on the debt is crowding out other priorities and $50 trillion is in view.  Still the Biden administration, with an election looming, continues to propose yet more new spending programs.

We should instead be desperately seeking out nonessential expenditures that could be cut without any significant harm. The Department of Education is an ideal place to start.

On the occasion of his “eleventy-first” birthday, the hobbit Bilbo Baggins famously disappeared. On July 31, we celebrate[d] what would have been the 111th birthday of another man who was diminutive in size but larger than life in spirit: Milton Friedman. Were he to reappear today, he would likely marvel at how much progress has been made on issues about which he cared so deeply.

In particular, Friedman would likely be amazed at the expansion of education freedom over the last year as well as the landmark Supreme Court decision to eliminate racial preferences in education.

In the past three years alone, more than 20 states have enacted new education choice policies or expanded existing ones, including eight states that are in the process of implementing Friedman’s vision of universal school choice.

And last month, the Supreme Court decided jointly in two cases brought by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard and the University of North Carolina that the equal protection clause prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, including in college admissions.

For Friedman, these two issues were closely connected. He was convinced that black Americans could not obtain equality of opportunity unless they had access to school choice. But he also understood that if those educational opportunities were allocated with racial preferences, that system might help a few but would inevitably undermine access to quality options for most black Americans.

Friedman once remarked, “If you think that there is a way out of this by getting government to pass laws especially to benefit [black Americans] you are kidding yourself. That isn’t going to happen.”

The problem, he astutely observed, is that majorities pass laws and black Americans are a relatively small minority. It is unreasonable, he argued, to expect majorities to pass laws that would undermine their own interests while advancing the interests of a minority. As he put it:

Temporarily … affirmative action may benefit some blacks, some low-income people, but if you believe that Supreme Court decisions are going to be able to stop a majority of the population, which is prejudiced, from using this power to benefit themselves rather than the people who are disadvantaged, you’re kidding yourself. That’s not the way out.

Affirmative action may have elevated select members of minority groups, but it did so at the expense of others, particularly Asian Americans. According to author Kenny Xu:

In the case of Harvard, race is not simply used as a tiebreaker in admissions. A 2013 internal Harvard study revealed by the [Students for Fair Admissions] lawsuit showed that had Harvard only considered academics, Asians would make up 43% of Harvard’s student body. Adding legacy, athlete recruitment, “extracurriculars,” and a “personal” score lowered Asians to 26%. Finally, in the years the internal Harvard study looked at, Asians actually made up only 19% of the student body.

Even the supposed beneficiaries of racial preferences in college admissions are harmed by them in at least three ways. First, artificially advancing some applicants undermines incentives for achievement within their racial communities, as it detaches accomplishments from rewards.

Second, as the great economist Thomas Sowell (a former student of Friedman) observed, racial preferences lead to a “mismatch effect” that leaves “many blacks and Hispanics who likely would have excelled at less elite schools … in a position where underperformance is all but inevitable because they are less academically prepared than the white and Asian students with whom they must compete.”

And third, as Justice Clarence Thomas has argued, racial preferences “stamp [their beneficiaries] with a badge of inferiority” that “taints the accomplishments of all those who are admitted as a result of racial discrimination” as well as “all those who are the same race as those admitted as a result of racial discrimination” because “no one can distinguish those students from the ones whose race played a role in their admission.”

Friedman was very clear that meaningful progress depended on abolishing both racial discrimination and racial preferences:

We want a society in which people can celebrate their own special ethnic background. But that’s a very different thing from a society which somehow takes ethnic characteristics as a criterion for preference or lack of preference, from a society which moves away from the doctrine of color-blindedness to the doctrine of so-called affirmative action. That’s the problem.

There are many advocates within the school choice movement who agree with Friedman on the benefits of expanding educational freedom but somehow ignore his message about the harms of racial preferences. They favor private school choice, but only for urban school districts with large minority populations or only when programs are targeted toward low-income families. They favor charter schools, but only those that focus on minority students with “culturally responsive” models. They believe that students learn the most from teachers who share the same skin pigmentation and they seek preferential funding, training, and hiring of black teachers to accomplish this.

Friedman would be thrilled to see that all students, regardless of class, color, or creed, are now eligible for private school choice in eight states. But he would be aghast that some claiming to favor school choice would prefer that these opportunities be allocated with racial preferences.

Friedman had no objection to people maintaining strong racial and ethnic identities: “I believe it’s highly desirable for people to be able to pursue their own values, to have whatever ethnic values they want, provided they do it voluntarily and do not interfere with the freedom of others to do it also. We want a society of variety and diversity.”

But he would have objected vigorously to the idea that government policies, such as critical race theory in public school curriculum, matching the race of students to teachers, or racial targeting of education opportunities, were necessary to cultivate those group identities and achieve progress for members of those communities.

Friedman was once asked directly about this issue: “Don’t you think it’s through ethnic solidarity that many minority groups were able to make advances in the American society?”

To which Friedman replied, “Not in the slightest. If you look at the way in which ethnic minorities made advances, it was not through ethnic solidarity. It was through the free market.”

On Milton Friedman’s 111^th birthday, we should celebrate the remarkable growth toward a free market in education that we have seen in recent years. But we should also heed Friedman’s warning that those benefits of freedom can only be enjoyed if we avoid the coercion of racial preferences.

*****

This article was published by Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

We published an interesting interview with Tom Lewis, the generous benefactor who had to withdraw his significant contributions to ASU because of militant left-wing bias among its faculty.

In that interview, he has high praise for Michael Crow, although he admits he does not think Michael Crow knows what is going on regarding academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus.

This is a reaction we have gotten from a lot of people who hang around the Paradise Valley Country Club and we really can’t understand why they feel that way.  Michael Crow is the man in charge.  If things are going awry at ASU, he is ultimately responsible. After all, they will readily assign credit to Mr. Crow for ASU’s astounding growth.  Should he then not be held responsible for its deficiencies?

At a minimum, he is supposed to know “what is going on.”  If he doesn’t, who is?  We readily admit, even having that knowledge is no guarantee that attempting to herd biased academic cats will be successful.  But at least the attempt should be made.

Secondly, on the occasions when he has had a chance to deal directly with left-wing bias and support intellectual diversity and free speech, he has caved into the demands of intellectual vandals.  So far on this latest crisis, he has been strangely silent.

To his credit, Mr. Crow has built ASU into a behemoth of a university and upgraded its academic standards, at least the academic standards maintained by left-wing academics that determine the standards.

He has also built a real estate empire and sports enterprise that generates large sums of money, something admired by the business community and some in the legislature.  The more ASU runs like a business, the less money it will seek from the legislature.

However, neither the square footage of a university nor its cash flow is a measure of its quality.  A university that does not allow free inquiry cannot by definition be rated very high as an academic institution.

The economic independence argument is somewhat understandable when there are so many competing demands for legislative funds.  However, that does not mean intellectual diversity and freedom of speech really exist on campus.  It simply means we have a left-wing hothouse of a school that doesn’t cost the legislature much money.

Maybe the legislature should take some of that money back and exert some control.  Maybe taking control of the funds generated by sports will get the attention of the university administration.

For those reasons, lots of people on our side of the political spectrum give him a pass for the terrible intellectual environment on campus.

We won’t do that.  He is the man in charge. If there is a lack of free speech and intellectual diversity at ASU, Michael Crow is the man at fault.

Further, if you don’t have freedom of speech and intellectual diversity, you really don’t have a university, you have a training camp for radicals.

Earlier we said when confronted by left-wing bias, he has either capitulated to it or agreed with it.

Left-wing bias in the university is something that has gone on for many years, and that is not his fault, to be sure. But for purposes of illustration, we will choose a particular time period to examine.

We fondly remember 57 years ago attending ASU and as a freshman taking philosophy from Marxist Morris Starsky, who openly recruited for the radical SDS in class and later got fired for his over-the-top activism.  It was in that class one really was alerted to how biased your professor could be.  In a way, it was a good lesson. While most of the faculty in economics and history were “liberals” at the time, they were not like the left-wing radicals of today.  They were more like Hubert Humphrey than Che Guevara. But, they paved the way.

Perhaps the worst decision was allowing special departments to be built such as Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and Gender Studies.  All of these could have been accommodated within existing academic departments and thus subject to more rigorous academic standards and peer review.

It would not be a stretch to say that almost all of the bad ideas infecting our society today came out of the university and specifically out of these departments.

You might recall just three years ago the spasm of riots and destruction that accompanied the outbursts of Black Lives Matter.  After some 700 “mostly peaceful” riots and numerous accusations of institutional racism, the organization has fallen somewhat on hard times as news has emerged about how  BLM founders spent millions on luxury homes for themselves from the craven contributions of American Big Business.

While their progressive reputation has been sullied perhaps by their obvious greed and hypocrisy, their lies about America live on in our culture and in our universities, thanks in part to people like Michael Crow.

How did Michael Crow comport himself during this crisis?  Mind you, this was Black Lives Matter, an organization founded by three militant Black women who said openly they were “trained Marxists” and when they published openly their views opposing capitalism, the nuclear family, and heterosexuality.  To be sure, they took down their original website and tried to hide their radical views. But their rioting on a national scale spoke with less equivocation.  And mind you, Crow made his decisions when the embers of our smoldering cities were still glowing.

In short, this recent period was a target-rich environment for a college President to say he was against these things.

What did Michael Crow do?

Well, he produced a recommended reading list. https://president.asu.edu/statements/statement-from-asu-president-michael-m-crow-on-juneteenth

And he produced a  25-point program. https://president.asu.edu/statements/asus-commitment-to-black-students-faculty-and-staff

The reading list is a cherry-picked pack of left-wing radicals chosen by Black Lives Matter themselves!  That’s right.  He farmed out the choices to those burning down the country. Not one book by Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Heather MacDonald, Shelby Steele, Glenn Loury, or James McWorter can make the list. Not one.

If intellectual diversity is not practiced by the head man, what kind of message does that send to the faculty and administrators?

In short, Mr. Crow farmed out his reading list to Black Lives Matter and it is easily as biased as his faculty when it comes to choosing books to get a “well-rounded” view of contemporary controversies.

As to the 25-point program, click on the hyperlink for yourself and see if you think that offers any pushback at all to the demands of radicals to brainwash your kids in college.  From all reasonable perspectives, this looks like abject capitulation.

Funny, he seemed to know “what was going on” then?

So, no, we won’t give Michael Crow a pass, despite his great financial success.  It is kind of Mr. Lewis to do so, but looking at Crow’s recommended reading list or his 25-point program, he did not face down any of the demands from left-wing radicals with anything but capitulation.

True, it probably mollified them because they got what they wanted.  That created a peaceful period to continue building ASU’s educational empire, but it did not enhance intellectual discourse at the university.

Now to be fair, we picked a specific time period to measure Mr. Crow’s response because we think it tells you something.  Otherwise, it is like looking for a response to a moving glacier.  It has taken about 70 years for the left to completely dominate the university campus.  While he is not at fault for that, he is at fault for not doing anything about it.

The specific events back in 2020 tell you that he is not committed to free speech and intellectual diversity on campus.  His primary job is to keep caving into the demands of radical faculty members, keeping them happy, and thus freeing him to keep growing ASU into a real estate empire that parades as a university.

He now has a chance to correct our impression and set the record straight.  Will he stand up for free speech on campus and insist on intellectual diversity at ASU?  Will the Republicans in the legislature finally stand up and insist on free speech on campus as well?  What limited leverage lawmakers have with the university they should be applying to encourage, if not compel, free speech and intellectual diversity on campus.

Tom Lewis is among America’s most generous philanthropists. Over more than 20 years, his T.W. Lewis Foundation has funded causes helping children and families, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations like The Heritage Foundation.

But he’s now taking a different approach with colleges and universities after a controversy at Arizona State University. Lewis pulled his funding following the school’s mishandling of an event with Charlie Kirk and Dennis Prager in February.

The Arizona State event was hosted by the university’s T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development. It sparked outrage from professors and accusations of censorship from the center’s former executive director.

Lewis spoke to The Daily Signal about his decision to pull the funding and the state of higher education in America. Listen to the full interview on “The Daily Signal Podcast” or read a lightly edited version below. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

Rob Bluey: Tom, welcome back to “The Daily Signal Podcast.” We’re always grateful to have guests return, and especially grateful for you given your support for our organization.

Tom Lewis: Well, thank you, Rob. I’ve been involved with Heritage for a long time and my respect for Heritage continues to grow. And really appreciate the work you do there too.

Bluey: When you appeared on our show last year, we talked mostly about your book “Solid Ground: A Foundation for Winning in Work and in Life.” And I remember from that interview what an important role college played in your life. That’s certainly relevant to the topic that we’re talking about today, given the controversy at Arizona State.

But before we get into that, I would really appreciate your sharing with people about your life and why college and your experiences in the workforce shaped how you think and basically how you make the donations with the T.W. Lewis Foundation.

Lewis: I grew up in Lexington, Kentucky. My dad was Navy for 20 years. We moved around until I was about 12. And then we returned back to my parent’s home, which is Kentucky.

And mostly, my parents were from Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia, and I used to spend a lot of summers up there with a lot of the natives of Eastern Kentucky, and those were my relatives.

But we grew up in Lexington, which is a nice town with pretty good schools, and I never considered going anywhere. I really couldn’t afford it, other than the University of Kentucky. And I became a big Kentucky fan when I got there anyway with football and basketball. And it was right there in our backyard, so I was kind of hooked by the time I was 13 in Kentucky. And I like to joke, when I went there, I got a full scholarship coming out of high school.

A philanthropist happened to die in a plane crash about that time, and he set up a scholarship to go to the University of Kentucky and major in engineering. And I got that scholarship and it was full tuition. And the tuition in 1967 was $115 a semester. So that’s hard to believe now, but that’s what it was, $900 for four years.

But the point, though, was that that scholarship meant so much to me. Back then, that was a big deal, and my mother was happy and my family was happy, and it was just—it meant a lot.

So I understood how much scholarships mean to kids coming out of high school. It’s really an endorsement of them, and somebody else other than their mother and father see potential in them. And so that was my big impression there. And then I was so active at Kentucky as a student leader.

And really, most of the things I learned were outside the classroom, getting involved in campus activities and leadership activities, living in a fraternity house, and just had so many friends and it was so much fun, and good teachers. And it was a great experience, the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.

I have always been a huge advocate of college, and I love to travel the country and go to football and basketball games on different campuses and just always enjoyed being on college campuses and being around college students.

When I became a donor, which was over 25 years ago, I started donating to, first, University of Kentucky, then to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I got my MBA. And then later, in Arizona, where we live, [Arizona State University] and the Barrett Honors College.

And so for 20 years, I gave money to all three of these schools. And usually, they were one- to two- to three-year gifts. And then they were supposed to do something, and then they didn’t really do it. And then I would get on them about it, and then they would promise to do better. And then I would do it again, and just over and over.

And the 20 years that I gave to all three of these universities was really, I have to say, a steady series of disappointments, where, for example, you sponsor a class and you pay for a faculty member, and they’re supposed to teach a course on some subject and use books as resources. Well, they refuse to use any book that a donor would recommend. But they don’t tell you that. They just don’t do it. Then they morph the content of the class away from your intent, toward whatever they want to teach.

It was hard to really learn that, but that’s what happened. That’s kind of a summary of what happened over the 20 years. And it makes me think of the saying, how do things go bad? And the joke is that at first, it starts gradually, and then it happens suddenly.

And I think that’s really the short story of public universities in America over the last 40 years, really, is they’ve been gradually getting worse relative to their curriculum and their product quality. And then when the George Floyd incident happened and COVID happened, it happened very suddenly. And now I think, finally, most people are waking up to that.

Bluey: You mentioned your gift to Arizona State. You began giving several years ago and you established a center with your name on it. And it was quite prominent, featured in the news over the last several months, given a controversial event that took place with Charlie Kirk and Dennis Prager, two good friends of this organization and this show. The T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development hosted that event.

Tell us what exactly transpired in February and what led you to make the decision that you would no longer fund Arizona State.

Lewis: We have an executive director in this program at ASU called the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development. And the concept behind that center was, first of all, to better prepare the students for the challenges and opportunities of life. And the way you prepare them is to make them smarter and make them stronger.

So we were going to make them stronger by providing workshops on how to balance your checkbook and buy a car and having speaker series to get to talk to and hear from doctors and lawyers and people from all walks of life and all different career types. Because in college, nobody on the college campus has a clue about what it’s like to navigate a career outside of academia.

And so most people are not there to get a Ph.D., so they don’t—there’s no one to give anybody any advice and they don’t bring in these kinds of speakers.

So that’s what the center was all about.

We also, though, included in our gift agreement that it would be speakers that would address traditional American values, like faith, family freedom, and free enterprise.

Well, I learned later that the free enterprise topic was very controversial. Most of the faculty were anti-capitalist. They didn’t want to teach free enterprise. They wanted to turn it into anti-free enterprise.

But anyway, we went ahead with this speakers series, and we had over 150 events. And we had an event every week for a couple of years and it was really a great thing. We had … 7,000 students at Barrett Honors College. And we had a lot of participation and it was really a good thing.

But then we kind of took on a big event to bring in Charlie Kirk and Dennis Prager, and it was kind of a marquee event. We had it in the big auditorium at ASU called the Gammage Auditorium, which seats about 2,000 or 3,000 people. We put on big events there.

When we scheduled the event, we knew it would be controversial because of Prager and Kirk, but we wanted to make our point that this is America and this is free speech, and these people are going to talk. But the subject matter was health, wealth, and happiness.

And knowing Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk, know they’re both very strong men of faith, but they’re also incredibly wise men. And then Robert Kiyosaki was also on board to talk about wealth. So it was really a very positive topic.

But then once that word came out, ASU’s reaction from the administrators is, “Well, what are these people going to talk about? We don’t want them talking about anything political.” … They’re starting to come up with these parameters on what they could say and couldn’t.

Then the faculty got really crazy and … 37 out of 47 faculty at Barrett signed a really nasty letter of condemnation for the event. You can find it online. But they were calling Prager and Kirk purveyors of hate and homophobes and things like that. And so it was just got ugly.

Now, then, we went ahead and had the event. There was 1,500 people there, most students, a lot of non-students, actually. But what we learned right after it was how much the students had been suppressed, how teachers in the classroom had told them not to go to the event. If they did go to the event, they might pay a price. And the students that did want to go didn’t want to get filmed in the audience because they didn’t want their teachers to know they attended.

So there’s just all this behind the scenes suppression going on. And the dean of the honors college, Barrett, called in Ann Atkinson, and they wanted to quiz her about why she let this happen.

And so it just got really ugly. And it was pretty clear to me that I had no reason to continue supporting an organization like this where the faculty is out of control. They’re very radicalized. I’d say half of them are probably radical, but the other half don’t speak up. And the administrators were complicit. And in their passivity, it was their way of approving. And so they really did approve it.

And a lot of those people don’t believe in free speech. They just don’t think that—if free speech is hate speech, then you can’t say it. And they get to find out what hate speech is.

So it really showed and exposed, I believe, a very ugly condition in ASU that I think is in most big public universities, if not all of them, that is just this unwelcome attitude toward what we’ll call conservative thinking and traditional thinking and religion, and things like that America has been built on.

So there was no way I was going to continue to write checks to them, given the blatant disregard for the intent of our center. And so it was pretty easy to make that decision.

I wrote a letter to the dean and the foundation at ASU and just told them that based on the level of hostility toward these speakers at this event, I could no longer trust them to really steward our fund. And so I terminated our agreement, which I had the right to do. So that’s the short story.

Bluey: Was this the first time that you’ve had to terminate a recurring gift of this nature?

Lewis: No, I actually had two gifts to Barrett. The first one lasted two years and was bigger. But then I realized how badly the faculty was performing, and so I terminated that agreement, but told the dean I wanted to change the agreement and back off on the funding to the courses because the faculty was not adhering to the plan.

So I did do that. That was done quietly. And then we, within a month, implemented a new agreement. … And then the new agreement was the one that I canceled after one year. So, yeah. So I’ve canceled it twice.

Bluey: Amazing. And what is your reaction to Arizona State President Michael Crow’s response, which generated quite a bit of publicity, that he had to come out and state and adhere that Arizona State was adhering to free speech principles?

Lewis: First of all, the Arizona State Legislature called a hearing. It was a one-day hearing. They had Dennis Prager come and speak. They had other people. The director of the program spoke. I did not attend that but watched it.

So the state Legislature, which is conservative, or is led by conservatives, had that hearing. And then the conclusion was they would give ASU 60 days to respond to the accusations, really.

But I think Michael Crow has kind of tried to stay out of this. I think he’s not really said much at all. He did come out with a statement that said something to the effect that there are some confused folks out here that don’t understand free speech as it relates to ASU. OK? And so I thought that was kind of interesting. But he’s so buffered by his huge bureaucracy down there that I don’t think he’s really getting a straight story.

I think in his mind—and I know Michael Crow. He’s a good man, but he’s in the ivory tower. And I think in his mind, ASU is a bastion of free speech, but he doesn’t know what’s really going on. And his close advisers aren’t telling him.

So I think this media is getting his attention. And they’ve now hired a law firm to represent them in this hearing request. And so it’s being elevated to a higher level.

But, Rob, what I want to say to your listeners, though, as a longtime lover and donor to universities, is that we need to fix these organizations. But before you can solve a problem, you have to understand it.

And briefly, here’s what I think is the problem. It starts, really, with the faculty. They become more and more radicalized, especially the younger ones. They don’t want to teach. They want to teach—it’s always been a three-three load, three courses per semester. That’s not very much. They want to teach two-two loads. They want to have six students in their classes or fewer students. They complain about too many classes, too many students. They don’t believe in free speech.

On most campuses, there’s this concept. It’s really misleading. They call it shared governance. And the presidents of the universities use that phrase because they share governance of the university with faculty. And so in other words, that gives faculty this concept that they have a voice and their voice matters. Well, most of the time, it doesn’t matter, but they like to be led to believe that it does.

And then there’s this issue of academic freedom. Academic freedom has always meant, used to mean the freedom of a professor or teacher to pursue truth in their discipline, wherever it leads them. That was always the definition of academic freedom.

But like the Left always does, they redefine things. And so they’ve now expanded that to where they have—somewhere, I read a statement that they believe they have the right to weigh in on any social or political issue inside or outside the classroom and say whatever they want, whenever they want, to whoever they want. So they feel like they have this superior freedom.

And I got a phone call yesterday, Rob, from the student at Barrett that was really upset by this. She’s a foreign student, but she wants to talk to me about how she felt whenever she would want to say something that they didn’t agree with. And so there’s a lot of kids like that and my heart goes out to them.

So, anyway, the faculty is kind of, to me, the problem. And it’s literally the inmates running the asylum. … And if you look around at the university and you try to find the person that is in charge of improving curricula, you can’t find them because there is no one.

One time I was talking to a provost, who is supposed to be the top academic officer, I believe, of a major university. And I asked him what his top goal was. And that was kind of a trick question. I wanted to see what he said. And he said, “Increasing enrollment by 20%.”

So that’s the chief academic officer. That’s what they want. They know that college applicants are going down. They know out-of-state students pay more. They know international students are easy to get and pay more. So that’s what they’re trying to do. And they’re all competing with each other.

But the administrators, though, are complicit in all of this. And they act like they’re not. They act like they’re above it. Michael Crow’s comment when someone asked him what’s going on at ASU after this event, his reaction was, “Well, that’s just faculty being faculty.”

It’d be like your children throwing spears at somebody. And then the parents saying, “Oh, that’s just kids being kids.” So that’s what he said, “Faculty being faculty.”

So … the administrators are complicit in this whole thing. And the faculty is kind of the point of the spear.

But I think the solution, I think, is to get a Republican governor. I was just in Aspen yesterday with the Republican Governors Association, and there’s a lot of good Republican governors, 26 of them right now. And like [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis, they can first pull [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and [critical race theory] out of the classroom.

This thing right now through Title IX and DEI bureaucracy, most universities have a DEI officer in every college. And so, for example, at the University of Kentucky, there’s, like, 26 colleges. They have 26 DEI officers, usually full-time. So these are just people that are running around trying to enforce all these race, gender, class, racial kind of perspectives on everything. …

So anyway, I think we start with eliminating DEI and CRT, but I think donor pressure on funding. Donors need to wake up and realize what they’re funding. And I think most of the main donors at these public universities are conservatives.

I know that the two biggest donors at ASU, they’re both friends of mine, they’re both conservative. I know the top three donors at the University of Kentucky, they’re all conservative. So somehow the conservatives tend to be the big donors. And I think you’re going to see a lot of that changed.

Bluey: Having recently interviewed Chris Rufo about his new book, “America’s Cultural Revolution,” it’s quite clear to me that this is the Left’s long march through institutions and it’s the consequence of that.

A two-part question for you, Tom. You said you recently spoke to a student. So how should students who hold Christian or conservative beliefs navigate the anti-free speech environment that you speak of on college campuses? And then, to your last point, what advice do you have for others who may be in a similar position to you as donors?

Lewis: I’d say, first, on the students, it’s hard. Because if you’re 19 years old, you want to fit in, and you want to go along, and that’s very natural. So that’s why the suppression is so unfair.

But I think, first of all, today, if you’re a conservative student, I think you have to get a support group, and then you have to stand together. And then you have to raise your hand and speak out and let the chips fall and not be intimidated. But you do need a support group of other students. And that’s what I would hope for.

Then I think, relative to other donors, every donor has their own reason for giving. And mine was just always to try to help students have better lives and better careers and find their talent and things that I talk about in my book.

That book was written for college students, really, on how to be successful. And it was also based on a lot of myths that are being promulgated out there today, like find your passion; do what you love; live your dream; 30’s the new 20; work smarter, not harder. That’s what they’re hearing.

So it’s really bad. It’s not just bad advice, it’s terrible advice, and it’s wrong. And so it doesn’t work. So that’s really why I wrote “Solid Ground,” to try to address the many myths that are out there in the culture. And they basically are living loud at public universities.

Bluey: Tom, how will this recent controversy, in your experiences with higher ed, shape how you make future gifts from the T.W. Lewis Foundation?

Lewis: I’m going to take a pause on any public universities for a while. I’m pretty much wrapped up there. I am wrapped up there.

And so our foundation is very active. We give to a lot of different causes, from foster children to battered women, to Christian education, to medical programs for melanoma and migraines, to organizations like Heritage and Arizona First Policy Institute, and a lot of the good conservative groups in D.C. that are really making a difference for our movement.

So there are plenty of good organizations to give to. There’s no shortage. But you just have to pick and choose. And I think, as I’ve become an experienced donor, I have expectations for every gift that we make, and I think that’s appropriate. And when the expectations aren’t met, you maybe give them another chance. And then if they don’t do it, you go somewhere else. And that’s what I think everyone should do.

Bluey: I appreciated the advice that you circulated in the wake of everything and suggesting that these universities should really talk to their customers, the parents and the students who are the ones who are ultimately supposed to be there in a learning environment, and hopefully learning the American principles of free speech as first and foremost.

And so … closing words from you as to where you see things going next. Are you leaving us on a optimistic note or are you leaving us on a pessimistic note about the future of higher ed in America?

Lewis: I think we’re kind of at a bit of a crossroads. I think there’s not much optimism out there right now in the public universities. I think public universities need what K-12 is getting, which is school choice, or let’s call it school freedom.

So I think we need to increasingly offer alternatives to public education or public university education. There are a lot of those out there from two-year trade programs to community colleges to small colleges.

And I think parents are going to need to get involved and get a little smarter about what’s going on in the school where they’re sending their children. Because so many parents in America over the last 20 years have sent their kids away to college, and then when they come back, they don’t recognize them. And as Dennis Prager talks about a lot, as he talks about a lot, there are so many kids that don’t even talk to their parents anymore. So you really need to be, as a parent, very aware of what the school is teaching.

Bluey: Tom, I really encourage our listeners to pick up a copy of your book. Again, it’s called “Solid Ground: A Foundation for Winning in Work and in Life.” Leave us with some thoughts about where they can follow your work, and pick up a copy of the book. Anything else, closing thoughts on your mind today?

Lewis: Well, we’re getting a little more active on social media. Our handle is @TWLewis_. And so we’re beginning to put some more messages out there. And also promoting the message of “Solid Ground,” because I still think that’s very relevant.

But it’s an interesting world and I think we see a big challenge here. And I think there are a lot of people that are really upset and have seen this thing happening in universities for a long, long time. And I’ve heard from hundreds of people, many that I don’t know, some from as far away as London, England. And so this is, I think, touching a nerve. And I think that’s how solutions begin, is awareness.

Bluey: Tom Lewis, thank you so much for standing up for these important principles and for the many contributions you’ve made to help our country and help so many individuals benefit and have an opportunity, just like somebody gave you when you were approaching college yourself.

We’re grateful that you would join us again on “The Daily Signal Podcast.” Tom, please keep us posted on what you have happening in the future. We’d love to have you back again.

Lewis: Great, Rob. Always look forward to talking with you and look forward to staying in touch.

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This article was published by the Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.