Have universities ever been a source of political wisdom?

Over at Power Line, while discussing the Claudine Gay/Harvard scandals, John Hinderaker raised the “broader question whether universities collectively have even been a source of wisdom on political issues.”

It’s an important question, and it has a clear and definite answer: American institutions of higher education shaped the American founding fundamentally, and for the good (though in those days, they were called colleges, not universities).  Here is how I put it in my book Common Sense Nation:

“Jefferson was the architect of the Declaration of Independence, Madison was the architect of the Constitution, and Hamilton was the architect of The Federalist Papers. If we want to understand their thinking, we need to start with the fact that the Scottish Enlightenment provided their teachers.”

Jefferson’s mentor was William Small.  Small was a powerful exponent of the Scottish Enlightenment’s common sense thinking, and he was by far the most brilliant member of the faculty at The College of William and Mary.  He came to America to teach only from 1758 to 1764 — at precisely the right time to guide Jefferson’s studies there.  Small left America when he did in response to an urgent request from James Watt.  Watt wanted his help with the development of the steam engine. 

Madison’s mentor was John Witherspoon, the president of The College of New Jersey (today’s Princeton University).  Witherspoon’s own education can help us see just how close the Founders were to the Scottish Enlightenment.  Before coming to America, Witherspoon had studied with Adam Smith and Thomas Reid, two of the greatest thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Hamilton’s tutor at King’s College (today’s Columbia University) was Robert Harpur, also a Scot and a product of the Scottish Enlightenment.  He had studied at Glasgow before coming to America. 

The Scottish Enlightenment’s influence in American education continued long after the founding era, securing America’s informal title, the common sense nation.  James Foster’s admirable book Scottish Philosophy in America states that enduring influence this way:

For a hundred years or more, Scottish philosophers were both taught and emulated by professors at Princeton, Harvard and Yale, as well as newly founded colleges stretching from Rhode Island to Texas.

The distinguished American historian Allen Guelzo made that point in this way in his truly great lecture series, “The American Mind”:

Before the Civil War, every major [American] collegiate intellectual was a disciple of Scottish common sense realism.

Harvard College, like the other American colleges, once taught students to think like the American founders, to think like an American.  Consequently, Harvard and American colleges in general were once sources of wisdom on political issues. 

We are separated from those days by two campus revolutions, one around the beginning of the 20th century, the other more radical one an outgrowth of the turmoil of the 1960s.  The first abandoned the task of teaching students to think like the founders; as the result of the second one, students today are taught to reject the America of the founders.  The common sense thinking of the founders was lost in two steps, first forgotten and then rejected.

For more on this subject, I can recommend this article on how education once was in America.

Robert Curry is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea and Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World.  Both are published by Encounter Books.

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