Panel Discusses Merits of Federal Subsidies for College Education
by Jim Brown
December 18, 2006
(AgapePress) - - The president of a prestigious private college in Michigan says the real cost of federal aid to higher education is much different today than America's founding fathers intended. Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn spoke at a recent Heritage Foundation forum on "The Real Costs of Federal Aid to Higher Education." Arnn said for the last 100 years, the meaning of the university has been advancing social change, promoting new ideas to govern the country. And the cost of higher education, he stated, is now sustaining that revolutionary activity.
However, Arnn pointed out the founder's reason for funding higher education was their belief that "religion, morality, and knowledge are necessary for good government and the happiness of mankind." It is unfortunate now, said Arnn, that federal funding is subsidizing a thing whose specific purpose is to remake society on the view that there is no such thing as nature.
"John Dewey [an early 20th-century educational reformer] loved and quoted often the expression from Francis Bacon, 'The purpose of science is the torturing of nature,'" said the educator and Heritage Foundation trustee.
"But we live in a country in which our rights are said to come from the laws of nature and of nature's god," he continued, "and our colleges were originally built to perpetuate those laws, to understand them, and to cultivate their refined understanding."
But Arnn argued that such processes can only happen when things like argument, difference, and disagreement are permitted -- exercises he claims are "barred at the outset" on America's college campuses.
[T]hat means that colleges are not 'good' anymore," he stated, "and we ought to find a way to make them so again."
According to Dr. Arnn, the people who built America also thought a massive federal subsidy of higher education should be an endowment to states to manage locally.
Joining Arnn on the December 7 panel discussion was Richard Vedder, director of the Center on College Affordability and Productivity and author of Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
