Conservatives have had a complicated relationship with American higher education over the last century. On one hand, the academy has always been an institution designed to reproduce the middle and upper echelons of Christian society in the United States—something classical liberals from Thomas Jefferson to today’s postliberal academics on the right like Patrick Deneen have historically appreciated and felt worth conserving.
But during the 1920s, one faction of evangelical conservatives became deeply suspicious of the inner workings of the ivory tower. Graduates, it seemed, carried with their diplomas an open-mindedness and, relatedly, questions about the very tenants of Christian learning. In 1927, Bob Jones Sr., an evangelical preacher and son of a Confederate veteran, took a pioneering step to counter this: he opened the doors to Bob Jones College (now university) with the explicit goal of creating what he dubbed a “training center for Christians."
By the time of the Great Depression, two other camps of conservatives were beginning to share Jones’ anxieties over American colleges. One of these groups, wealthy industrialists opposed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, were suspicious of the new Keynesian school of research spilling out of economics departments and directly into Roosevelt’s fiscal policies. They were joined by a bloc of traditionalists who were alarmed at the steady pipeline of German philosophers seeking refuge in the United States from the Nazi regime. These German social theorists—many of whom were Jewish—were welcomed at the nation’s most elite institutions such as Columbia University, when a mere decade before many of the Ivy League schools maintained strict quotas limiting Jewish enrollment.
Traditionalists found the ideas of these German critical theorists abhorrent because they challenged capitalism, Christianity, and other Western institutions that conservatives viewed as foundational to America’s very existence. Over the next three decades, as “foreign” ideas from Jewish thinkers permeated the academy, conservatives became resolute that universities place a renewed focus on what they believed to be bedrock American ideals.
Their growing frustrations compelled conservative leaders to create parallel academic programs in the name of ideologically balancing the curricular offerings in American universities. Unlike Jones’s Christian separatist college, these programs were designed to be part of existing institutions—an analogous corrective to countermand the supposed dogmatism of liberal professors.