The left’s dominance of American higher education has created a disastrous situation: There are very few professors who can train future professors in traditional and useful fields. Today’s Ph.D. pipeline produces almost nothing but radical leftists who hate America and want their students to do so as well.

Fortunately, a few programs have recently been established to deal with this, and in today’s Martin Center article, David Randall of the National Association of Scholars writes about them and the challenges they face.

He begins with a program at the University of Florida:

The Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida has just established two Ph.D. programs: “History of Ideas” and “War, Statecraft and Strategy.” I believe these are the first Ph.D. programs to be offered by the new generation of intellectual-freedom centers that education reformers have seeded these last few years in public universities. They are extraordinarily important as pilot programs for how the movement to revive traditional scholarship can establish an ecosystem to train and credential new professors. For that, you need Ph.D. programs — and the Hamilton School can now show the nation how that should be done.

The Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida has just established two Ph.D. programs: “History of Ideas” and “War, Statecraft and Strategy.” I believe these are the first Ph.D. programs to be offered by the new generation of intellectual-freedom centers that education reformers have seeded these last few years in public universities. They are extraordinarily important as pilot programs for how the movement to revive traditional scholarship can establish an ecosystem to train and credential new professors. For that, you need Ph.D. programs — and the Hamilton School can now show the nation how that should be done.

We need many more such programs, but the problem is the scarcity of good scholars to run them.

Randall continues, “The new intellectual-freedom centers now have to hire by cannibalizing the few tradition-minded professors remaining from the nooks they have secured in the academy—or by hiring old-school liberals who at least are not activist radicals. Creating new Ph.D. programs to educate a new generation of tradition-minded professors is absolutely crucial.”

Randall argues that we need a host of concentrations, such as constitutional history, the social sciences, fine arts, and American studies.

Read the whole thing.

© National Review