Thomas A. Shakely

Jeffrey Hart, professor emeritus of English, author, mentor and conservative thinker at Dartmouth, asked the question “What is a College Education?” in 1998 in The Dartmouth Review, that university’s leading journal of conservative-libertarian thought.

I found Hart’s arguments for a liberal and character-forming collegiate experience to be particularly compelling in contrast to the alternative view of higher education, the “multiversity” view, which promotes the idea that students are merely components within a larger system designed to train individuals for their trade who will later go on to support and maintain the nation’s military-industrial complex.

What Is A College Education? (The Dartmouth Review) September 30, 1998 — A notable Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth, Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey often expressed the matter succinctly, “The goal of education,” he would say, “is to form the Citizen. And the Citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-found his civilization.”

He meant that in quite large a sense. He did not mean that you had to master all the specialties you can think of.

He meant that you need to be familiar with the large and indispensable components of your — this — civilization.

This certainly does not mean that you should not study other cultures and civilizations. It does mean that to be a Citizen of this one you should be aware of what it is and where it came from.

…

But the main job in getting a college education is to make sure the large essential parts are firmly in place, after which you can build upon them.

Jeffrey Hart has been an influential figure in the rise of modern conservatism at Dartmouth and mentored, among others, Dinesh D’Souza, a founder of The Dartmouth Review during his undergraduate years and prolific author and speaker, best known for books like What’s So Great About America and The End of Racism.

I found Hart’s article on the purpose of college to be a decent primer into the subject of modern higher education and whether, by and large, its aim run concurrent with The Idea of a University as famously explained by John Cardinal Newman.

The broad question of the purpose of the modern university is something I’ve struggled to answer as an undergraduate at Penn State University. Especially for a school like mine, which has a land-grant mission to educate the poor and middle class young men and women of Pennsylvania, it’s not always easy to assertain whether we’re getting our bang for our buck, so to speak.

(These questions are a key reason for my founding Safeguard Old State, an advocacy and educational group based out of State College, Pa. with the mission of revitalizing the Pennsylvania State University by seeking to “rekindle the spirit of the classical university within the structure of the modern research institution.”)

Ben Casnocha recently posted a few links to some excellent articles, including P.J. O’Rouke’s commencement speech published in the Los Angeles Times and an in-depth article by Roger Kimball in The New Criterion that explores the same fundamental questions on college education by asking the question, “What was a liberal education?”

There are great minds out there asking fundamental questions about the nature of higher education and because of that I’m confident that our universities will not remain forever rudderless, left to drift in the water, swaying toward one ideology or another depending on the waters of the day.

Newt Gingrich’s latest public policy book Real Change is a superb, practical roadmap for achieving positive transformation in American government. The book was published in January and, though finished prior to “change” becoming the buzzword of Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, is now perhaps particularly apropos.

I cannot begin to do justice to Real Change and the masterful way in which Gingrich lays out a sweeping call for fundamental transformation of American government while explaining how such change is both precedented and necessary for the future prosperity of the country. Real Change is filled neither with political sloganeering nor cliched hyperbole.

I have been a fan of Newt Gingrich since picking up Winning The Future two years ago, wherein Newt articulated his idea of a “21st Century Contract with America.” Real Change is, in many ways, the culmination of his previous work in that Gingrich offers further justification for change and outlines an impressively comprehensive plan to bypass “partisan gridlock” in Washington.

Real Change is a must-read for anyone who wants to learn more about their government and why some things work and why so much fails. In it, Gingrich offers common sense, “tripartisan” solutions on everything from education to immigration to federal spending to health care and does so in easily understandable language backed by empirical evidence that betrays his background as a professor of history.

My only major disapointment was the lack of detailed footnoting rather than sourcing in the text itself, but I can understand this may have resulted in a book that read more like a college term paper than a public policy manifesto.

As I read, I kept a highlighter close at hand. Here are a few excerpts from the book which I wanted to remember and hopefully demonstrate a bit of its scope. It should go without saying, but many of these excerpts won’t make full sense until read in context of the complete book.

• Albert Einstein had a firm rule for thinking about new solutions. He asserted the following: thinking that doing more of the same will lead to a different outcome is a sign of insanity.
• Any academic environment [during Einstein's youth] would have socialized him into limiting his thoughts to conform with his colleagues’.
• [General Dwight] Eisenhower learned one lesson that strikes many people as counterintuitive: “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger,” he asserted. “I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.”
• Peter Drucker had a variation on this theme [Eisenhower's] when he wrote The Effective Executive that effective leaders always consider the visible problem to be a symptom of a deeper underlying problem.
• To do something serious and new means overcoming frustration, confusion, opposition, and indifference. It means being a leader.
• The keys [to implementing real change] are iron will, enormous discipline, and cheerful persistence. Those traits can change history.
• In the bureaucratic model, failure is simply a reason to raise taxes and give even more money to those who are failing.
• Together, [Mayor] Giuliani and [Police Chief] Bratton acted on insights about lowering crime, known as the broken-window theory, developed by two political scientists, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. This theory contends that disorder, such as broken windows that go unrepaired, lowers the psychological-cultural barrier to crime and that a police force focused on creating order would actually reduce crime.
• Traditionally, bureaucracies replace the original mission for which they were founded with a new mission of protecting the structure, the budget, the habits, and the culture of the bureaucracy as it has current evolved.
• Following the law of unintended consequences, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act effectively drives businesses to be less accountable than they were before and has done vastly more damage to the American economy than the corporate accounting scandals it was supposed to reform. … It is a wound inflicted by the Congress on the American economy.”
• To remain competitive we need to massively expand the freedom for high-value workers to come to the United States and contribute to the growth of our economy.
• For the past forty years, capital gains tax increases have been associated with a decline in tax revenues. … One reason is that higher taxes give investors an incentive to hold their assets to avoid paying the tax.
• The free choice flat tax option would apply one single tax rate of 17 percent to all individual and corporate taxpayers. … [It] would mean no federal income tax on the first $46,165 in income for a family of four. … The free choice flat tax would eliminate the death tax, the capital gains tax, and the alternative minimum tax. There would be no tax on retirement benefits or on Social Security benefits. There would be no tax on dividends because corporations would have already paid taxes on that income at the corporate level.
• It should surprise no one that Social Security modernization is inevitable. In 1935, when Social Security was adopted, the average American lived to be sixty-three and would not draw a Social Security pension until age sixty-five.
• What we learned in 1995, and what we must recognize today, is that there are four key principles to achieving a balanced budget: 1. Cut taxes to increase economic growth and therefore increase revenues. 2. Set priorities and increase spending in key areas while reducing it in non-essential areas. 3. Eliminate pork-barrel spending. 4. Shift from expensive, wasteful systems to smarter spending.
• We should return NASA to funding space science and basic research into fundamental new capabilities and focus on encouraging private sector space entreprenuership.
• The environment, biodiversity, and energy reform are among the most important challenges facing America. … It is vitally important that we develop a positive, solution-driven approach within a market-oriented, non-bureacratic model.
• America needs an energy strategy that will pass this three-part test: marginalize the oil dictators, reduce the amount of carbon discharged into the atmosphere, and create an even more productive economy for the future.
• The great stength of markets over bureacracies is that they empower two people who are controlled and limited by bureaucrats: the consumer and the creative entreprenuer.
• Bureaucracies are inherently anti-innovation and anti-change.
• It is a simple fact that all our hopes and dreams ultimately depend on our ability to defend and protect ourselves. … Countries can die. Civilizations can collapse.

Newt Gingrich recently spoke on leadership at the Young Republican Convention in Washington, D.C. I didn’t find out about the convention until afterward, but the entire video of the speech was posted on YouTube. While the speech and the setting are both political, Gingrich is speaking on leadership in non-partisan sense and his lessons are applicable to anyone passionate about bettering himself and her community.

I am a great admirer of Newt Gingrich’s political acumen, from his historic “Contract with America” in 1994 as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives to a few of his more recent projects, including the Center for Health Transformation and American Solutions for Winning the Future.

Gingrich speaks with a candor atypical of a man who has spent so many years in politics. If you want to know more about leadership not only in politics but in life, this video is worth your time. Obviously, Gingrich speaks as a conservative, but if you can get past that you’ll find his lessons in leadership are pretty comprehensive and genuinely American.

After watching the speech a few times, here are some notes I took summarizing a few of Newt’s remarks which I found to be particularly powerful.

• Govern on behalf of the entire country — echoing a “red-white-and-blue” mentality rather than “red versus blue” politics which he calls “suicidal.”
• Speak first personally, second historically and third politically. Speaking solely politically is trivial and irrelevant.
• If you focus merely on the base of a political party, you’re marginalizing the independents, who will think you’ve gone nuts.
• A science and technology based entrepreneurial free society should produce more choices of higher quality at lower cost. Gingrich calls this “the greatest challenge” our generation faces.
• On health care, learning and environmental policy he asserts, “if we can’t offer better quality at lower cost we shouldn’t be in the business of politics.”
• Real leadership must be done with missionary zeal.
• Be bold enough to go out with big ideas, to describe them in personal terms and believe in them deeply enough to stand on the platform and win the argument.
• If your leaders aren’t leading, they’re not leaders. They’re placeholders.
• “Adolescence is a failed 19th century social experiment. Prior to the nineteenth century, you were either a child or you were a young adult. The average age of admission to Princeton at the time of the revolution was 13½.”
• We ought to match tax cuts with government budget cuts.
• Politics and government are central to the survival of a free society. If we can’t get a generation of leaders to stand up and say, “I’m not going to take baloney anymore, I’m not going to be passive, I’m not going to be intimidated by incompetent leaders, I’m not going to be intimidated by a party structure that doesn’t know what it’s doing. I’m going to go out and take the beating in order to lead, but I’m going to do it every day until I get good at it, and I’m eventually going to help this country find its way back to the right track. If you would do that, you would be startled over the course of your lifetime at the impact you’ll have.”

Michael Murphy, a fallen Naval officer posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, will be honored with a new new destroyer named in his memory. The USS Michael Murphy, recently announced by the U.S. Navy, will commemorate this American hero who died fighting in Afghanistan in 2005. This news is perhaps especially touching for those of us in Central Pennsylvania, as Murphy was an alumnus of Penn State.

Navy ship to bear name of PSU grad (Centre Daily Times) May 10, 2008 — The Navy’s newest destroyer will be named after a Penn State graduate who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism in Afghanistan on June 28, 2005.

Secretary of the Navy Donald C. Winter announced this week that an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer will be named the USS Michael Murphy.

Murphy, of Patchogue, N.Y., graduated from Penn State in 1998 with a degree in political science. On June 28, 2005, he was the officer in charge of a SEAL team tasked with locating a high-level Taliban militia leader in the region near Asadabad, Afghanistan, when they came under fire from a larger enemy force.

Murphy, mortally wounded, left his position of cover to get a clear signal to communicate with his headquarters and, while being repeatedly shot at, called for support for his team. He returned to his cover position to continue the fight until he succumbed to his wounds,according to the Navy’s account.

It was for these actions that he was awarded the Medal of Honor in 2007.

“Every sailor who crosses the brow, every sailor who hears the officer of the deck announce the arrival of the commanding officer, and every sailor who enters a foreign land representing our great nation will do so as an honored member of USS Michael Murphy,” Winter said at the dedication of the destroyer, according to a Navy Web site.

I owe thanks Andy Nagypal and Jon Dandrea of The LION 90.7fm’s Radio Free Penn State public affairs program for bringing this to the attention of our on-air listeners yesterday. It’s my hope that both The Daily Collegian and Penn State’s Office of Public Information cover this story so that a wider portion of the Penn State family may learn of the USS Michael Murphy and its namesake.

Regardless of one’s political position on uprooting Islamists in Afghanistan, news like this (especially for Penn Staters) is rightly honored as an example of genuine heroism and supreme sacrifice for God and country.

You can find further information about the USS Michael Murphy here, as well as the Navy’s official webpage honoring Lt. Murphy, including video of the commemoration ceremonies that took place last year, by clicking here.

Update (5/13/2008) — Penn State Live, run by the Office of Public Information at the University, has published a fitting article on this subject.

I’ll be on the “Pennsylvania Television Network” (PSN-TV) tonight, discussing a new student fee that the administration at Penn State University is looking to implement. This was my second interview with “The U” on PSN-TV this year, and it’s been a sincere pleasure to sit down with the fine men and women on both sides of the cameras at PSN.

The topic of discussion, the “Student Facilities Fee,” would impose an annual $200 tax upon all students — undergraduates and graduates alike — in order to fund what administrators have only vaguely elaborated upon as “non-classroom space”, which in practice will likely mean new recreation space.

We’ve been following the story of the Student Facilities Fee closely at Safeguard Old State (SOS), a student-alumni advocacy group focused on empowering students at Penn State and reforming administrative bureaucracies that serve, typically unintentionally, to degrade the quality of the University.

I’ll be sure to publish a digital version of the interview if I can get my hands on a copy of the segment later this week.

UPDATE (April 12) – We had our tech guy at Safeguard Old State upload the interview earlier today after getting it from PSN-TV. How did I do?

CNN talker and radio personality Glenn Beck writes today on “the $53 trillion asteroid” that, according to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, “threatens to destroy America’s future prosperity.” The impact of this “asteroid”, Beck warns, is almost beyond comprehension.

Let me give you three numbers that will put this economic asteroid into perspective: $200 billion, $14.1 trillion, and $53 trillion.

$200 billion is the approximate total amount of write-downs announced so far as a result of the current credit crisis.

$14.1 trillion is the size of the entire U.S. economy

And $53 trillion is (drum roll please) the approximate size of this country’s bill for the Social Security and Medicare promises we’ve made.

I encourage you to read the entire article yourself. The numbers are nothing new, but they’re worth paying attention to, especially given that it’s an election year. I doubt that any of the three contenders for the presidency — McCain, Hillary or Obama — are likely to cut the fat from the federal budget. Still, the more Americans that get behind the fact that government spending is way out of control (and has been out of control for decades) the better.

It’s past time that we issue major cuts to the entitlement programs, reform how the government handles Social Security, abolish the utterly failed “War on Drugs” and re-establish the purpose and meaning of the “War on Terror.”

After that (or perhaps before), lower the tax burden on every earning bracket in America.

CHICAGO (AP) - At least one in four teenage girls nationwide has a sexually transmitted disease, or more than 3 million teens, according to the first study of its kind in this age group.

A virus that causes cervical cancer is by far the most common sexually transmitted infection in teen girls aged 14 to 19, while the highest overall prevalence is among black girls—nearly half the blacks studied had at least one STD. That rate compared with 20 percent among both whites and Mexican-American teens, the study from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

About half of the girls acknowledged ever having sex; among them, the rate was 40 percent.

Regardless of where we fall in the political spectrum or what our religious convictions are, these statistics are entirely unacceptable for any advanced society, let alone the United States. We are being sold a pack of lies from the pro-choice, pro-abortion crowd and told that more “education” (read: condoms) will solve the problem of sexually transmitted diseases, HIV and AIDs. We’re told that teenagers and young people like us will “do it anyway”, and so the only solution is to use condoms, the pill, etc.

The most dangerous lies are those laced with half-truths — misleading ideas that play on the most noble of human desires. That 25 percent of young girls in their teens are infected with STDs, some of which will lead to cervical cancer and other serious medical complications, means that something is seriously wrong in America. Further, that nearly half — 48 percent — of young black girls are infected with an STD, is a shocking truth to accept.

Promoting more condom use and contraception in general will naturally lead to an increase in sex — the very activity for which the “pro-choice” movement hawked its contraceptive wares in the first place. Is the goal, then, really education? Or is the goal really just about the bottom line for the pro-choice lobby and the pro-choice corporations?

After all, if they can convince lawmakers and public schools that they are there to promote safe sex practices (rather than to merely promote a product they’re selling) then it will appear that they’re doing a fine public service, when in fact they’re manipulating our most human desire to protect our children and ensure their safety.

For an industry constantly falling over itself to promote the importance “safe” practices and sex education, a 25 percent failure rate is not too impressive.

H/t: Hot Air.

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin reported yesterday in the wake of New York Governor Elliot Spitzer’s prostitution-ring scandal that Planned Parenthood was planning to meet with him yesterday morning on a new piece of legislation that would dramatically expand the abortion industry in that state.

The Reproductive Health & Privacy Protection Act, or RHAPP, is being pushed as a necessary step toward “codifying Roe v. Wade.” According to Malkin’s information, it would:

• Allow non-doctors to perform abortions, including a dentist, a social worker, or a health care practitioner.
• Let girls as young as 12 obtain abortions throughout all 9 months of pregnancy without ever having to tell their parents.
• Force health practitioners or Catholic hospitals to lose their medical licenses if they don’t perform abortions since they would be denying women the “fundamental right” of an abortion.

Given that Planned Parenthood’s legal services have been somewhat curtailed under President Bush’s administration with the ban on partial birth abortion — which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court — it’s not entirely surprising that Planned Parenthood would seek to expand their business operations into previously untapped markets. This is accomplished, of course, by manipulating or fighting to establish legal precedent.

What’s most astonishing to be about RHAPP is not even that it would allow non-doctors to perform abortions, but that it actively seeks to destroy the fiscal viability of religiously affiliated hospitals for opting to deny abortion requests. If RHAPP passes in New York, this key plank would certainly be overturned on judicial review, but that Planned Parenthood has included this attack on the free operation of hospitals in their agenda signals what is potentially a new phase in the “culture war.”

Pope John Paul the Great called Catholics to uphold and defend a “culture of life”. Meanwhile, despite falling abortion rates in recent years and legal restrictions like the ban on partial birth abortion, Planned Parenthood continues to advocate abortion-on-demand, throwing all reason caution to the wind on the fundamental question of whether life begins at conception or birth.

Why? Quite simply, business is good. Planned Parenthood brings in more than $1 billion every year, and that’s only if you account for their abortion arm and the government grants — taxpayer funding — that this non-profit receives.

RHAPP, through its intimidation tactics toward Catholic hospitals, makes clear that there is no room for reasonable disagreement on the abortion issue. If you’re not with them in providing abortions and providing their industry profit, then you’re against them and you’ll be stripped of your medical accreditation and denied the ability to practice medicine as a corporate entity.

What we’re seeing here is corporate warfare, initiated by Planned Parenthood with the goal in mind of silencing and shutting down not just critics of their business practices, but those who are ethically or morally at odds with the abortion. Coercion, intimidation and religious discrimination are not the values of the American people, and we pray to God that they do not become the law of the land for New Yorkers.

Planned Parenthood’s attempt to hoodwink the people of New York by advancing a bill that claims to protect “reproductive health” is dispiriting given that the people of New York have already spoken. According to a 2007 Gallup Poll of New Yorkers, 73 percent want greater restrictions on abortion, and have affirmed their belief that “late-term abortion” — the kind promoted in RHAPP, should be illegal.

Planned Parenthood stands opposed both to judicial precedent and public opinion on abortion in New York. In fair competition in the “marketplace of ideas” between pro-abortion and pro-life voices, Planned Parenthood lost the game. With RHAPP, they’re brazenly attempting to change the rules of the game.

Thankfully, advocacy groups have sprung up in a united effort to protect human life and defend New York hospitals from RHAPP. New Yorkers for Parental Rights is maintaining a fairly comprehensive alert system on RHAPP, while Kathleen Gallagher, Director of Pro-Life Activities for the New York State Catholic Conference, appears in a forceful video rebuttal of RHAPP and Planned Parenthood’s efforts to criminalize medical free choice in their state.

For those of you who follow my involvement with Safeguard Old State and some of my extra-curricular involvements at Penn State University, you might find the following video worthwhile. “Voices of ‘69: The Struggle for Penn State” was sent to me by a blogger who writes for Penn State’s “College OTR” blog, and it’s a gem of a documentary.

The documentary runs over three hours, but it’s a rare and unique look into this college campus during the tumultuous 1960s. The documentary covers student activists’ struggles from national civil rights issues to students’ rights on campus.

One of the things we often wonder at Safeguard Old State is whether the State College community would be better off if students didn’t have more say in the affairs of the town through either the Mayor’s office or the Borough Council. This past week, SOS Executive Director Gavin Keiran’s ruminations on the subject were covered in The Daily Collegian here at Penn State.

A friend of mine from the University of Pennsylvania forwarded me an article from The New York Times, originally printed in 2003, about a 26 year-old named Jason West who did what might be the impossible in a town like State College. Jason West beat out an incumbent 71 year-old Democrat to assume the office after campaigning heavily to get out the student vote. He won by only 64 votes.

When you read the article, you’ll notice how displeased and downright disgusted many of the “old guard” were at the prospect of having been run out of office by the twenty-something Mr. West. The mayor-elected rightly noted the absurdity of their reaction, asking “I’ve heard their fears of a student takeover, but I’m never quite sure what that means — if students need money for more shots at the bar, they’ll call the village clerk to cut them a check?”

When we talk about the prospect of a student mayor, student control of the Borough Council or just establishing a Student Subcommittee of the State College Borough Council, it seems the idea tends to be met with a discouragingly negative knee-jerk reaction from the same old guard types here in Happy Valley.

Take, for instance, the comments of one local resident on Gavin Keiran’s Safeguard Old State blog post on the subject:

I think you underestimate your power in the community. The students do monopolize and rule this town. Being an alum and a resident of State College, I find it disturbing that you would like to control more.

…

I encourage you to take some time and try to view this situation from the resident’s viewpoint. Make this your permanent address and register to vote here. Pay the taxes. We live here year round, we pay our taxes here, our children go to school in this town, and to suggest that our voice does not count because we are not a majority is severe hypocrisy. And as I read on, I think most of your ideas are based on snobbish intolerance for those who are not like you.

We underestimate our power in the community, do we? I wonder where we, the independent up-start student politicos have gone wrong with our silly misunderstanding.

Perhaps it’s based on the history of student-resident inequality in the State College borough, given horrendous decisions like the so-called “three unrelated” rule that hurts both student tenets and local landlords. Or, perhaps it’s the fact that Penn State undergrads were derided as “miscreants and lowlives” in 2003 by current Borough Council chairwoman Liz Goreham.

For the politically attuned Penn Stater — which admittedly is a small crowd — there is bias aplenty to be found, and for student or alumni leaders who label anti-student policies as such, there’s always the price to pay from residents who see our actions as nothing but “snobbish intolerance”. Such is life, I guess.

Safeguard Old State will be releasing a report later this year outlining the comparative lack of student authority in State College to other University towns in the Big Ten Conference.