Here’s an outrage from the halls of academe. In her aptly named piece, “Board of Bozos,” Naomi Schaefer Riley, exposes what appears to be an egregious case of anti-religious bias by the New York State Board of Regents. An evangelical school named Kings College has established itself in the heart of New York City–in the Empire State Building, in fact. The idea is to bring top quality religious education into the capital of American secularism. King’s students have higher SAT scores and higher high school GPA’s than students at most colleges in the SUNY system. King’s has excellent student-faculty ratios, and faculty members have graduated from schools like Cornell, Yale, Fordham, and Wharton. King’s has hired Boston University administrator, anthropologist, and frequent NRO contributor, Peter Wood, as its provost. (Wood is an old friend and colleague of mine.) Even though the New York State Education Department’s own evaluators recommended a five-year extension of the college’s accreditation, the Board of Regents has torpedoed King’s College by giving the school a mere one year extension. That is equivalent to a death sentence–making it impossible to recruit students or faculty. Although we can’t be certain, anti-Christian bias is an all-too-likely explanation for the Regents’ decision.
The man behind the move to kill King’s College is New York State Board of Regents member, John Brademas. Brademas was a liberal Democratic congressman from Indiana, and a long-time backer of the National Endowment for the Arts. After losing his seat in Congress, Brademas went on to become the president of New York University. As Riley shows, Brademas has repeatedly raised bogus objections to King’s College. A major power on the Regents, Brademas has gotten the Board to ignore its own evaluations and administrators, effectively placing King’s under a death sentence. Brademas denies anti-religious bias, and maybe he’s right. But it’s tough to make sense of his baseless accusations against King’s in any other way.
Here’s are some questions for Corner readers. What do you know about the political backgrounds and educational philosophies of the members of the New York State Board of Regents? In particular, what do you know about their views on the place of religion in education and public life? Here is what appears to be a current list of the New York State Regents. This study suggests that Brademas lost his congressional seat, in part, due to opposition from the Moral Majority. Do readers know anything else about the relationship between John Brademas and religious conservatives? References to written sources would be particularly helpful. I hope to have more in the future on the King’s College outrage, and what readers can do about it.
Here’s one more point about the King’s College scandal. The just released study of academic bias reported on by Howard Kurtz confirms that professors are far more secular than most Americans. This is not a matter of self-selection. It is a question of bias. How do we know that? We know it because of incidents like the King’s College outrage. When religious folks make a good faith (in every sense of the word) effort to establish an intellectually serious institution of higher education, the powers that be step in to destroy it. Campus bias doesn’t just happen. It is the product of a deliberate effort to exclude conservative and religious views.