Those who have read coverage of college campuses over the past academic year — including National Review’s — will know that the situation in academia may have reached a low point. The combination of the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel campus protests, leftism-inflected curricula, and stifling climate toward those straying from progressive doctrine has created a black hole for honest, open inquiry. Undergraduates and graduate students alike are expected to be activists first and learners second, while faculty often view their roles as political shamans rather than instructors.
A survey conducted in the first half of 2023 by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and analytics organization College Pulse found that only 37 percent of current students at American institutions of higher education believe it is never acceptable to shout down a speaker to prevent them from completing whatever talk they were invited to campus to give. That attitude has manifested itself in scenes such as the one at the University of California, Berkeley, where protesters broke windows and a door and even choked a Jewish student in their successful attempt to stop an Israeli lawyer from speaking at an event organized by several Jewish student organizations and Fifth Circuit judge Kyle Duncan being prevented — by students and a diversity, equity, and inclusion administrator — from delivering an address at a campus Federalist Society chapter event.
The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal — a nonprofit organization that operates out of the conservative luminary’s former home in Mecosta, Mich. — has created prizes with substantial monetary awards in hopes of counteracting the trend.
The Richard D. McLellan Prizes for Advancing Free Speech and Expression, which Kirk Center executive director and CEO Jeff Nelson and board member and former Michigan governor John Engler announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week, consist of a $50,000 award for a written work promoting the ideals in the prizes’ name and two $12,500 fellowships for scholars and writers pursuing the values of open discourse and diversity of thought.
The panel tasked with awarding the prizes includes such names as former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, Fifth Circuit judge James Ho, newspaper publisher Walter Hussman, Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald, and former Freedom Forum head Charles Overby, among others.
As Nelson told National Review, the Kirk Center’s leadership has faith that the prizes will help jumpstart efforts toward renewing a sense of true scholarship and inquiry within colleges and universities and begin to restore American institutions of higher education as places of learning rather than lockstep progressive activism.
“Our hope is that the McLellan Prizes will help affect academic culture and academic freedom in a positive way by rewarding some of the nation’s very best thinkers and writers, as well as top scholars through summer research grants, so that over time, the case for free speech and expression will be better made and more persuasive,” Nelson told NR. “In that way, the return of civil discourse to the American campus will be nearer at hand.”
Nelson and Engler wrote in their WSJ op-ed that those dedicated to the immutable values the Kirk Center seeks to promote “can still find new methods and teachers capable of reclaiming genuine liberal education and cultivating in youth a sense of gratitude for what Americans have inherited.” The process of creating and maintaining institutions to serve that purpose is essential, as is, they wrote, “encouraging people with the imagination and talent to write, film, and speak on behalf of the noble principles of our founders.”
The debate over how best to proceed with the project of reforming American higher education has produced myriad potential solutions. The task of incentivizing those committed to ideals too rare on the contemporary campus, as the Kirk Center plans to undertake, is a worthy first step.