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List of best colleges according to magazine's criteria - includes list of top 10 colleges; fifteen colleges to consider; and top 10 colleges that do not fit the criteria - Cover Story
Insight's annual guide to the nation's preeminent politically incorrect colleges heralds institutions that offer students old-fashioned quality educations.
Where should I go to college?" It's one of those big decisions. Four years spent at the right place can be a great experience. But four years passed at the wrong school in an atmosphere that isn't challenging is wasted time -- and at today's high prices, very expensive wasted time.
There is good news. There are very fine colleges and universities from which to choose, schools that haven't succumbed to the temptation to lower standards or pursue other current popular education fads, which still offer a solid education to those students willing to make the effort any good education requires.
This week Insight offers a list of 10 highly recommended colleges, as well as a selection of 15 others that offer a quality education as well. How did we choose these schools? Our consideration this year was heavily influenced by a recent conversation with Maj. Gen. Josiah Bunting III, superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, or VMI. Bunting is author of a thoughtful, just-released book on higher education, An Education for Our Time. In addition to his position as head of VMI, he has served as headmaster of Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, one of the nation's preeminent preparatory schools, and has been president of Hampden-Sydney College, named one of Insight's top 10 schools this year.
Bunting, whose new book focuses on his visions of the perfect college, quotes the poet John Milton on the mission of a quality education. In a 1644 essay, "Of Education," the author of Paradise Lost wrote that the ideal education should train students "in the study of learning and the love of virtue," with the goal of stirring them to "high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God and to men of all ages," says Bunting. He adds that what this means is clear: A good education must "inculcate standards of private morality and fit students for active, productive lives as scholars and members of the professions they have chosen."
Bunting asks us to consider "the venerable cocktail-party question that everyone talks about from time to time: How come we in America had Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Patrick Henry and all those guys in one magnificent generation, and now we have Bill Clinton?"
Put another way, "How was that generation able to meet a great challenge with equal greatness?" Bunting says there are a number of reasons, but the most important one may be the educations the Founding Fathers received. What did they learn, and what became the guide to their behavior that made them different from us?
Bunting supplies this answer: "They read religious texts, the Bible and particularly the Old Testament. They knew intimately the histories of Greece and Rome, particularly the Rome of the middle and late Republic, and this knowledge served them well."
They were "saturated in history," they knew the Judeo-Christian heritage and they had a strong sense of Western civilization -- those things that "people who are going to be strong leaders in a democracy, whether in politics or the military, must know because the challenges leaders and citizens face do not differ from generation to generation."
Each of the 25 colleges and universities listed by Insight offers a good background in history and the Western tradition. "We favor wisdom over job training" is how John Ciskanik, vice president for development at Christendom College in Front Royal, Va., puts it. The student handbook at Calvin College of Grand Rapids, Mich., says this about the school's mission: "The [college] community exists to enact a purpose; in the case of Calvin College that purpose is to shape hearts and minds through higher learning for Christian living."
The colleges and universities Insight recommends offer required core courses in America's heritage that all students take and whose subject matter therefore becomes a shared experience of every student on campus, a vast difference from many other campuses where core requirements are nonexistent and where so-called "distribution requirements" allow students to choose from a wide variety of courses -- some of them solid, many not. Too many young men and women may opt for the easy way out, rather than the more difficult.
What else does Insight look for? The 19th-century American writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau called for "uncommon schools," always an important element of any education. But probably of equal if not greater importance is the need for uncommon teaching, which is the way the great conservative essayist Richard Weaver described what he saw as essential to a good education.
Weaver, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, had a deep antipathy for what's known as "progressive education" and "progressive schools" that boast they prepare youth for a changing world and talk endlessly about the innovations they've made to improve education for today, and how those innovations have made education better than ever before. "In short, learning is to be foregone in favor of the child's spontaneous desires and unreflective thought," and education was to be a purely "subjective personal experience" where there were "no principles, no essences, no universals [and] I no objective structure of reality," wrote Weaver, summing up what he saw as the wrongheadedness of progressive education.
"Would it not be incomparably more sensible to prepare the youth to understand why the world is changing?" This is what a good education must do. Too many colleges and universities today fail "to rise above the confusion" of the modern world. Education at its worst "neither encourages recollection nor inspires a reverence for the good."
The effort to rise above the confusion of the modern world, Insight finds, is very important. The two St. John's, one in Annapolis, Md., and the other in Santa Fe, N.M., do this by allowing students to concentrate entirely on the great books for the four years they're in college. Thomas Aquinas College of Santa Paula, Calif., has a unique curriculum based on the courses of study followed by medieval universities, adapted for the 20th century, of course, but not watered down.
At secular St. Mary's College in Maryland, a state-owned school, classes are small and student-oriented. Designated an "honors college" by the state, St. Mary's (founded in 1840 as a two-year college for women) has been a four-year school for two decades, with rapidly increasing renown. James Madison College at Michigan State University, another relatively new school, emphasizes the training of students to become leaders who will make sound public policy.
Another factor that Insight considered was whether a school's administration has become bloated. This frequently is the case at American colleges and universities, where bureaucracy has run so rampant in recent years that Jerry L. Martin, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative Washington-based group, says that he recommends that trustees ask of a college, "If it's true we're here for the purpose of teaching and educating the young, why is it that 60 percent of our staff is nonteaching?"
Martin says this ever-growing bureaucracy comprises "administration and paraprofessionals, various kinds of counselors, outreach services, sensitivity-training teams -- it's all just mushroomed" with no end in sight.
Bunting adds that he also sees mushrooming bureaucracy as one of the blights of American higher education. "One of the puckish suggestions in my book is that we create this college where there is no administration building," he says. Bunting likes to quote what he calls a made-up version of Parkinson's Law, which says that administration expands to make work for the administration to do.
This is bad for education, according to Bunting, because "the effect of a big administration is stifling in a number of ways -- first of all, because it deprives the real heart of academia from funds that might profitably be used in teaching and research."
In addition, an expanding administration "creates a separate caste which, in a large university, is seen as discrete from the professoriate." There develops "an unspoken, quiet antipathy between the administration and the faculty, and I think that's wrong," says Bunting.
He recommends that colleges require all administrators to "be regular classroom teachers at the same time, or that they certainly look forward to going back to teaching after serving as an administrator," a proposal that would keep administrators in touch with the mayor service colleges should be providing -- teaching the young. At its most destructive, Bunting concludes, a big administration "sets up a whole layer of people whose work in a university is rather dubious and that doesn't really contribute very much to what students really need."
Insight has avoided listing schools with large administrations.
We also looked for schools that haven't watered down courses or that do not offer a lot of classes in contemporary culture. Says Martin of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, "We looked to see what was replacing Shakespeare courses that had been dropped, and we found a lot of pop culture: a course on the [rock star] Madonna, courses on best-selling novels and on gangster films, and a lot of [courses] about sex -- both straight and gay sex."
Insight also avoided universities at which the desire for a reputation for great research by its scholars and scientists has resulted in "full-time faculty members that have low teaching loads, which is made up by hiring a lot of part-timers, often grad students who can't speak English well," says Martin, who recommends that prospective students and their parents look at curriculum listings on a college or university's home page on the Internet to obtain actual information about what a professor is teaching in a given course.
There's another place to go, too. The American Academy for Liberal Education in Washington is the only accrediting agency that has specific academic standards. "We do not accredit a college that does not assure that its students get lab science, mathematics, history, foreign languages and literature," says American Academy for Liberal Education president Jeffrey Wallin (see p. 21).
Founded in 1992, the AALE has accredited five schools and others are under active consideration. Four of the five have made Insight's top 10 list, and the fifth makes the second 15. "What we tend to lose is the notion of an educated student," says Wallin. "It is fraught with problems. You can make a wrong definition. But without a faculty having an idea of what they would like to produce, what you end up with is a jerry-built system, and that's what we have at a lot of colleges today. It is true that we are often failing our kids miserably."
Thus, what Insight looked for above all was a faculty with an idea of what it would like to produce, and colleges that show an ardor and even a joy at being able to offer to their students what it is they offer. We live in jaded times. But a school that can stir a student's interest in "the best that has been said and thought in the world" -- a phrase from the English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold -- is an exciting place performing an essential public task. What's encouraging is that there are many good schools performing this task.
Bunting says that "what people are talking about after they see Saving Private Ryan is an expression of a yearning they feel when they see what it was like in the 1940s when the country was united in a common moral purpose in which our Americanness was to the fore. We've lost that, and people would like to have it back."
Can virtue be taught? asks Bunting, musing, and then answers his own question: "The answer is it probably cannot be taught, but you've got to keep trying."
RELATED ARTICLE: Top 10 Politically Incorrect Colleges
1. Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Mich. Founded: 1876. Enrollment: 3,930. Annual Costs: Less than $20,000. Description: The purpose of Calvin College "is to shape hearts and minds through higher learning for Christian living" (from "An Expanded Statement of the Mission of Calvin College").
2. Christendon College, Front Royal, Va. Founded: 1977. Enrollment: 370. Annual Costs: Less than $20,000. Description: Close community life. College was founded to educate young men and women for the lay apostolate of the Catholic Church.
3. Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, Calif. Founded: 1946. Enrollment: About 950. Annual Costs: More than $26,000. Description: First-rate faculty. Eighty percent and more of this school's graduates earn advanced degrees, mostly in business and law.
4. James Madison College of Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich. Founded: 1967. Enrollment: 1,200. Annual Costs: $10,000 in-state students; $1 7,000 out-of-state. Description: Unusual among state schools because of emphasis on quality teaching and on producing students able to set good public policy.
5. Hampden-Sydney College, Hampden-Sydney, Va. Founded: 1776. Enrollment: 960. Annual Costs: $22,000. Description: All-male student body. Among requirements to graduate is a high proficiency in rhetoric -- in this case, meaning the ability to write clearly and well.
6. Rhodes College, Memphis, Tenn. Founded: 1848. Enrollment: 1,420. Annual Costs: $24,000. Description: At the center of the general-education requirement is a humanities course called "The Search for Values," a two-year, interdisciplinary tour through "Western history and religion."
7. St. John's College, Annapolis, Md. Founded: 1696. Enrollment: 440. Annual Costs: $27,000. Santa Fe, N.M. Founded: 1964. Enrollment: 380. Annual Costs: $26,000. Description: At both campuses, students spend their four years reading and pondering 150 of the world's great books.
8. St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's City, Md. Founded: 1840. Enrollment: 1,660. Annual Costs: in-state, $10,000; out-of-state, $12,000. Description: A state school designated by Maryland as its "honors college," with tradition-oriented curriculum with such requirements as "The Western Legacy I and II."
9. Thomas Aquinas, Santa Paula, Calif. Founded: 1971. Enrollment: About 200. Annual Costs: $20,000. Description: Innovative curriculum modeled on an up-to-date version of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) of medieval education.
10. College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va. Founded: 1693. Enrollment: 5,480 undergraduates. Annual Costs: in-state, $8,000; out-of-state, $13,000 Description: America's second-oldest college; a state school known for tough grading at a time when As and B's proliferate at many colleges, public and private.
RELATED ARTICLE: Fifteen to Consider
1. Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah
2. College of Arts and Sciences, Baylor University, Waco, Texas
3. University of Chicago
4. Davidson College, Davidson, N.C.
5. University of Dallas
6. Franciscan University, Steubenville, Ohio
7. Furman University, Greenville, S.C.
8. Grove City College, Grove City, Pa.
9. Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Mich.
10. Millsaps College, Jackson, Miss.
11. Providence College, Providence, R.I.
12. St. Olaf, Northfield, Minn.
13. Samford University Birmingham, Ala.
14. University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.
15. Wheaton College, Wheaton, III.
RELATED ARTICLE: Top 10 Politically Correct Colleges
1. Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., described by one otherwise liberal high-school placement counselor as "nihilistic in its pursuit of political correctness."
2. Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, which made "Excuse me, may I please touch your breast?" famous as a line appropriate for a male student to use when amorously addressing a woman.
3. Duke University, Durham, N.C., whose English department is thinking up the newest line on postmodernism to replace the line it published last week.
4. Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass. If the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a science-oriented school, Harvard prestige-oriented and Cornell work-oriented, Hampshire, it is said, is pot-oriented.
5. City College of the City University of New York. Leonard Jeffries, a political-science professor, has achieved a good deal of fame for his anti-Semitic rants and his theory that whites are evil "ice people," while blacks are virtuous "sun people."
6. University of California, Santa Cruz. Three words: Professor Angela Davis, but generally left-wing anyway.
7. Bennington College, Bennington, Vt. Biggest party on campus is one called "Dress to Get Laid." Probably the only U.S. school that allows randomly assigned co-ed roommates. Lots of spoiled rich kids.
8. Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. No core curriculum or distributionals and far-left attitude in general.
9. Brown University, Providence, R.I. Not as politically correct as its reputation, but still ...
10. State University of New York, New Paltz, where last year the conference "Revolting Behavior: The Challenges of Women's Sexual Freedom" was held. Conference had such sessions as "Sex Toys for Women" and "Safe, Sane and Consensual S&M: An Alternate Way of Loving."
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