Perspective - March 2017

MARCH 2017

OKLAHOMA COUNCIL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Is Illiberal Education a Public Good?

If university officials prohibit “hate speech” (speech they hate), higher education undermines our political freedom and is the opposite of a public good.

In Case You Missed It State lawmakers can restore freedom on college campuses.

A Nobel Prize-winning economist suggested that a married mother at home may have a greater impact on the economy than a father in the workplace.

on.wsj.com/2kOT5M0

Reporting from Oklahoma City, a TIME magazine journalist describes what happens when doctors only take cash.

bit.ly/2jYEoSI

AEI scholar Mark J. Perry says “a reduction in the gender pay gap would come at a huge cost: several thousand more women will be killed each year working in dangerous occupations.” bit.ly/2kDToHs

SoonerPoll finds that Oklahomans favor reducing or eliminating wind tax credits in order to fund teacher pay raises.

ti.me/2jZ0CbT

SoonerPoll finds that Oklahomans would prefer that lawmakers prioritize K-12 spending over higher education spending.

bit.ly/2lmpGXB

OCPA's Jonathan Small wonders why OU would host a guest speaker who describes the Trump presidency as "the Fourth Reich."

bit.ly/2jYzG7v

Too many local tax assessors aren’t doing their jobs.

bit.ly/2ldbZwn

Rather than continuing to penalize parents financially for raising their children in accordance with their consciences, Oklahoma policymakers should enact schoolchoice policies which secure parental rights. bit.ly/2lgzYLY

Gov. Mary Fallin made a terrific appointment to the Oklahoma Supreme Court. bit.ly/2lDpNBc

bit.ly/2kOSFFu

Scott Pruitt will bring some muchneeded sanity to the EPA.

Some Oklahoma educators like the four-day school week.

bit.ly/2jYLypP

PERSPECTIVE

Educational choice can boost economic growth in Oklahoma.

bit.ly/2kE0ATU

Brandon Dutcher, Editor Alex Jones , Art Director

OCPA Trustees

OCPA Researchers

Glenn Ashmore • Oklahoma City

Mike O’Neal • Edmond

Robert D. Avery • Pawhuska

Larry Parman • Oklahoma City

Lee J. Baxter • Lawton

Bill Price • Oklahoma City

Douglas Beall, M.D. • Oklahoma City

Patrick T. Rooney • Oklahoma City

Steve W. Beebe • Duncan

Melissa Sandefer • Norman

organization. OCPA formulates and

John A. Brock • Tulsa

Thomas Schroedter • Tulsa

promotes public policy research and

David Burrage • Atoka

Greg Slavonic • Oklahoma City

analysis consistent with the principles

Michael Carnuccio • Yukon

Charles M. Sublett • Tulsa

Tom Coburn, M.D. • Tulsa

Robert Sullivan • Tulsa

William Flanagan • Claremore

William E. Warnock, Jr. • Tulsa

Josephine Freede • Oklahoma City

Dana Weber • Tulsa

in Perspective are those of the author,

Ann Felton Gilliland • Oklahoma City

Daryl Woodard • Tulsa

and should not be construed as

John A. Henry III • Oklahoma City

Perspective is published monthly by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Inc., an independent public policy

of free enterprise and limited government. The views expressed

representing any official position of OCPA or its trustees, researchers, or employees.

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PERSPECTIVE // March 2017

bit.ly/2kizkta

Robert Kane • Tulsa Frank Keating • Oklahoma City

EMERITUS BOARD

Gene Love • Lawton

Blake Arnold • Oklahoma City

David Madigan • Lawton

David R. Brown, M.D. • Oklahoma City

Tom H. McCasland III • Duncan

Paul A. Cox • Oklahoma City

David McLaughlin • Enid

Henry F. Kane • Bartlesville

Ronald L. Mercer • Bethany

John T. Hanes • Oklahoma City

J. Larry Nichols • Oklahoma City

Lew Meibergen • Enid

Lloyd Noble II • Tulsa

Daniel J. Zaloudek • Tulsa

Steven J. Anderson, MBA, CPA Research Fellow Tina Dzurisin Research Associate Trent England, J.D. Dr. David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow for the Advancement of Liberty Jayson Lusk, Ph.D. Samuel Roberts Noble Distinguished Fellow J. Scott Moody, M.A. Research Fellow Andrew C. Spiropoulos, J.D. Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow Wendy P. Warcholik, Ph.D. Research Fellow

Larry Arnn

William F. Buckley

George W. Bush

Jeb Bush

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE’S

Dick Cheney

Dinesh D’Souza

ARTHUR BROOKS APRIL 4, 2017 OKLAHOMA CITY •

Mitch Daniels

Artur Davis

Steve Forbes

Tommy Franks

For more information, contact Rachel Hays at 405.602.1667 or rachel@ocpathink.org

John Fund

© User:T3h wookiee / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0

Laura Ingraham Frank Keating Brian Kilmeade

Ed Meese

Newt Gingrich David Horowitz Mike Huckabee

J. Rufus Fears

Brit Hume

Charles Krauthammer

Art Laffer

Rich Lowry

Russell Moore Stephen Moore Peggy Noonan Marvin Olasky

Sarah Palin

Star Parker

Joe Sobran Thomas Stafford John Stossel

Cal Thomas

Dana Perino Michael Reagan

Clarence Thomas

Jim DeMint

Scott Walker

Paul Ryan

Malcolm Wallop

Jeane Kirkpatrick

John Walton

J.C.Watts

Allen West

Walter Williams

Past OCPA speakers are pictured above.

Is Illiberal Education a Public Good?

By Greg Forster

Oklahomans agree that liberal education—education that helps people grow as rational beings who know truth—is a public good.

That’s why they give their hard-earned tax money to subsidize schools like the University of Oklahoma. But universities’ status as a public good depends entirely on their providing a liberal, not an illiberal, education. OU increasingly provides the latter, so Oklahoma taxpayers would be wise to consider alternative ways of supporting liberal education in their state.

OU President David Boren has announced that he wants “hate speech” reported to the university’s police department. In the illiberal environment cultivated by OU leadership, “hate speech” doesn’t mean Klansmen burning crosses on front lawns. One OU professor called the police after being handed an evangelistic tract; that’s core speech about ideas if anything is. OU Vice President Jabar Shumate has made comments suggesting support for Donald Trump is “hate speech.” And of course all this is on top of the dense layers of one-sided indoctrination about diversity and sexual identity to which all students at OU, like at almost every other American university, are required to submit.

Recently, OU expelled students for using racial epithets, in flagrant violation of long-established First Amendment law. Six months later, the university paid $40,000 for a performance by a hip-hop artist who uses the same derogatory epithets. He also insults homosexuals, brags about physically abusing women in their genitals (hello, Donald Trump supporters!), and calls for the murder of police officers. Respect and toleration for others apparently go only one way at OU. The question here is not whether the people targeted by OU in these cases are right or wrong. The question is whether OU believes that wrong ideas are best corrected and right ideas are best vindicated through open discussion and debate in a social atmosphere of free inquiry for all sides. The particular merits of the speech acts at issue in these controversies are, here as always, irrelevant to the question of whether everyone ought to have free speech.

It is sometimes argued that because the university needs to maintain a special kind of social environment for the sake of education, it can be justified in placing stricter limits on speech— for the sake of maintaining mutual respect and social harmony.

It is true that a university needs to maintain a special kind of

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social environment for the sake of education. The big question is whether an educational environment ought to be one that values freedom of speech less than other environments, or more.

Liberal education is distinguished from illiberal education in a principle well stated by Thomas Jefferson when he founded the University of Virginia: “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Oklahoma taxpayers, take note: Jefferson tied the university’s financial subsidies to its mission of pursuing “the illimitable freedom of the mind.” He said that it was to support this freedom of thought, and the increase of knowledge that only it could produce, that the university’s financial supporters were ponying up to ”provide for the professors separate buildings in which themselves and their families may be handsomely and comfortably lodged, and to liberal salaries will be added lucrative perquisites.” Only the liberal quality of the education at U.Va. would make it worth such a high price.

For Jefferson, this freedom depended on transcendent concepts of truth and reason. Truth is not merely a social construct or human invention. It is something that we “follow,” not something we create or control. Freedom of the mind means the freedom of reason to discover and conform to—not make—the truth. For human thought, there is no other freedom.

Although the university produces useful technical knowledge, it is only this philosophy of freedom that truly makes liberal education a public good. Liberal education’s philosophy of the freedom of the mind establishes the grounds of our broader political freedom.

In Jefferson’s time, few institutions were dedicated to the production of new technical knowledge, so universities were needed for that reason as well (a point he emphasized in his description of U.Va.). Today, because of the worldwide revolution in social order in which the American founding played a leading role, we have everything from Apple and Google to the Gates Foundation, which is now closing in on global eradication of malaria. True, lots of the scientists are still housed in universities; but if their only value was producing technical knowledge and we needed to find other places for them to do that, it wouldn’t be

State Lawmakers Should Stop Enabling Higher Ed’s Assault on Free Speech It’s a mistake for politicians or bureaucrats to regard government spending as an excuse to micromanage campuses. It’s not too much to ask, however, that colleges and universities which draw on public support actually serve as repositories of free inquiry and free thought. State officials should feel comfortable demanding assurances from university leaders that public funds are supporting institutions committed to free inquiry and not forced indoctrination. And they should be unapologetic about redirecting state funds to institutions which respect that distinction. Better yet, they may want to consider cutting back on direct state support to institutions and instead fund higher education by empowering students to use funds at the institution or program of their choosing.

—Frederick M. Hess, resident scholar and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute

very hard.

If there is still a unique need for universities, it’s not because they produce technical knowledge. It’s because liberal education propagates a philosophy of freedom on which our public order depends. The mind’s freedom is, as Jefferson says, “illimitable” because the use of force and perception of the truth are mutually exclusive. If you command me to profess Belief X, by doing so you destroy the social environment in which it is possible for me to use my reason to investigate whether Belief X is true. The philosophy that freedom is necessary for discovery of truth is the basis of a free society in which law and government are kept in their proper places.

A hundred years ago, educator J. Gresham Machen summed up the connection between liberal education and political freedom: “Reasonable persuasion can thrive only in an atmosphere of liberty. It is quite useless to approach a man with both a club and an argument.

He will very naturally be in no mood to appreciate our argument until we lay aside our club.” Machen even testified to the U.S. Congress against a scheme for federal control of education on grounds that it would remove freedom for diverse ideas in education. (The more things change, the more they stay the same!)

Against all this stands illiberal education. It begins with the view that truth is constructed, not discovered; that places truth under the authority of social institutions, not the mind’s reason.

Education therefore does not require a social environment of freedom but one of control and domination. This is not (at least at first) out of a merely selfish desire for indoctrination. It is out of a sincere conviction that freedom of thought produces only incoherence and fragmentation, not knowledge. If the human mind does not have a power of reason able to discover truth, we ought to demand a strong social authority because that will be our only source of knowledge.

If this illiberal view of human nature were right, highly controlled social environments such as OU would become islands of harmony and agreement. The

continual degeneration of such institutions into fiercer and fiercer conflict, leading to schemes of indoctrination and brutal suppression of dissent, shows how wrong the illiberals are. Just look at how the attempt to create a women’s march on Washington ahead of the Trump inaugural was torn apart by infighting among the mutually hostile factions that make up the coalition of the illiberal left. The illiberal project eats itself, as parties fight each other to control the social instruments of indoctrination.

It is in schools—and nations—where speech is free and inquiry is “illimitable” that debates tend to become more civil, mutual respect and toleration grow, and common ground is eventually discovered.

That’s because such environments encourage people to trust each other.

Freedom of speech signals to people that they can have confidence they are respected and valued in spite of disagreements. This is the only possible basis of community. Debates become most acrimonious and destructive when people believe that those on the other side want to stamp out their point of view by force.

If OU doesn’t uphold the basic principle of liberal education, it undermines our political freedom and is the opposite of a public good. There are plenty of ways the taxpayers of Oklahoma could support liberal education in their state without direct subsidies to OU; for example, they could more fully voucherize their support for higher education, so Oklahoma students and parents, not any particular schools, are the beneficiaries. Absent a change at OU, Oklahomans might want to make use of their illimitable freedom of the mind to consider such alternatives.

Greg Forster (Ph.D., Yale University) is a Friedman Fellow with EdChoice. He is the author of six books, including John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and the co-editor of three books, including John Rawls and Christian Social Engagement: Justice as Unfairness. He has written numerous articles in peer-reviewed academic journals as well as in popular publications such as The Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

www.ocpathink.org

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By Jayson Lusk

Worrisome trends in the prevalence of obesity and type II diabetes have raised questions about the role of the federal and state governments in regulating the healthfulness of consumers’ diets. While fat and sugar taxes were considered fanciful ideas just a couple of decades ago, these policy proposals are now commonplace.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made headlines when he tried to outlaw the sale of large-sized sodas. Though his efforts were struck down by the courts, related initiatives have found their way into law. For example, several locales such as Berkeley and Philadelphia have recently passed taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages.

The Philadelphia measure, implemented at the first of 2017, added a 1.5 cent tax per ounce to most sugary and diet beverages.

With so-called soda taxes gaining traction across the U.S., many are wondering if similar initiatives would make sense in their state or even at the federal level. While public health issues are a serious concern, it is also important to marry those concerns with the evidence on whether proposed public policies will have the effects we desire. In fact, many of the same factors that make obesity such a complicated and multifaceted problem extend to the economic analysis of public health policies.

To begin, it is important to recognize that the federal government already places an implicit tax on sugared sodas. However, the manner in which the government goes

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about this makes the tax less than transparent even to many public health experts. Research shows that various farm policies aimed at controlling the supply and imports of sugar make U.S. sugar prices two to three times higher than in the rest of the world.

Moreover, while farm policies aimed at corn production might slightly depress the price of high fructose corn syrup (a common soda sweetener), countervailing ethanol policies have had a much larger effect in recent years. In 2000, less than 10 percent of corn production in the U.S. went to ethanol production, but today the figure is around 40 percent. The shift to ethanol production is one reason why the price of high fructose corn syrup more than doubled from 2000 to 2015. It’s no wonder that per capita sugar consumption has fallen precipitously over the last decade.

Total caloric intake from sugar consumption peaked at 423 kcal/person/ day in 1999 and is now 15 percent lower at 358 kcal/person/day. Moreover, whereas high fructose corn syrup contributed about 42 percent of caloric intake from sugar in 1999, today the figure is only about 33 percent.

In short, Americans today are consuming less sugar in total and less as a percentage from high fructose corn syrup (the primary beverage sweetener) than they did 20 years ago. And yet, problems with obesity and type II diabetes persist.

Numerous studies show that sugar tax policies have trivial effects on soda intake and body weight. When sodas are taxed, consumers substitute toward other caloric foods or drinks, like fruit juice or alcohol,

U.S. Consumption of Calories from Three Types of Sugar, 1970 to 2015 High Fructose Corn Syrup

Cane and Beet Sugar

Other Sweeteners

Calories Consumed from Sugar (kcal/person/day)

Calories Consumed from Sugar (kcal/person/day)

450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100

2015

2013

2014

2012

2011

2009

2010

2008

2007

2005

2006

2003

2004

2002

2001

1999

2000

1998

1997

1995

1996

1993

1994

1992

1991

1989

1990

1988

1987

1985

1986

1983

1984

1982

1981

1979

1980

1978

1977

1975

1976

1973

1974

1972

1971

0

1970

50

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service

which may have more calories than taxed sodas. That is one reason why some analysts argue that only across-the-board food taxes will significantly affect weight. The problem with food taxes, however, is that they are regressive. That is, the tax burden is disproportionately borne by the poor, who spend a larger share of their income on food than the rich.

Fundamentally, what motivates the view that soda taxes will increase consumers’ well-being? No one likes to pay higher prices. It is true that excess soda consumption may lead to health problems, but we also care about our food budget and desire consuming tasty, satisfying food and beverages. Life is full of difficult tradeoffs, and it is problematic and paternalistic for a third party to deem another person’s choices “wrong” given that different people have different preferences and incomes. If people do not understand the risks of sugar consumption, then the appropriate policy response is information provision, not a tax.

Even if new soda tax revenues could be directed toward education programs, as was promised in Philadelphia’s recent law, one would need to show how the costs of the tax are offset by the benefits of extra information. But there is scant evidence on educational effectiveness. There are already a number of public and private health information campaigns, and it is unclear what effects yet another would have. Even if it could be shown that anti-soda education effectively lowered sugar consumption and was an overall desirable policy, there are likely to be more economically efficient ways to fund such education programs than a soda tax.

Another factor that is rarely considered by soda tax advocates is how food companies and soda manufacturers might respond to the policy. For instance, beverage manufacturers are likely to absorb some of the tax increase, passing along a smaller portion

of the tax to consumers than is dictated by the law. Also consider how a beverage manufacturer might respond to a law banning advertising of soda to children. Given that the firms can no longer use revenue on promotion and advertising, they might instead redirect those resources to cost-cutting efforts that reduce soda prices. Competition moves from who has the most compelling ad to who has the lowest price. Lower prices will encourage more consumption: exactly the opposite of what was intended by the ban. Consumers and food producers are not passive bystanders— they respond, sometimes in unanticipated ways, to food policies.

Despite these arguments, it must be admitted that, at least at currently proposed levels, soda taxes simply aren’t that big of a deal. Yes, higher prices will harm consumers’ pocketbooks, but by relatively small amounts. Yes, higher prices will likely reduce soda consumption, but by small amounts that are unlikely to have any meaningful effect on obesity or diabetes prevalence. Yet the policy will add one more rule to the books for food companies to follow, and will add new bureaucratic oversight and lobbying efforts in deciding which items are taxed and which are not.

Soda taxes are often pitched as a type of silver bullet. But as H.L. Mencken once wrote, “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

Agricultural economist Jayson Lusk is the Samuel Roberts Noble Distinguished Fellow at OCPA. The author of The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto about the Politics of Your Plate (Crown Forum, 2013), Dr. Lusk is Regents Professor and Willard Sparks Endowed Chair at Oklahoma State University.

www.ocpathink.org

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Oklahoma’s Prison Crisis:

Working towards a Solution

By Jonathan Small and Trent England

Left unchecked, growth in the prison population will hold the state hostage for almost $2 billion, the cost of three new prisons over the next 10 years.

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Last month in these pages, we explored the enormous cost of Oklahoma’s state prison system and the extraordinary growth in new prisoners that will require adding more prisons in the next two years.

This month, we look towards a solution.

Thirty years of short-sighted criminal justice policy have made Oklahoma’s prison system what it is today: dramatically overcrowded and growing at an alarming rate. Left unchecked, growth in the prison population will hold the state hostage for almost $2 billion, the cost of three new prisons over the next 10 years.

As crime rates continue to fall in states that have reduced their prison populations, Oklahoma’s leaders are asking hard questions about policies that have been the foundation of the state’s criminal justice system for decades.

Governor Mary Fallin created the Oklahoma Justice Reform Task Force and charged it with increasing public safety while reducing the prison population and continuing to hold offenders accountable for their actions. The Task Force—made up of representatives from the business

community, law enforcement officials, legislators, judges, district attorneys, agency heads, an advocate for crime victims, a public defender, and a doctor who treats addiction—responded to the charge by conducting an intensive examination of Oklahoma’s criminal justice system as well as criminological research on correctional best practices.

The Task Force focused its policy development efforts on addressing the nonviolent offenders who make up 75 percent of Oklahoma’s prison admissions. Their crimes are largely driven by addiction and they often suffer from untreated mental illness. For these individuals, prison can actually increase their risk of recidivism; comprehensive supervision and treatment in the community are both more effective and significantly cheaper.

After seven months, the Task Force has put forward 27 recommendations that target sentencing, community supervision, release and reentry, support for victims of crime, and oversight and performance measures.

Projected Oklahoma Prison Population with and without Task Force Recommendations 37,000

35,798

35,000 33,000 31,000

28,580

29,000 27,000

7/1/25

1/1/25

7/1/24

1/1/24

7/1/23

1/1/23

7/1/22

1/1/22

7/1/21

1/1/21

7/1/20

1/1/20

7/1/19

1/1/19

7/1/18

1/1/18

7/1/17

1/1/17

7/1/16

Baseline

1/1/26

26,490

25,000

With Task Force Recommendations

Source: Data from the Oklahoma Department of Corrections; analysis by the Crime and Justice Institute at Community Resources for Justice

The sentencing recommendations focus on drug and property crimes, adjusting penalties and creating tiered systems of weights and property values designed to punish serious conduct more harshly and to distinguish addiction-driven conduct from profiteering. The recommendations also expand alternatives to incarceration, giving judges and prosecutors more options to divert people from incarceration to treatment and supervision.

The release recommendations focus on the parole process, streamlining parole for compliant, nonviolent offenders and creating an evidence-based case-planning process for all Department of Corrections (DOC) inmates. The recommendations also create a geriatric parole process for the lowest-risk and most expensive inmates, and enhance accountability and transparency in the general parole process.

The supervision recommendations focus on aligning Oklahoma’s supervision systems with evidence-based practices, including assessing a person’s risk to reoffend as well as the causes of this risk, graduated responses to misconduct

rather than the immediate “heavy stick” of imprisonment, and effective case management. The recommendations also create a certificate of rehabilitation and expungement process to help offenders get back to work, and establish provisions to minimize financial barriers to successful reentry.

The recommendations relating to victims of crime include the creation of specialized training for the supervision of domestic violence offenders and more effective law enforcement, and advocate responses to domestic violence situations through training and certification.

These recommendations are now being advanced to the legislature. Lawmakers will determine whether Oklahoma will seize this opportunity, or will face the $1.9 billion price tag of continuing to do business as usual. If the legislature adopts this package in full, the reforms would reduce the projected prison population by 9,308 beds, resulting in a 7 percent reduction in the prison population over the next decade.

This reduction below the current prison

population would allow Oklahoma’s prison facilities to operate at a safer capacity, affording better protection for both guards and inmates, and ultimately, protecting taxpayers and citizens from poor public safety outcomes and the staggering cost of a bloated criminal justice system.

Jonathan Small, CPA, serves as President at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. Previously, he served as a budget analyst for the Oklahoma Office of State Finance, as a fiscal policy analyst and research analyst for the Oklahoma House of Representatives, and as director of government affairs for the Oklahoma Insurance Department.

He holds a B.A. in Accounting from the University of Central Oklahoma and is a Certified Public Accountant.

Trent England serves as Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, where he also is the David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow for the Advancement of Liberty and directs the Center for the Constitution & Freedom and the Save Our States project. He also hosts a radio program, The Trent England Show, from 7 to 9 a.m. every weekday on Oklahoma’s AM 1640, “The Eagle.”

www.ocpathink.org

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Higher Education Is a Mission–Not an Excuse

By Trent England

Thomas Jefferson ignored the presidency when he wrote his epitaph.

Instead, he chose to be remembered as author of the Declaration of Independence and Virginia’s Statute of Religious Freedom and as “father of the University of Virginia.” Creating the university mattered so much to him because Jefferson believed education is necessary for the survival of individual freedom and democratic government.

Jefferson was not alone. Rabble-rousing revolutionary Sam Adams wrote, “If Virtue & Knowledge are diffused among the People, they will never be enslav’d. This will be their great Security.” George Washington, in his Farewell Address, called for “institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge.” John Adams advocated government spending “for the liberal education of youth.”

Many of these quotes are tossed around in debates about education policy, usually about spending. Too often, however, our debates miss the point the American Founders were trying to make. Public education is important, probably essential, to the success of our state and nation. But public education is a mission.

To put it another way, public education is not a building, not a law, not even an institution. Public education is not a jobs program, though a person’s job is understandably very important to him or her. Public education is also not daycare or a substitute for intact families, churches, and the other “little platoons” that characterize a thriving society. It is not a

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way to get lazy teenagers to finally move out.

The mission of public education is to create an educated public, a people capable of selfgovernment. Really, this means two different kinds of education. One is for everyone, the kind of education that produces citizens. The other is for those who might be chosen by their fellow citizens to lead, the education of statesmen. This was Jefferson’s purpose in founding a university.

Are our public colleges and universities today fulfilling this mission? Do they turn out productive citizens and future statesmen?

Consider Oklahoma’s largest state university.

Last year, OU paid $40,000 to rapper YG—whose lyrics celebrate violent crime, casual sex, drug abuse, and racial stereotypes—to perform on campus. Seemingly immune to irony, this year administrators spent thousands of dollars on a 24-hour tip line to report “incidents or concerns” about “campus climate and bias.” This investment in political correctness seems to be working—in November a person handing out gospel tracts at OU reportedly generated multiple calls to campus police.

How do students at OU actually fare? Many do great, of course, but a third never graduate. Those who make it average nearly $20,000 in student debt. A few will enjoy a semester in Italy, but the vast majority of students will benefit not at all from the university’s $20 million Tuscan villa. The same is true of many fabulously expensive buildings in Norman. The university’s website brags about new on-campus apartments: “From the luxurious pools and hot tubs, to the putting green ... OU Traditions Square is a great place to call home.”

Citizens and legislators should push back against political correctness and financial extravagance at OU and other state universities and colleges, but not because higher education is unimportant. It’s just the opposite. The mission of higher education is too important to let it be an excuse for overpaid administrators to feather their own nests.

Thomas Jefferson’s vision of higher learning enlivened by the spirit of free enquiry is hardly served by either vulgar rappers or bias hotlines. The legislature should take higher education seriously by holding our institutions accountable to the mission of creating an educated public.

Trent England serves as Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, where he also is the David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow for the Advancement of Liberty and directs the Center for the Constitution & Freedom and the Save Our States project. He also hosts a radio program, The Trent England Show, from 7 to 9 a.m. every weekday on Oklahoma’s AM 1640, “The Eagle.”

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@OCPAthink 1. Corporation Commissioner Todd Hiett, former Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, addresses a group of 55 state lawmakers on February 7 at OCPA. Hiett urged legislators not to fear the noisy special-interest groups under the dome but rather to remember the silent majority of taxpayers back in their districts.

2. Lt. Gov. Todd Lamb speaks at the February 2 meeting of the Oklahoma School Choice Coalition. The meeting is held monthly at OCPA. 3. Wilfred McClay speaks on January 21 at a National Association of Scholars (NAS) conference titled "Securing Liberty: Rebuilding American Education in an Era of Illiberal Learning." Dr. McClay is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, a position previously occupied by the late J. Rufus Fears.

4. OCPA trustee Frank Keating addresses a group of 55 state lawmakers on February 7 at OCPA. Keating, who served as Oklahoma's 25th governor, also served in both houses of the Oklahoma legislature.

5. Conference attendees engage in a networking exercise at the NAS conference on January 21 at OCPA. 6. OCPA's Estela Hernandez welcomes attendees to National Association of Scholars conference.

www.ocpathink.org

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QUOTE UNQUOTE “In a letter to his wife in 1952, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘capitalism has outlived its usefulness.

“If you have got a teacher who has been

It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.’

teaching 20 years and they have a Ph.D.

Capitalism, by definition, benefits some and leaves out others. Is this what we want for our children?”

and a teacher who has been teaching

School-choice opponent Aaron Baker, an 8th grade history teacher in Del City

"Educators, please stop calling and “He’ll have 16,000 employees working against him.”

U.S. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), describing what it will be like from day one for EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt

emailing me upset about my vote on Betsy DeVos. I am not in the United States Senate."

two years—why should they get the same pay raise? ... Maybe the 20-year veteran deserves a $10,000 pay raise and the two-year teacher should get $2,000.”

State Sen. Adam Pugh (R-Edmond), quoted in the Edmond Sun

State Sen. Bryce Marlatt (R-Woodward), in a Feb. 8 message posted on Twitter

“The only political philosophy this neo-school complies with is corporatism, better known as fascism in Italy during the 30’s and early 40’s. The last fascist in Italy was caught and hung upside down as the Allies swept through.”

Blanchard school superintendent Jim Beckham, decrying the creation of a new charter school in Seminole. The state school board approved the school in an action Mr. Beckham described as a “state coup.”