Author Profile

George Leef

George Leef is director of external relations for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from Carroll College (Waukesha, WI) and a juris doctor from Duke University School of Law. He was a vice president of the John Locke Foundation until 2003.

Prior to joining the Locke Foundation, Leef was president of Patrick Henry Associates, a consulting firm in Michigan dedicated to assisting others in advocating free markets, minimal government, private property, and individual rights. Previously, Leef was on the faculty of Northwood University in Midland, Michigan, where he taught courses in economics, business law, and logic. He has also worked as a policy adviser in the Michigan Senate.

A regular columnist for Forbes.com, Leef was book review editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education, from 1996 to 2012. He has published numerous articles in The Freeman, Reason, The Free Market, Cato Journal, The Detroit News, Independent Review, and Regulation. He writes regularly for the National Review's The Corner blog and for SeethruEdu.com.

Articles by George Leef

Does UNC need to expand?

May 25, 2006 ·

When I first saw the email heading – “Could NC Wesleyan become a UNC school?” – I thought it was going to be a joke.

But as I read through the news item, I found out that several members of the General Assembly are quite serious about wanting to have North Carolina Wesleyan College be taken over by the University of North Carolina system. The idea is laughable, but they’re serious.

A provision was included in the Senate budget bill to study (at a cost to the taxpayers of $50,000) the feasibility of bringing this liberal arts college that is affiliated with the United Methodist Church into the big UNC congregation. Why on earth would we want to start ladling public money into a school that has managed quite well for half a century on funds raised from willing donors and students?

The Perils of Collegiate Philanthropy

May 11, 2006 ·

Large donations to colleges and universities have a troubled history, but nothing compares with the legal battle between Princeton University and the Robertson family. This fight has important lessons for anyone who is contemplating a gift to an institution of higher education.

Here’s the background.

Charles Robertson was a Princeton graduate, class of 1926. His wife inherited a fortune through her grandfather, the founder of the A&P grocery chain. In 1961, the Robertsons created the Robertson Foundation and endowed it with $35 million worth of A&P stock. The certificate of incorporation stated the purposes of the Foundation:

“To establish or maintain and support, at Princeton University, and as a part of the Woodrow Wilson School, a Graduate School, where men and women dedicated to public service may prepare themselves for careers in government service, with particular emphasis on the education of such persons for careers in those areas of the Federal Government that are concerned with international relations and affairs….”

Faculty Pay – Is Higher Education Being “Devalued?”

Apr 27, 2006 ·

Each year, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) puts out a study on faculty compensation. This year’s study takes on a somewhat alarmist tone. Its title, “The Devaluing of Higher Education”suggests that there is some ominous trend at work that could make “faculty positions less appealing for the next generation of scholars.”

The difficulty, according to the AAUP researcher, is that in 2005-06, average faculty salaries increased less than the rate of inflation. While average gross pay rose by 3.1 percent, inflation (measured by the Consumer Price Index) increased by 3.4 percent. That’s a pretty small erosion of purchasing power and since the inflation rate was unexpectedly high – it had been around 2.5 percent for several years – it’s hard to see this as a serious “devaluing” of higher education. Rather, it looks like a minor bump in the road. The study doesn’t say whether there have been years when average faculty compensation exceeded the rate of inflation, but that has undoubtedly occurred.

Is it Possible to Reduce College Costs?

Apr 20, 2006 ·

The Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education recently released several studies. One of them, written by Robert C. Dickeson, deals with perhaps the most frequently discussed college topic of all – does it have to cost so much?

Higher education is very labor-intensive, so if you want to find ways to lower costs, labor is the first place to look.

Dickeson points to tenure as being one reason why labor costs are higher than they need to be. The decision to grant tenure, he notes, carries with it a price tag that often exceeds $1 million. Its effect is to reduce institutional flexibility in two ways. First, if student interest in a field declines, the school can’t readily adjust; it’s stuck with a tenured professor even if students aren’t enrolling in his courses any more. Second, a tenured professor who is no longer effective – someone who is just coasting along, putting forth a minimal effort for his students – is hard to remove. Although tenure is not an absolute job guarantee, trying to remove a professor with tenure is a costly, time-consuming task that many administrators don’t want to try.

What should we do about college accreditation?

Apr 6, 2006 ·

College accreditation is a little-understood aspect of our system of higher education. Most people don’t know how it operates, but believe that accreditation is a guarantee of reasonably good educational quality.

Sadly, that is far from the truth. A college or university can be accredited and yet offer pathetically weak academic programs. A recent report issued by the U.S. Department of Labor tears into the accreditation system with surprising frankness.

In “The Need for Accreditation Reform,” Robert C. Dickeson begins by explaining that “The standards for accreditation…are based on an institution’s self-study of the extent to which the institution feels it has met its own purposes.” Since college and university mission statements are never couched in precise language about educational results, that means that accrediting bodies don’t focus on questions pertaining to the central point of college life (what do students learn?) but rather on peripheral matters.

Arizona Study Recommends Student-Grant System of Higher Education Funding

Mar 23, 2006 ·

On March 14, the Goldwater Institute, an Arizona think tank that favors market-based solutions to public policy issues, released a study that education leaders and policy makers in North Carolina should read and consider. Entitled “Cash for College: Bringing Free-Market Reform to Higher Education,” (available here) the paper argues that Arizona’s higher education system would benefit from the adoption of a new policy that would grant higher education money directly to students rather than appropriating funds to public colleges and universities.

The author of the study, Dr. Vicki Murray, makes a strong case that “Giving grants directly to students would expand their educational options and would help make the delivery of higher education in Arizona more efficient.” Undoubtedly, those are goals worth pursuing.

Should the American Bar Association accredit law schools?

Mar 16, 2006 ·

On March 8, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) issued a public statement calling on the U.S. Department of Education to oppose renewal of recognition of the American Bar Association (ABA) as the accrediting body for legal education. What is at stake is this: only ABA-accredited schools can currently accept federal student aid money. A law school that doesn’t obtain or loses ABA accreditation can continue to operate – and some do – but they are restricted to students who don’t depend on federal grants and loans to help pay for their expenses.

Obviously, the law as it now stands gives the ABA enormous influence over law schools. Since many of them would have a much smaller student body if they lost the students who need federal aid, they are as obedient as trained poodles to the whims of the ABA’s accrediting council. But so what?

The NAS press release explains why they oppose continuation of the ABA as the gatekeeper for access to federal dollars. Recently, the ABA has proposed new accrediting standards that would compel law schools to adopt “diversity” policies having nothing to do with educational excellence and which would sink law schools further into the morass of social engineering. “Unless the ABA eliminates all requirements of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity from its accrediting standards,” continuing to give it power to declare law schools acceptable or not is, the NAS argues, “inappropriate.”

Revenge of the Tenured Radicals

Mar 2, 2006 ·

The conviction that American higher education is a ship far off course and heading for the rocks was strengthened last week with the announcement that Harvard’s president Larry Summers had been pressured into resigning.

Since Summers assumed the post in 2001, the faculty – composed mainly of professors whom Roger Kimball accurately calls “tenured radicals” – had repeatedly quarreled with Summers because he didn’t fit their idea of a modern university president. They had already voted “no confidence” in him once and were preparing to do so again. Why?

A modern university president must – absolutely must! – bow down before the idols of the leftist thoughtworld. Those idols include the abhorrence of the American military, acceptance of the idea that the historical grievances of blacks entitle them to special treatment today, and the belief that discrimination is the only possible explanation for group differences. Not only did Summers not bow down to those idols, but he said and did things to indicate that he rejects them.

John McWhorter Versus Affirmative Action

Feb 23, 2006 ·

John McWhorter is one of the sharpest analysts of race relations in America. Born in Philadelphia in 1965 in a middle-class family, he earned a doctorate in linguistics and taught for several years at the University of California before accepting his current position as a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute. McWhorter rejects just about all of the “conventional wisdom” regarding race, especially the idea that the great obstacle to black progress is lingering racism.

When McWhorter engages a subject, he does so with relentless logic. I would bet that as a professor, he was known as one whom students couldn’t “BS.” In Winning the Race, his tenth book, McWhorter tackles a number of contentious issues revolving around the failure of many black Americans to advance and prosper despite ever-improving conditions in America. “It’s not that there is ‘something wrong with black people,’ but rather that there is something wrong with what black people learned from a new breed of white people in the 1960s,” he writes. That something is an attitude McWhorter calls “therapeutic alienation” – a preference for anger and scapegoating as opposed to the work needed for success.

Bringing Health and Fitness to the University

Feb 21, 2006 ·

The newly-installed Chancellor of the University of East Dakota at Middleburg (UED at M), Dr. D. Reginald Von Buskirk, was determined to make improvements at the campus. His predecessor had been content to collect his annual salary of $250,000 in return for a bit of tinkering with the curriculum to make it more relevant to students – the popular new Sociology course on “The Simpsons” had been his idea – but the school had mostly stagnated under his leadership. Von Buskirk was made of different stuff. The most important thing he had learned in earning his doctorate in education administration was that leaders must be bold. That idea had so overwhelmed him that he wrote his dissertation on it, “Leadership Styles and the Boldness Imperative.” His advisor had called it “the most inspiring twenty pages I’ve ever read.” Von Buskirk had a bold idea for UED at M.