[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 119 (Thursday, September 10, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10217-S10218]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       GREAT MINDS, SMART GIVING"

 Mr. ABRAHAM. Mr. President, I rise today to call my 
colleagues' attention to an article by Dr. Samuel J. LeFrak, entitled 
``Great Minds, Smart Giving'' from the May/June 1998 issue of 
Philanthropy magazine. LeFrak is chairman of the Lefrak Organization 
and has been honored for his many years of philanthropic giving.
  Recently, through the LeFrak Foundation, Dr. LeFrak has done 
something incredible for the state of Michigan. Concerned that an 
emphasis on traditional liberal education at America's colleges and 
universities is diminishing, LeFrak chose to endow the LeFrak Forum at 
Michigan State University. This program focuses on political philosophy 
and public policy, helping professors to teach with an emphasis on 
traditional Western ideas. The Forum will accomplish this through 
lectures, conferences, research, publications and fellowships. The 
students of Michigan State University are very fortunate to have such a 
wonderful program and will undoubtedly benefit from it.
  As we continue our efforts as a nation to raise our children to be 
truly educated adults, imbued with the values of our traditions and the 
bases of well-ordered liberty, I feel we can look to the LeFrak Forum 
as an excellent model. I ask that the text of ``Great Minds, Smart 
Giving'' be printed in the Record.
  The text follows:

Great Minds, Smart Giving--A Noted Philanthropist On Reclaiming Academe

                           (By Samuel LeFrak

       When my wife Ethel and I began discussing a major gift to 
     an academic institution, we wanted to do something new and 
     off the beaten track of bricks-and-mortar, scholarships, and 
     endowed chairs. We also talked at length about the problems 
     of higher education and how we might help to solve them. Our 
     grandsons, Harrison and James, were just finishing college 
     and from them we had a pretty clear idea of the dismal state 
     of today's campus landscape. Both reported that the news 
     about political correctness and multiculturalism is largely 
     true. While it is surely an exaggeration to say that the 
     traditional liberal arts curriculum is gone, it is true that 
     an entire generation of graduate and undergraduate students 
     is being trained to a drumbeat critical of the Western 
     tradition as racist, sexist, homophobic, hegemonic, Euro-
     centric, and rationalistic (a vice, it now seems!). The path 
     to academic success is definitely smoother for those who 
     adhere to this fashionable view. The graduate students are, 
     of course, the professorate of the future and the teachers of 
     the coming generation of leaders in politics and business. 
     What happens in the seminar room, no matter how bizarre or 
     arcane, eventually makes its way to the boardroom.

       Now, Ethel and I have the deepest respect for the great 
     books and ideas of the Western tradition. If that tradition 
     is so bad, how is it that we have from it--and only from it--
     democracy, capitalism, the ideals of freedom, equality of 
     opportunity, and the dignity of the individual? To us it 
     would be nothing short of a catastrophe for this great 
     tradition to disappear as the focal point of a liberal 
     education. Yet the traditional curriculum definitely is on 
     the defensive these days: we hear of English departments 
     where Shakespeare is no longer required and history 
     departments that teach nothing about America. The faculty at 
     Yale could not bring itself to live up to the terms of a 
     generous gift intended for new courses on the Western 
     tradition, and had to return the money--with interest. So it 
     seemed appropriate that we use a LeFrak Foundation gift to 
     help assure the survival and vitality of traditional liberal 
     education.
       Ethel and I had been to Michigan State University a few 
     years earlier, when I had been awarded an honorary degree. 
     While there, we met a group of scholars of political 
     philosophy in the political science department. These 
     professors are very accomplished: they have fine graduate 
     degrees, are good and popular teachers, and have impressive 
     records of research and publication. But they are also 
     steeped in and respectful of the Western tradition and, 
     unlike many professors in the social sciences and humanities, 
     respectful of entrepreneurial capitalism and free-market 
     solutions to social problems. After prolonged discussions 
     involving these professors, Ethel and me, and my grandson, 
     Harrison, we decided to endow a program: the LeFrak Forum at 
     Michigan State University. Endowing a program--rather than a 
     building or a chair--met the criterion of establishing a new 
     and vital entity. The aims and activities of the Forum met 
     the criterion of doing something to help traditional scholars 
     hold their own against the current academic tides.

[[Page S10218]]

       The LeFrak Forum's theme is political philosophy and public 
     policy. The word ``philosophy'' often signifies airy 
     abstraction unconnected with the real world. But at the 
     LeFrak Forum, the idea is that much of what people think 
     about practical affairs is determined ultimately by deeply 
     embedded and barely conscious beliefs about what is good and 
     bad, just and unjust. The LeFrak Forum will approach pressing 
     and concrete issues by exposing the underlying and 
     philosophical foundations of conflict. The Forum will always 
     remind us that these foundations are not just derived out of 
     nowhere, even though most people--and increasingly more 
     scholars and students--don't know where they come from. We 
     get them--and hence the very terms of our debates and 
     differences--from the historical tradition of Western 
     thought. The Forum will not insist on agreement. Rather, it 
     will strive to expose the real grounds upon which we disagree 
     about such practical matters as how big government should be, 
     whether a person is first an individual or a member of a 
     group, and whether America should mind its own business or 
     police the world.
       The Forum pursues its mission by sponsoring an array of 
     activities: lecture series and international conferences, 
     research and publication, post-doctoral research fellowships, 
     and enriched graduate and undergraduate education. The aim is 
     to enliven, deepen, and diversify debate on campus and to 
     provide fresh views on public policy to those who lead in 
     politics and society and to those who form or influence 
     public opinion. But most important, the LeFrak Forum ensures 
     that at Michigan State the Western tradition will always be 
     studied and that free-market points of view toward the 
     solutions to social problems will always get a fair hearing. 
     But what about this ``always''? It is one thing to help 
     scholars or a curriculum one knows. In fact, it's important 
     to know the people involved so the gift gets used for the 
     purpose you intend. But it's quite another thing to have 
     confidence that the program one endows will continue long 
     after the people one knows are gone. This has to be a serious 
     concern for any donor who gives a permanent endowment to a 
     program or particular curriculum. Buildings and endowed 
     chairs are pretty stable. But programs can easily change over 
     time and even become the opposite of what they were at the 
     outset. Solving this problem was very important to us. The 
     solution was unique and, we hope, a model for what others can 
     and should do. The terms of the endowment agreement were 
     tailored to ensure that the purposes and spirit of the LeFrak 
     Forum would always be maintained. There were two crucial 
     issues.
       First, it was important to spell out the meaning of the 
     LeFrak Forum's goals in concrete detail. To this end the 
     agreement stipulates that free-market points of view must 
     always get a fair hearing in LeFrak Forum activities. The 
     agreement says that the Forum must always provide a venue for 
     arguments in favor of ``liberty and free enterprise 
     capitalism and the study of the Western philosophic and 
     intellectual tradition, especially as it establishes the 
     moral and conceptual basis for constitutional democracy, 
     limited government, the American Founding, individualism, 
     freedom of expression and economic enterprise, and 
     entrepreneurial and market based approaches to national and 
     global political and social problems.'' And lest there be any 
     uncertainty about what the ``Western tradition'' really is, 
     the agreement actually lists the specific authors on whose 
     works LeFrak Forum teaching and research must focus. They 
     are: ``such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, 
     Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Adam 
     Smith, Burke, the American Founders (Jefferson, Hamilton, 
     Madison, Jay, Adams), de Tocqueville, Hegel, Mill, Nietzsche, 
     Weber, Heidegger, and Strauss.'' This list is of course not 
     exhaustive; but no one could mistake who must always matter 
     the most at the LeFrak Forum.
       Second, it was essential to assure full academic freedom 
     and autonomy as those values are understood by the relevant 
     university officials. Donors to programs must understand this 
     concern. It does no good to exert positive influence on the 
     university curriculum by threatening academic freedom. Such 
     attempts will not and should not succeed. Furthermore, it 
     does no good to one's own cause to set up programs in which 
     the converted speak only to their respective choirs. That's 
     the very problem on campus these days: not enough real 
     intellectual diversity, not enough respect for all points of 
     view, too much lemming-like adherence to fads. The agreement 
     therefore specifies explicitly that ``all points of view can 
     and will be presented at the LeFrak Forum.'' Critics of the 
     Western tradition and capitalism will have their say. They 
     just won't go unchallenged. And finally, it should be noted 
     that while the agreement provides for our advice, it makes 
     absolutely clear that appointment and review of LeFrak Forum 
     personnel is determined by appropriate academic officers of 
     the University. Donors must never try to appoint professors 
     to their programs. That would violate institutional autonomy.
       Ethel and I are proud of the Forum, which is now in 
     business and off to a wonderful start. We're sure that it 
     will prosper and grow, make a real contribution to education 
     at Michigan State, and be a significant voice in national and 
     international policy debates. We hope that other 
     philanthropists will follow our lead and the model of the 
     LeFrak Forum. We hope they will endow programs that support 
     education in our precious Western tradition.

                          ____________________