University President Thinks Law Requiring Study of Constitution is ‘Archaic’
This is a follow up report to a story we covered last week about the president of the University of South Carolina.
Hans von Spakovsky of the Daily Signal reports.
University President Calls Law Requiring Study of Constitution ‘Archaic’
University of South Carolina president Harris Pastides is refusing to comply with a state law that requires all public universities to teach students about America’s founding documents, including the Constitution, calling it “archaic.” In a bit of irony that is apparently lost on Pastides, USC claims the state law is itself unconstitutional.
Section 59-29-120 of the South Carolina Code requires students be taught the “essentials of the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers,” and goes on to provide that “no student in any such school, college, or university may receive a certificate of graduation without previously passing a satisfactory examination upon the provisions and principles” of those documents. A number of South Carolina universities do not require students to take such courses or pass such an exam—most notably the state’s flagship institution: the University of South Carolina.
When asked about this by a student at an academic forum in 2013, the vice provost of USC, Dr. Helen Doerpinghaus, claimed that while the university did not follow the letter of the law, it did follow the “spirit of the law” by handing out pocket-sized Constitutions on Constitution Day. Under this logic, the university must believe it could teach students chemistry by handing out a copy of the Periodic Table on World Science Day on Nov. 10.
Starting in December 2013, several concerned state legislators wrote to the university asking about this failure. President Pastides responded by saying the law was “archaic” and giving multiple reasons for the university’s noncompliance. He also claimed that about 60 percent of students take a political science or history class that discusses these documents, which, of course, means that approximately 40 percent of students don’t take those classes and do not receive a proper grounding in our founding documents and the principles that animate them.
University President Calls Law Requiring Study of Constitution ‘Archaic’ (The Daily Signal)
Comments
It shouldn’t be necessary to have a law to get law profs to teach the Constitution. The only reason not to teach the law of the land would be to have ignorant students. Failing to teach the Constitution means that those profs prefer to train traitors.
Archaic?
Hmmmm, I didn’t know that Article VI of the 1787 document had been repealed. At one time that Article had this provision, “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states [officers like presidents of state-owned colleges], shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution . . .”
So the very document to which a knucklehead like this guy has taken an oath to support, and which binds by oath all the lawmakers in Congress and the 50 states, plus all the enforcing officers, is archaic?
Amazing what you can learn in college today.
They are hoping that by NOT teaching the history and documents, and the follow on discussions that would follow, they (the colleges) can create good little drones who think that any law can be created based on whatever is politically fashionable.
Yea, that’s worked out so well for so many in the past.
(ugh)
There is a very simple solution in dealing with those administrators who do not follow the constitution of South Carolina – termination. Having taught at that level for many years, I can understand the reluctance of current faculty and administrators to teach the students what has happened in the past and how it relates to what is happening today. Current faculty do not believe in the free exchange of ideas. Academic freedom is being destroyed. The current profs and administrators will rue the day they destroyed academic freedom.