LITTLE ROCK — Higher education is not biased toward liberalism because academia has abandoned the true meaning of the word "liberal," according to Alan Keyes, a candidate for the Republican nomination for president and an assistant secretary of state under former President Reagan.
"I don't think there's anything liberal at all about the intellectual environment of America," Keyes said Tuesday night to a gathering at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock. "One of the great problems I've had throughout my lifetime is that this wonderful word, liberal, which has as its root liber, which as I recall means free, should be hijacked by folks who by and large have abandoned the idea that human freedom is possible."
Liberals have substituted for freedom notions that on one hand see our life "ordered by totalitarian and controlled environment dominated by government power" and on theother defined by an "anarchy of passion and unbridled will," he said.
Keyes was speaking as part of the Clinton School's Distinguished Speaker Series.
Keyes sought the presidency in 1996 and 2000. He lost to Barack Obama in a 2004 race for Illinois' empty U.S. Senate seat. He also lost races for Senate seats in Maryland in 1988 and 1992.
Keyes served as assistant secretary of state for international organizations and was ambassador to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations under President Reagan. He holds a doctorate in government from Harvard.
Academia has wrongly applied a scientific approach to knowledge, Keyes said, which denies the "very essence of our humanity." Viewing human thought and knowledge through a scientific paradigm, which is designed to "manipulate a material property," dehumanizes people.
"The moment I start to treatyou as if you are just a thing, you watch how nasty you'll get," he said. "And it's not just you, it's everybody."
We should be wary of people who want to apply the scientific process to justice, Keyes said.
"Evolution is about the priority of the last one standing," Keyes said. "If we applied that as a recipe for justice in human and social affairs, we would return to the worst kind of oligarchic, militaristic and barbaric violence."
The founding fathers didn't accidentally include reference to God in the Declaration of Independence, Keyes said. They understood that we claim our rights based on the "evocation of the authority of God," he said.
"Discard the authority and we discard the rights," he said.
Political leaders have little understanding of the foundation of the nation, Keyes said.
"We have leaders now who cannot even conceive of the true dimensions of these foundations," he said. "They stand next to them, these tiny little beings, patching up the cracks in the wall while the foundation crumbles and they are pathetic. They will not be adequate for the survival of this precious gift, which is our liberty."
Arkansas, Pages 12 on 10/24/2007