Alpha College
By Lawrence A. Clayton
Published as A Fix For the Country’s Woes: Alpha College in Sunday October 25, 2015, The Tuscaloosa News.
In last week’s column I lamented the state of knowledge in the country. I promised to propose a fix. This is it.
We need to reexamine closely the values and ethics which gave this country its distinctive character. And then, before the collective memory of those attributes fades away into some corner of our memory, a footnote—like the fall of the Roman Empire—to appear occasionally on history tests, then we need to recapture that spirit and bring it alive into the twenty-first century.
Our curriculum no longer demands the classic liberal arts education, things we all used to think important, like heavy doses of math, history, English, foreign languages, even the elementary sciences.
The curriculum today is dismal as students flow through a politically correct system devised to please everyone, threaten no one, and pander to the lowest common denominator.
I propose establishing an “Alpha College” as the most challenging forum for teaching students the values and ways that made this country.
Does any doubt that we need Alpha Colleges across the country?
As I see it, the world is taking us. The signs are all around us. Most everything we buy seems to be made in China.
Our unparalleled lead in technology is eroding.
Cheating in schools is rampant.
There is in fact a culture of entitlement and mediocrity where there once was excellence and pride in one’s work.
We spent like profligates during the last generation. Not so long ago we saved and invested for the long haul, not for the short term gain.
We are the “evil empire” in wars in the Middle East that contradict our history and national values.
To change our culture we begin by changing ourselves, one by one. I am not offering a solution for all people, for all time. Here’s the way we begin.
Establish an “Alpha College” at any university wishing to take the lead. The curriculum of Alpha College will be decided by faculty and people in society whose values and accomplishments we admire. Alpha College will emphasize learning the fundamentals of our civilization just as in times past, and how to apply them, justly and wisely.It will not be a replica of any one curriculum from the past.
The first Alpha College Dean faces three tasks: one, identify those core values which make a successful civilization; two, study past educational tracks and institutions to see which ones encouraged and inculcated those values; three, create a modern track for Alpha College, one for the 21st century incorporating not only the best of the past but also the best of today into a package for the future.
That is what we are lacking, a vision of the future that lifts us up from simply existing (a job, a home, financial security) and accumulating (wealth, power, acclaim, fame) to one that looks with learning, discipline, and study to a future that truly lights our eyes with wisdom and pulls us forward with hope.
Discipline, hard work, and accountability will be cornerstones of the new College.
For that we need to reach back to the values that allowed us—a free people living under republican institutions—to realize our potential as human beings, and, two, to fashion the new frontier before us, invoking the best from the past, and the promise of the future.
We need both tradition and the future, Shakespeare and computers, history and nanotechnology, and we need to teach these with conviction and high expectations.
What will be the Alpha College curriculum? Alpha College will foster true thinking and a deep appreciation for the Western tradition (recognizing its flaws as well as its merits), but with a knowledge and respect for the other great traditions and civilizations of the world.
When—if—you get your diploma you will come away with two major accomplishments.
One, you will be an educated person.
Two, you will be prepared to compete in the global marketplace of ideas, economies, ideologies, religions, and politics. You will know that you have passed the most rigorous and demanding curriculum in the U. S.
The challenge is for some institution—great or great-in-the-making, national or regional, large or small—to make a reality of Alpha College and set the model in place.
Or, perhaps, an aspiring candidate for President could absorb and reflect the vision in his or her platform.
The King James version of Proverbs 29:18 shows us the wrong way: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
The parable of the sower in Matthew 13 reminds us, on the other hand, that “the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”
Lawrence A. Clayton was born October 5, 1942, in Summit, New Jersey. He lived in Peru for seven years. He attended Duke University (B.A., 1964), and earned his M.A. (1969) and Ph.D. (1972) at Tulane University in Latin American History. From 1964-1966 he served as an officer in the U.S. Navy on the USS Donner (LSD-20), cruising both in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean with the 6th Fleet.
He was on the faculty of the University of Alabama from 1972-2013. He directed the Latin American Studies Program from 1980 to 1992. He was Chair of Department of History 2000-2007 and was Interim Chair, 2009-2010. His specialties focused on Latin American history and the history of the Christian church. He is now Professor Emeritus of History. He retired in 2013.
He held two Senior Fulbright Lecturing Awards, one in 1983 to Costa Rica and one in 1988 to Peru. In 1983 he served as President of the South Eastern Council on Latin American Studies. In 1999 he held a year-long Pew Evangelical Scholars Fellowship.
Some of his publications include
- The De Soto Chronicles (Tuscaloosa, 1993). Prize winning.
- A History of Modern Latin America (3rd. ed. published as A New History of Modern Latin America ,University of California Press, 2017).
- Peru and the United States: The Condor and the Eagle (Athens, Georgia, 1999).
- Cleared for Landing: On Living a Christian Life (2008).
- Bartolomé de las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas (New York, 2011)
- Bartolomé de las Casas: A Biography (New York, 2012).
- Work and Wealth in Scripture (Eugene, Oregon, 2015)
- The Andean Cross: A Novel (Los Angeles, Ca., 2019)
- My Christian Prism or at the Port Rail (Bloomington, In., 2019)
- Three of his books have been translated and published in Peru and Ecuador.
He is working on the script to a new movie on the Doolittle Raid of 1942; and on several book projects, including his Memoirs. The best of his OpEds published in The Tuscaloosa News and elsewhere was published in 2019, as was his first novel, The Andean Cross,
He and his wife Louise have two daughters and a son, Carlton, who is a pilot with Elite Air, Tampa. Oldest daughter Amy Alderman, M.D. (UAB) is a plastic surgeon in Alpharetta, Georgia, and Stephanie Clayton Richmond, next oldest, is Executive Vice President for Papa Murphy’s Pizza in Portland, Oregon. Both daughters have two children.
Clayton has participated since 2000 in a Christian jail ministry program at the Tuscaloosa County Jail on a weekly basis, and his wife Louise is a licensed and ordained minister who teaches a Monday evening course on Christianity and the Bible to female inmates. They attend Victorious Life Church, Fosters, Al. Clayton also writes a weekly column, The Port Rail for The Tuscaloosa News that appears on Sundays in the Op-ed section.
In November, 2015 he was inducted as a Knight Commander of the Imperial Order of Charles V, in the Alcazar Palace, Segovia, Spain. In 2018, he was inducted into the Royal Hispanic American Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters in Cadiz, Spain
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels