By Victor Skinner
EAGnews.org

GREENSBORO, N.C. – Entrepreneur Jim Van Eerden wants America’s college students to think for themselves, instead of automatically accepting the viewpoints of their politically liberal professors.

And he’s not the only one.

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Conservative parents across the country are begrudgingly spending tens of thousands on tuition each year to send their children to leftist schools where professors espouse positions that go against the grain of their core values.

The problem is nothing new, but Van Eerden, his son James, and his parents – Richard and Donna Van Eerden – have created a solution that will provide students with a more balanced perspective on important issues to counteract the liberal bias.

It’s called Free Think University and it launches on Memorial Day weekend.

“Free Think U promotes world-class, multi-media learning resources that make the case against politically correct opinion,” according to FreeThinkU.com. “We reward students with points toward scholarships for completing courses and other actions.”

Free Think University offers scholarships for college students in a variety of formats, but there’s a catch: in order to receive the money students must complete online courses that challenge political correctness and promote critical thinking.

“We think American higher education is shortchanging students right now because it’s too focused on a monologue of Orwellian group think – which manifests itself in political correctness,” Van Eerden told EAGnews.

Universities and colleges are “stifling dialogue that needs to happen. What we’re trying to do is engage students in active, meaningful dialogue.”

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Free Think University’s online courses are developed by experts in their field and touch on a wide variety of topics, including American exceptionalism, morality, population growth, faith and science, global warming, capitalism, hedonism, slavery, the Cold War, among others.

They’re what Van Eerden calls “the big questions.”

“What we’re aiming at is to be the largest independent college scholarship fund in America, and to be a community where students who are excited about engaging in the big questions gather, participate and qualify for these scholarships,” Van Eerden said.

“We don’t go live until Memorial Day weekend … yet we already have tens of thousands of students on our weekly opt-in email list.”

How it works

Free Think University offers two types of scholarships: “UP! Scholarships” and “Free Think U Scholarships.”

UP! Scholarships are paid directly from donors to their sponsored students, after the students complete a predetermined number of online courses of mutual interest. The donors can be the parents of the student, or anyone with a vested interest in their success.

“Mom and dad are paying a certain portion of their kids’ college, and so they’re just putting some strings on it and saying, ‘Look, here’s your portion that we’re providing, but this is what I want you to do to earn it,” Richard Van Eerden, Jim’s father and co-founder of Free Think U, told The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“It’s a hand up, instead of a handout.”

Free Think U Scholarships are public scholarships established by alumni of specific universities or by independent groups that are available to students who meet certain qualifications. Students are awarded “impact points” for completing online courses outlined in each Free Think U Scholarship, and by engaging in dialogue with others about various issues through social media.

Those who accumulate the most points by a certain date win the scholarship, which is deposited in their school account by Free Think University.

“We’re tapping into money that’s already moving,” Jim Van Eerden said. “There are billions of dollars moving every year (through parents to their children or alumni to their alma maters). We’re effectively giving them a platform to move that money in a more intelligent way.”

The courses themselves are developed with the help of leading experts in their fields, much like online university classes, but that’s where the similarities with conventional college courses end.

Free Think University’s courses typically consist of multimedia presentations that summarize both sides of a particular issue. Most are two to three hours of study, Jim Van Eerden said, and conclude by encouraging students to formulate their own position on the topic.

As students with UP! Scholarships complete courses, donors who sponsored them receive emailed updates that allow them to track the student’s progress and engage the student in meaningful conversations.

“The course topics are coming largely from our students and the material comes from subject matter experts who are focused on a particular topic,” Jim Van Eerden said. “Every course has a different partner and they help shape the core” of the material.

Disturbing trends

Van Eerden, a technology entrepreneur by trade, developed Free Think University with the help of his parents, son and others who recognized several disturbing trends in higher education.

“The first is a lack of intergenerational dialogue around big questions that shape our culture and our views,” Van Eerden said. “In our view, Americans have never been more generationally segregated.

“I think social media has exasperated that.”

The second trend is what Van Eerden describes as a “crisis of pedagogy.”

“Too much in education today has been dividing the teacher and the learner, instead of engaging people around questions and encouraging them to think critically,” he said. “All of our lessons are centered around questions.”

The current monologue style of higher education feeds into the third trend – “a crisis of cost in higher education and the diminishing return in value,” Van Eerden said.

Van Eerden explained that most students who graduate from college in America show no measurable increase in critical thinking from when they started, which means many students are learning what to think, instead of how to think.

“What’s so great about Free Think U is that it truly allows you to set politics and partisanship aside so that you can do your own thinking about issues that matter to you,” said Connor Doran, a recent recipient of a Free Think U scholarship. “The courses and community of students involved do an excellent job at reaching out to young people like me who are trying to hear both sides of the story, learning about points of difference as well as common ground.

“I want to be more thoughtful in my dialogue with others about the issues that shape our society and that’s why I am an advocate for Free Think U.”

Positive feedback

In the months leading up to Free Think University’s official launch Memorial Day weekend, more than 38,000 students from numerous colleges and universities have signed up to participate. A dynamic counter displayed on FreeThinkU.com shows donors have already pledged more than $226,000 for scholarships.

Scholarship winners named so far come from a wide variety of schools, including the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, University of California-Berkeley, Grove City College, Penn State University, Franciscan University, Harvard, The Citadel, Cornell University, University of Southern California and Ohio State University.

Just last week, Yale graduate and New York City private equity fund partner Charles Stetson pledged $20,000 to his alma mater to provide 10 Yale students with $2,000 each.

“I think it’s time that we find creative ways, like Free Think U, to reward students who are willing to engage in The Great Conversation and re-commit themselves to the ideals that have made this country what it is in the world,” Stetson said.

“Let’s create a conversation about really important topics, like why some communities flourish and other don’t, and see if that can help students as well as the institutions that we love.”