The House Ethics Committee has hired attorney James Cole to investigate whether House Speaker Newt Gingrich violated the law in using tax-deductible money to support “Renewing American Civilization,” the televised college course taught by Mr. Gingrich and claimed by his enemies to be politics in academic disguise. If Mr. Cole concludes that it is illegal to use tax-deductible funds to support teaching that has a political purpose, there may be an unanticipated consequence: Institutions of higher learning will have to close down. Colleges and universities rely on charitable gifts; and on campuses across the country, politics in the classroom is not only acceptable but has become for many professors a point of pride. Prof. Richard Ohmann of Wesleyan University boasts: “We work in whatever ways we can toward the end of capitalist patriarchy. What we’re about is dismantling the corporate structure.”

At a recent convention of the National Women’s Studies Association, Prof. Vivian Ng of the University of Oklahoma announced proudly, “I do political work, both inside the classroom and outside it.” Lest anyone miss her point, she added, “My students came around and I converted them.” In freshman composition classes from coast to coast, many students are being taught not about the well-composed paragraph but about how deeply mired in racism, sexism and capitalism our nation is and about the necessity of transforming it into the vision of the left. Like faculty activists, Mr. Gingrich talks openly about having political aims--though his goals are quite the opposite of theirs: to train “200,000 citizens into a model of replacing the welfare state and reforming our government.” The history that Mr. Gingrich teaches is a mirror image of what the left is advancing. They paint a grim and gloomy picture of the American past, one that emphasizes failure and makes it seem that most of the faults of mankind have here found their most fertile ground. Mr. Gingrich, however, starts with the assumption that “this is a great country filled with good people,” and the 20 hours of “Renewing American Civilization” are for the most part an examination and illustration of this theme.

All Mr. Gingrich’s foibles come through in the course--his puzzling attraction to futurism, his reverence for Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive, his tin ear on some topics. But when Mr. Gingrich focuses on American history, he is a fine teacher, well read and passionate about his subject. He teaches American history as the story of individuals and is clearly fascinated by the people he talks about: Lincoln, parsimonious with words when the times called for volubility, managed nonetheless to convey to the ages the deepest meaning of Gettysburg; Edison, not only the father of invention but of persistence, conducted some 50,000 experiments before he successfully produced a storage battery. The speaker has the gift of being able to convey information he has no doubt known for years--that most Americans of FDR’s time had no idea that their buoyantly optimistic president had been crippled by polio, for example--in a way that makes the wonder of it seem fresh.

He tells these stories to emphasize the energy and genius that our democracy has unleashed by allowing people a remarkable amount of freedom. From the first arrival of English-speaking people until the 1960s, he maintains, we valued individual liberty because we knew that we were worthy of it. Around 1965, however, intellectual elites began telling us another story: that this is “a racist, sexist, repressive society of greedy people who exploit the poor” and that government intervention is necessary if we are to live up to our ideals. This “discontinuity” in our thinking is now ending, according to Mr. Gingrich, and the job at hand is to recover the values that the liberal welfare state undermined--the integrity, discipline and responsibility that have traditionally been the source of our strength.

There are clear policy implications to what Mr. Gingrich teaches, one of them being welfare reform that encourages work and family formation and emphasizes the moral duty of individuals to help their fellow human beings. One could call this partisan in that it is the thrust of the Republican welfare plan, but many Democrats embrace these ideals as well. Moreover, in making the various points that buttress his argument, Mr. Gingrich is as given to citing liberals--from Max Cleland to Franklin Roosevelt, from Gary Wills to Jimmy Carter--as he is to quoting conservatives. This almost certainly makes him less partisan that his peers on campuses, most of whom it is difficult to imagine saying anything kind about Ronald Reagan.

Mr. Cole, the special prosecutor, may want to compare the history that Mr. Gingrich teaches with history as it used to be taught at our colleges and universities. David Samuels, a humanities professor at Princeton, has pointed out that Mr. Gingrich’s views are much like those once espoused by “progressive” historians. Mr. Samuels is no friend of Mr. Gingrich’s (he calls him a “smirking menace”), but he nonetheless notes that in emphasizing ideas such as individualism, suspicion of government, and respect for merit, the speaker is squarely in the tradition of such luminaries as Charles and Mary Beard. Mr. Samuels notes this resemblance to make the point that current revisionist historians have abandoned the “vital center of the liberal tradition.” In showing how Mr. Gingrich is reclaiming it, he effectively devastates the case made by the speaker’s enemies that what Mr. Gingrich teaches is nothing more than conservative propaganda. One might call “Renewing American Civilization” political, but anyone who does should then explain that it encompasses ideas long valued on both ends of the political spectrum.

But even if one could argue that the course Mr. Gingrich taught from Kennesaw and Reinhardt colleges in Georgia--and that he used 501(c)(3) money to support--was a far-right view of history, when did that become a crime? Day in and day out, a radically left version of history is being taught on our campuses and supported by exactly the same kind of funds.