Gospel according to Newt

Every Saturday Newt Gingrich, Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, steps up to the podium at a small private college in rural Georgia to teach his course "Renewing American Civilization", writes Lucy Hodges.

His thoughts, which can best be described as anti-government conservatism, are beamed out of Reinhardt College, on the outskirts of Atlanta, via satellite to colleges and universities around America. They contain a mish-mash of traditional values, management theory and "third-wave" futurism. Mr Gingrich hopes, as a recent fund-raising letter put it, to "train, by April 1996, 200,000 citizens into a model of replacing the welfare state and reforming our government".

But Mr Gingrich's course is in trouble. The House ethics committee is investigating it, along with the Speaker's book contract with a publishing company owned by Rupert Murdoch. A complaint has been lodged by Ben Jones, Mr Gingrich's Democratic opponent in the elections last November, questioning the Speaker's use of his House office and political contributors to establish the course. Other critics are querying Mr Gingrich's aims in setting up the course, as well as his use of political allies to staff it and the way he plugs political contributors on the air.

Tax experts say that the way the course is funded skates dangerously close to the line of what is not allowed for a tax-exempt organisation. According to the law, tax-exempt bodies may not engage in partisan politics.

Mr Gingrich, a former history professor at West Georgia State College, maintains the course is a serious academic undertaking. In an interview with the New York Times, he said the course was not narrowly partisan.

"It's not narrowly electoral, but it is broadly political in the best sense of a free society," he said. "The current political process is so sick that attempting to talk in a serious way for 20 hours with an earned PhD is automatically dragged into the mud."

The Speaker gained his PhD in 1971 in the unlikely subject of Belgian education policy in the Congo, 1945-60. But it obviously taught him some lessons that are still useful today. His dissertion concluded: "It is now clear that the dream of technocratic planning had all too many limitations and so became a nightmare."

Mr Gingrich's course has been appraised by one or two academics. In the current issue of the magazine Lingua Franca, David Samuels, Mellon fellow in the humanities at Princeton, expresses considerable admiration for the Speaker's talents. He praises his "first-rate mind" but is critical of his use of tapes from corporate sponsors and contributors.

Samuels writes: "Much too restless to have made a good scholar, Newt Gingrich remains a riveting presence in the classroom, and he's never lost the professorial habit of taking his ideas to their natural limit, to conclusions that might surprise some of his Republican followers in Congress."

Much of the concern about the course centres on the way it was set up. The money came from people who had contributed to Mr Gingrich's political action committee, GOPAC, and action committee employees staffed it.

Initially it was to be located at Kennesaw State College, but there were complaints from academics that it was essentially political, so it was moved to Reinhardt.

Questions have also been raised about whether the contributors - who gave a total of $660,000 to its creation - were buying mentions in the classroom. For example, people who contributed $50,000 were entitled to register three students and work on developing the "Renewing American Civilisation" course. Anyone who put up $25,000 would be "invited to participate" in the course development.

Some of the companies and individuals which gave money, like the textile magnate Roger Milliken, are given favourable mentions in the lectures. Sometimes Mr Gingrich used taped material prepared by companies. All such innovative and entrepreneurial methods will be examined as the members of the House ethics committee probe aspects of the fund-raising empire often referred to as Newt Inc.