The Breakdown of Higher Education

How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done

John M. Ellis

• Editore: Encounter Books
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781641772150
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Higher Education

A series of near-riots on campuses aimed at silencing guest speakers has exposed the fact that our universities are no longer devoted to the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of truth. But this hostility to free speech is only a symptom of a deeper problem, writes John Ellis.Having watched the deterioration of academia up close for the past fifty years, Ellis locates the core of the problem in a change in the composition of the faculty during this time, from mildly left-leaning to almost exclusively leftist. He explains how astonishing historical luck led to the success of a plan first devised by a small group of activists to use college campuses to promote radical politics, and why laws and regulations designed to prevent the politicizing of higher education proved insufficient.Ellis shows that political motivation is always destructive of higher learning. Even science and technology departments are not immune. The corruption of universities by radical politics also does wider damage: to primary and secondary education, to race relations, to preparation for the workplace, and to the political and social fabric of the nation.Commonly suggested remedies—new free-speech rules, or enforced right-of-center appointments—will fail because they don't touch the core problem, a controlling faculty majority of political activists with no real interest in scholarship. This book proposes more drastic and effective reform measures. The first step is for Americans to recognize that vast sums of public money intended for education are being diverted to a political agenda, and to demand that this fraud be stopped.

CHAPTER 1

What Do Those Near-Riots Tell Us about the State of Higher Education?

The public’s already declining confidence in academia has recently been jolted by a series of violent campus events, some of which could legitimately be called riots. Student mobs have prevented invited guests from speaking on campuses such as UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Middlebury College. On other campuses, faculty members have been subjected to harassment campaigns for expressing opinions contrary to the reigning orthodoxy. The denial of free speech in campus public spaces has become widely known, but while it is certainly an important issue, it doesn’t get to the heart of what has been happening to our campuses. In this chapter I want to go deeper into these events to examine what they really tell us about the state of higher education.

The assault on free expression in the public sphere is best regarded as a relatively superficial symptom of much larger problems that need to be understood and dealt with before we will ever be able to restore genuine respect for freedom of speech on the campuses. If tomorrow every campus in the nation were to start ensuring that visiting speakers are never again shouted down, the underlying sickness of higher education would remain untouched. We cannot understand the nature of the sickness until we ask: Why is free speech constantly under threat on the campuses? Why do shout-downs and near-riots now occur with such regularity? These questions lead to the broader subject of how higher education has been so thoroughly corrupted and diverted from its real purpose.

This nation’s major universities have always had much prestige, which is another way of saying that the public stood in awe of them. A Harvard University degree always transferred some of that institution’s prestige to the student who earned it, but during the last three decades the prestige of colleges and universities has been declining. People have become increasingly skeptical about them—all of them, not just the minor ones. A steady drip of stories about grade inflation, political correctness, identity politics, political advocacy in the classroom, trivialization of the curriculum, kangaroo courts, a dearth of classes that educate for citizenship—and much more besides—has diminished the respect that universities enjoy. Now the much-publicized shouting down of visiting speakers has dramatically accelerated the decay in the standing of academia.

Harassment of visiting speakers on campus is not really new in itself: for many years now, hecklers have been disrupting lectures by conservative guests. What has changed is that the disrupters’ behavior has become more determined, more spiteful, and more indiscriminate. Only recently have we seen a violent mob absolutely set on preventing a scheduled lecture from taking place, and willing to use physical threats and assault to make sure of that.

The threat of violence is of course not just about canceling a particular speech. The aim is to intimidate and discourage future speakers too, so that certain kinds of ideas will never be heard on campus. And these threats have been quite successful: campus administrations have often used the likelihood of violence as a reason for canceling a lecture. In so doing, they have been willing to reward mobs who threaten violence by giving them what they want preemptively. It’s easy to understand why violent mob action would be effective in causing vulnerable small-business owners to capitulate, but much harder to understand why university presidents would cave to extortion by their own faculty and students.

The series of events that have riveted the public’s attention began on February 1, 2017, with a riot on the Berkeley campus of the University of California on the occasion of a planned speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay conservative. Fires were set and buildings damaged ahead of the planned talk, which was then canceled. While that event was fresh in everyone’s mind, another at Middlebury College on March 2 raised public awareness of politically inspired violence on campus still more: the distinguished sociologist Charles Murray and a Middlebury College professor, Alison Stanger, were physically attacked as they left the lecture hall at the end of Murray’s talk, which protesters had tried unsuccessfully to stop by making as much noise outside the building as they could. Stanger was injured and had to be hospitalized. The mob didn’t stop there: they pursued Murray after he had left campus to go to a dinner with friends. Then, on April 5, Heather Mac Donald was shouted down at UCLA after she had finished only half of her planned talk, and the next day her talk at Claremont McKenna College was effectively canceled by another menacing crowd. In May, Evergreen State College descended into complete chaos after a group of black students had announced that whites should all leave campus for a day, and Professor Bret Weinstein objected to this attempt to discriminate by race. Both students and faculty harassed him so viciously that he and his wife were in effect hounded into retiring from their faculty positions.

By this time, the public was paying attention to campus thuggery as never before, and anxiety about it was growing. In the past, heightened public attention had often been enough to make campus radicals stop what they were doing, but now it was different: these lamentable events actually became more and more frequent. Later that year, Stanley Kurtz summarized what happened next:

The spring semester of 2017 will long be known for popularizing this fearsome technique of speech suppression. Remarkably, however, as we approach the halfway mark of the Fall 2017 semester, the rate of shout-downs is now nearly quadruple that of last spring. I count 19 shout-downs so far this year. At the current rate, that would make for 38 fall-semester shout-downs. This would nearly quadruple the 10 shout-downs of last spring, a semester already infamous for speaker disruptions.¹

What then do these events say about the overall health of college campuses? The most important issue that emerges in every one of them is the way in which the academy now deals with political ideas. The traditional academy specialized in analyzing them: it examined the pros and cons, the strengths and weaknesses of any idea, and looked into what the historical record showed of the opportunities and dangers it held. But what these recent campus episodes demonstrate is that advocacy has now replaced analysis as the central concern of the campuses. And not just advocacy, or spirited advocacy. Campus political advocacy is more than passionate. It is ferocious. It has no time for quibbles about pros and cons of different viewpoints, but aims to stamp out all opposition to a campus orthodoxy. It is completely closed-minded and intolerant, and vicious toward those who disagree.

In an earlier time, the difference between the political street and the academy with respect to political ideas was that the first dealt in advocacy and the second in analysis, but now the difference is that the political street deals in advocacy while the campus deals in violence-backed advocacy. Instead of being the reasoned antidote to everyday politics, the academy is now a more extreme version of it.

A common defense of these highly unpleasant campus incidents is that they are isolated cases not representative of higher education in general. That defense no longer works when it’s clear that the same thing is happening all across the country, in public institutions as well as private ones, in small liberal arts colleges just as in large research-oriented campuses, in fairly obscure institutions just as in the nation’s most prestigious campuses. It’s no longer possible to deny that we are dealing with a pervasive nationwide campus culture.

• • •

Before we reach any overall judgment of these events we need to ask: who is really doing this? In the aftermath of the riot at UC Berkeley some attempted to blame agitators from off campus. But the repetition of such incidents on one campus after another soon destroyed that particular excuse. Students are usually found to be on the frontlines, which has led to an assumption that it’s mostly a matter of inexperienced young people acting up. But students who were behaving badly on their own account would soon have been set straight by faculty and administration, and order would quickly have been restored. Pushback from those quarters is generally notable for its absence, however. If and when there is any at all, it is usually late, and minimal. Moreover, students were just as young and inexperienced fifty years ago, and they didn’t show this appalling closed-mindedness then.

Today’s students must have gotten those resolutely closed minds from somewhere, and it’s not hard to figure out the most likely source: their teachers. And indeed, a series of parallel campus incidents involving mainly faculty and administration supports this conclusion. These incidents leave no room for doubt as to the real source of the problem.

In the fall of 2017, Bruce Gilley, a professor of political science at Portland State University, published an article in the Third World Quarterly with the title: “The Case for Colonialism.” Gilley argued that whatever the motives of the colonialists, they had improved many lives, while the regimes that took their place have done a great deal of damage. The essence of his argument is contained in this sentence: “The notion that colonialism is always and everywhere a bad thing needs to be rethought in light of the grave human toll of a century of anti-colonial regimes and policies.”

Gilley was of course far from the first writer to note that colonial regimes had often been the means by which the benefits of a more technologically and politically advanced culture were spread to other cultures. His article was a careful exercise in weighing the negative against the positive effects of colonialism, which is a perfectly normal form of academic analysis. It has always been clear that there was at least something to be said on both sides of the ledger. How could it be otherwise in complex human situations?

But Gilley’s essay caused an enormous uproar. A petition demanding that the article be withdrawn gained more than ten thousand signatures. The attack on the essay was extraordinarily bitter and Gilley himself was vilified. The organizers of the petition were faculty, not students. Fifteen members of the editorial board of the journal in which the article was published resigned. Because the editor received death threats, Gilley agreed to the withdrawal of the article, though without recanting what he had said. (He published it again later in Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars.) The response to Gilley’s article was fully the equivalent of a shout-down and silencing of a speaker, done this time by very large numbers of his fellow professors. They insisted not only that he was wrong, but that he had no right to publish his opinion, or even to hold it.

What is important here is the particular way in which they expressed their disagreement with him. Academic people—professors and researchers—used to have a standard way of proceeding when they wanted to disagree with an argument like Gilley’s. They would have examined Gilley’s account of the benefits that colonialists brought to colonized countries, in order to show that he had exaggerated or misstated them; and then they would similarly have rebutted his account of the evils of postcolonial rule. That would allow them to argue that his general conclusion about colonialism was wrong because he had overestimated the positive effects and underestimated the negative ones.

That is the genuine professorial way of arguing: by careful analysis, with judicious use of relevant facts. But that’s not what Gilley’s opponents did. They wanted nothing to do with academic analysis. They began and ended with the political judgment that colonialism was evil, period. They would not permit anyone to say anything that was positive about colonialism, regardless of any facts whatever that might be called on to support it. Anything but a 100 percent negative judgment was strictly forbidden. Did India get railways, a common language that united the country, and democracy from the British—in addition to the hardships of colonial exploitation? You must not say it or even think it. The colonialists’ motives were evil, therefore every single aspect of their influence on a colonized country must be seen as evil, period. No argument or evidence to the contrary can be allowed, anywhere, anytime. Gilley had weighed the positive against the negative effects of colonialism, but his opponents said, in essence: you may only condemn colonialism.

What was truly astonishing about this episode was that here were literally thousands of people with professorial appointments who completely rejected the very idea of academic thought and analysis. They were so fully in the grip of a political animus that they would not allow anyone who didn’t share their political viewpoint to be heard. Their political zealotry was making them unable to think and behave as all professors should do. Their mental world was limited to what their political outlook dictated and what might advance their political goals. Political radicals are harshly critical of their own society, and they rate colonialism as among the most grievous of its sins. For them, historical fact can never be allowed to complicate or interfere with that fiercely held political opinion.

It is the job of academics to investigate such questions as how the more advanced cultures have spread technological, medical, and political innovations to less advanced cultures, often through conquest. Scholarly research must look carefully at complex historical situations that are always made up of many different strands, and must do full justice to all the factors at play. But the mob that went after Gilley had no interest in historical understanding. Their thought stopped dead with the political judgment: colonialism is bad! Radical politics stopped academic thought before it could even begin. What Gilley’s opponents demonstrated is that political radicals can’t be true academics, and yet here we saw thousands of them employed as professors in spite of their having no interest whatsoever in academic analysis and thought.

Gilley’s case didn’t get nearly as much public attention as the UC Berkeley riot did, but it was actually far more important, because it got to the heart of the problem on the campuses. The sheer number of professors involved showed that the betrayal of reasoned debate and scholarship was definitely not the work of an atypical few. On the contrary, very large numbers of college teachers were now so politically obsessed and so bitterly intolerant of other political stances that they could never provide the careful analytical thought and research expected of professors. This is the real source of the political obsession and mulish intransigence among students that resulted in the riots at UC Berkeley.

A number of similar incidents have reinforced the conclusion that campus closed-mindedness originates with college faculty who no longer behave like academics. They were clearly the driving force in the denunciation of Amy Wax, a distinguished University of Pennsylvania law professor. She and her University of San Diego colleague Larry Alexander published an article entitled “Paying the Price for Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture” in the Philadelphia Inquirer (August 9, 2017). Wax and Alexander recommended a return to some traditional values for groups that were currently in trouble:

Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

Off campus these prescriptions might seem rather obvious, but Wax and Alexander went on to spell out what all of this meant in a way that challenged the bedrock political beliefs of their radical faculty colleagues:

The loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups…. Would the re-embrace of bourgeois norms by the ordinary Americans who have abandoned them significantly reduce society’s pathologies? There is every reason to believe so. Among those who currently follow the old precepts, regardless of their level of education or affluence, the homicide rate is tiny, opioid addiction is rare, and poverty rates are low…. But restoring the hegemony of the bourgeois culture will require the arbiters of culture—the academics, media, and Hollywood—to relinquish multicultural grievance polemics and the preening pretense of defending the downtrodden.

In the context of the prevailing campus climate of political radicalism this was certainly provocative, but it was a point of view that needed to be reckoned with and countered with reasoned argument. Instead, the response was howls of outrage and an attempt to silence a heretic. An open letter signed by thirty-three of Wax’s departmental colleagues—about half of the faculty of the formerly well-regarded University of Pennsylvania law school—did not debate or contest the issues, in the academic way. Instead it “condemned” what she and her colleague had said, and went on to suggest that it was so intolerable that it might justifiably have cost her her job had she not had tenure: “Wax has every right to express her opinions publicly free from fear of legal sanction thanks to the First Amendment, and she may do so without fear for her job due to her position as a tenured faculty member at Penn.” This was also a strong warning to junior faculty without tenure that they had better not try saying such things. Worse still, the letter called upon students to inform on Wax, saying that if they heard expressions of “bias or stereotype” at Penn Law, “something has gone wrong, and we want to know about it.” Next, a letter signed by fifty-four graduate students and graduate degree holders piled on, accusing Wax of racism, bigotry, white supremacy, and hate speech. They even called on the university’s president to investigate her—and all for expressing an opinion that surely is widely held by ordinary people of good will throughout the nation.

Once again, it was Wax’s faculty colleagues who began this inquisition. The students were following, not leading. And soon enough, the administration joined the mob too. Wax’s dean told her that she would no longer be allowed to teach the introductory course that she had been teaching for some time. This happened to be a course for which Wax had recently received a prestigious award when her students were highly enthusiastic about her teaching. The grievous loss to student...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Preface
• Chapter 1 What Do Those Near-Riots Tell Us about the State of Higher Education?
• Chapter 2 Who Are the People Destroying Our Universities?
• Chapter 3 How Was It Possible for This to Happen?
• Chapter 4 Sabotaging Education for Citizenship
• Chapter 5 Graduates Who Know Little and Can’t Think
• Chapter 6 The Wretched State of the Campuses
• Chapter 7 The Campus World of Lies and Deceit
• Chapter 8 What Can Be Done to Restore Higher Education?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index