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True to his campaign word, President Trump continues to pursue the reformation of our failing institutions of “higher learning” –– the long decay of which has earned them the scare quotes. Harvard, with international prestige (especially in Communist China), and the country’s largest tax-free endowment, is currently Trump’s Admiral Byng, whom the British Navy hanged “to encourage the others,” as Voltaire quipped.
For now, most universities are pitching fits over Trump’s reforms, and hoping lawfare and district courts can stop Trump and override the will of we the people––only 32% of whom, according Gallup, have confidence in higher education, almost half as many as in 2015. And they’re justified in thinking so, given that six decades of politicization and corruption have been turning the Groves of Academe into graves.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, former Nebraska Senator and University of Floria President Ben Sasse provides a list of citizen concerns “about the cowering before vandals and antisemites, about endless celebration of regressive identity politics, about administrative bloat and indefensible tuition hikes, and about the corruption of teaching and research—the nearly 4.0 average grades across the humanities, tenure rates of 80% and 90%, and a replication crisis in many fields.”
We should remember the latter problem whenever richly endowed, tax-free research universities use research “breakthrough” as a reason for keeping the billions of taxpayer dollars flowing. Maybe we need a Department of University Efficiency to identify how much of the scientific and medical research grants are rife with fraud, waste, and abuse––not to mention the soft subjects like the humanities and sociology, or politicized cultural fads like transgenderism and “systemic racism.”
Contrary to popular opinion, the decline and corruption of education didn’t start with the Sixties and Cultural Marxism’s “long march through the institutions.” Larger changes in Western Civilization had long before begun dismantling our Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman foundations and traditions in the name of “enlightenment” and “progress.” A secular, technocratic materialist paradigm began undermining and marginalizing old-fashioned, “retrograde” beliefs like truth, reason, common sense, spiritual reality, and the transcendent value of the human mind and free will.
An early warning came in 1926. During the tremendous changes of the Industrial Revolution, and after the enormities of the Great War, French writer Julien Benda wrote The Treason of the Clerks, those intellectuals and philosophers who influenced education. The vocation that they betrayed comprised the life of the mind, humane ideals, moral integrity, and the search for truth, all of which the “clerks” abandoned for “practical advantages” in order to fulfill their “desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action,” and to promote the idea that “politics decides morality.” Benda particularly focused on the antihuman ideologies “owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and national passions.”
Benda was prescient, for the politicization of our universities has tracked his description of the intellectuals’ betrayal. Marxism has “abased” knowledge and put “action” and activists in its place. God and faith have been discredited, and radical relativism and an imperious material determinism have usurped the transcendent reality upon which truth, reason, morality, virtue, and our very minds and humanity rely.
A consequence of such mutilation of our souls is that much of speculative philosophy became scientism, which takes dubious ideas like political ideologies and human psychology that are not suited to the rigors of the empirical scientific method, and disguises them in the quantitative procedures and technical jargon of real science. But that doesn’t stop them from co-opting the authority of science.
Here too, Marxism led the way: As Friedrich Engels said at Marx’s funeral, “Just as Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature, so did Marx discover the laws of human history” –– which in bloody practice turned out to be Thucydides’ maxim “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
Hence the arrogant conceit of Leftists that they are more intelligent than those who believe in traditional political structures predicated not on theory, but on experience and traditions about human nature and its possibilities and motivations. That dynamic explains the Progressives’ long disdain for, and assaults against the Constitution and its ideals like unalienable rights and ordered liberty.
Next, the denigration of the West and the U.S. has fostered a blatant hatred of the United States in our universities, nourished by Leftist intellectuals and professors who were rooting for the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War. This betrayal also predates the Sixties. It emerged in Europe as early as 1933, the year Hitler came to power. Winston Chuchill in a speech that year said, “Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. . . But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism and the promise of impossible utopias?” Nearly a century later, these observations are still pertinent in our universities and colleges.
Such fashionable self-hatred, moreover, also corrupted our universities by demonizing Western Civilization and its culture, traditions, and principle––the teaching of which historically has been the most important function of education, especially liberal education. “Liberal” in its original meaning concerning individual freedom. The assault on liberal education was publicized in Alan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind––and has worsened considerably since with the rise of “wokism.”
Bloom’s importance comes from his emphasis on what Matthew Arnold in 1864 called the “free play of the mind on all subjects,” and its importance to our Constitutional order: “By liberal education,” Bloom writes, “I mean education for freedom,” which means training students to seek the answers to the perennial questions of human value and human identity, and to resist the dominant “notions and habits” of one’s own society and culture: “A liberal education means precisely helping students to pose this question to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not available.”
The rejection of liberal education followed the rise of “multiculturalism” and its Cultural Marxist confection of “identity politics,” which reduces––with help from trendy, postmodern and poststructuralist “higher nonsense” –– ethnic diversity and complexity into a therapeutic melodrama of Western victimization of politically selected “people of color” at the hands of “white,” “cisgendered,” “privileged” males. In the process, identity politics marginalize the most important diversity of all: that of unique, individual minds and characters.
Yet university departments and curricula, as well as administrations have endorsed and institutionalized this malign narrative at the expense of traditional disciplines. New courses and programs, called “studies,” preceded by the multicultural tribal affiliation, have sprung up, and colonized General Education requirements, where callow under-classmen are taught little that is true about women, sexual-preference minorities, and “people of color.” Rather, they are exposed to bad myth-history, bigoted, preposterous theories like “white fragility,” and various other politicized content that serve the interests of partisan politics and power.
Moreover, these courses promote the erosion of merit; encourage censorship and “cancellation” of fellow students and “politically incorrect” professors; contribute to the epidemic of grade inflation, and as we’ve seen with campus protests in support of terrorism and genocide, which violate the civil rights of other students, especially Jews, several of whom recently have been violently attacked and some murdered, while the perpetrators chanted the genocidal slogans featured during campus protests.
What’s responsible for this malign transformation? Not just the Cultural Marxist’ “long march through institutions,” or the dumbing down of our schools from primary grades to graduate schools, or the spigot of trillions of taxpayer dollars, or the general trashy vacuity of popular culture, or the lupin careerism of faculty and administrators.
Rather, the 1978 Supreme Court decision Regents v. Baake, which contrary to the Civil Rights Act, allowed the consideration of race––itself a dubious concept––in admissions and hiring protocols. To perfume this violation, Chief Justice Lewis Powell invented the simplistic concept of “diversity” and put it into federal law, without empirical evidence that it is critical for the universities’ success in fulfilling their mission.
In reality, this vague, superficial “diversity” balkanized the student body into parochial identities, recreating the old Jim Crow “separate but equal” canard. And it turbocharged the decay of the curriculum into cheerleading “area studies” that marginalized liberal education and its “training for ordered liberty” and principles of equal rights and equality under law. Instead, it replaced those foundational tenets with the creed of Benda’s traitor: “to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action,” and to promote the idea that “politics decides morality” ––exactly the same violent spectacles we’ve been watching in our most prestigious universities.
These historical causes of today’s corruption have for several generations polluted our institutions of learning, whence they have spread to our whole culture. President Trump’s efforts so far are heartening, but as Gerard Baker has written, “The rot in many American universities is so deep and so extensive that a four-year presidency will be nowhere near enough to begin to reverse it through suasion, incentives and dialogue.”
This means We the People must make our voices heard now, and in the future, and demand that educational institutions, which have waxed fat on our tax dollars, revive their dying core mission to train our young for ordered liberty, without which we cannot keep our Democratic Republic.