Sidney Hook believed the university to be a community of scholars bound together by the ties of civility and intellectual respect, pursuing the truths, the goods, and the beauties—multiple visions which inspire the life of the mind. Those who accept this conception, he believed, must dedicate themselves to help those misguided students and their allies who work to wreck the university.
It’s a metaphor for a state of social collapse and in which order seems to have broken down and it might seem as if chaos has taken over. On the other hand, it’s just a poem and thus just literature;
Anarchy, that is, and not “mere” at that.
He’s been dead now since 1989 but it’s possible to suggest what he would say if he were paging through the 310 pages of the recently released Harvard “Final” Report,” a self-study by a prudential task force on combating antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias at Harvard University.
That and other things which question the university’s ability to survive.
Professor Hook does not have Harvard in mind when he discusses academic freedom issues in his “Academic Freedom and Academic Anarchy,” a 1968 lecture he delivered at The Institute For The Comparative Study of Political Systems and Ideologies held at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In the lecture he references the contemporary example of the University of California at Berkeley, which was at one time the crown jewel of the California university system but had become a short hand for trouble if not anarchy. The public had come to hold the university not only in distrust but disgust. And for Professor Hook, in order to assess the events that caused Berkeley to become an embattled campus and its outbreak of lawlessness, one must be clear about the nature of academic freedom and the meaning of student rights.
Is it true, therefore, as Harvard’s current demonstrators assert, that Israel, a regime, is responsible for all the violence occurring on October 7, 2023? United, so to speak, these student groups express their grievances by draping John Harvard’s statue with a Palestinian flag under the rubric of academic freedom and student rights.
The proposal in this essay is first to survey the issues currently in front of an embattled Harvard University which seem to call into question whether such is legitimate academic freedom or academic agitation—or by name academic anarchy if not academic fanaticism. Surely Professor Hook if he were alive today would be in distress witnessing what he believes is not academic freedom but academic extremism and/or what happens when a university or college rolls over capitulating to the left.
Second, then, is some personal background from my own college experience, 1965, and what seems benign is with hindsight become over time adverse resulting in a new vanguard of interpretation.
Third: How The Political Imbalance Has Come About.
Fourth and finally, In Place Of A Conclusion.
First: Leftist Academic Ideology Challenges Israel’s Right To Exist….
I should mention here that the “Report” is not charitable. It will be difficult for Harvard to fix itself but the recommendations argue that Harvard’s Jewish and Israeli community deserve nothing less. The “Introduction” offers to the reader one example whereby a Jewish Harvard student was invited to speak at a forum hosted by students. He planned to describe how his grandparents survived the Holocaust and then migrated to a refugee territory that became the modern State off Israel.
To the student’s surprise, he was told that he could not speak since his family’s Holocaust narrative was not “tasteful,” a response that was hurtful.
It’s ambiguous as to what makes it not “tasteful.”
And so, why?
Because, the student was told, it’s inherently one-sided.
The “Introduction” goes on to mention that this experience epitomizes the circumstances and experiences of numerous Jewish and Israeli students in the period prior to and then after the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel.
Now then: Harvard’s motto is veritas, truth, which informs the university’s “brand.”
That involves defining its mission, its values, and unique strengths, and using them to guide all aspects of its operating from academic to campus life.
Harvard boasts 188 living billionaires and is the wealthiest academic institution in the world. The university boasts a total of 162 Nobel Laureates; Berkeley boasts 100. One might read such boasting as an argument that the university as part of its “brand” holds students to the highest most rigorous standards.
What if, though, the “brand” becomes tainted with Berkeley again as the example?
Professor Hook’s own intellectual autobiography, Out of Step, details the events of his career and his unquiet relationship with what he calls the “mob,” colleagues who lacked the moral courage to stop the outrages of the process by which universities and colleges over the years rolled over to the left and then even more to the left. Published in 1987 the book might seem academically quaint but is remarkable for his standing up against the strengthening new left.
The Harvard Final Report is again titled the “Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias.” It’s a self study inside of which one might find a delineating process by which academic freedom became over time academic anarchy. If I have it correctly, the report was compiled by a task force of 500 community members.
What was discovered and reported is good evidence showing lack of oversight in which classes were being taught denying historical facts in favor of political ideology, denying veritas. Some of this was reported in the April 30th Wall Street Journal noting that this argument included denials that the land of Israel owns no historical connection to that land. Curriculums were biased, scholarship compromised, devolving into anti-semitism increasing after the Hamas attacks.
Chapter Four is titled “Case Studies from Harvard Schools.”
It reads like a discovery brief.
Antisemitism and anti-Israel bias had been manifest on campus and listed in order of reported frequency.
Ostracism of Zionist and Jewish students also had been manifest and adversely affected their participation in classroom and co-curricular settings.
The report cites overwhelming examples of manifest politicized instruction that mainstreamed and normalized what many Jewish and Israeli students experienced as antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias.
It’s important to mention also that the “Report” owns an Executive Summary which begins with the argument that “Some across academia, including Harvard, have been engaged in a broad effort to show . . . that the relationship between modern Jews and any origin story in the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine is ahistorical [and this] polemical literature is contradicted by scholarship.”
The point being that the scholarship is flawed, deeply.
Each of these examples is delineated in detail and with examples in which Jewish students who showed support for Israel were tagged as objects of suspicion.
I should add that the numerous examples are far beyond mannered academic freedom and were reported in that same Wall Street Journal article including the “fact” that a good deal of classroom practice by non-tenured faculty was also linked to political advocacy which the report calls “laziness.”
I also should add that the “Report” begins with “A Note to Our Readers” but with this provision: The hope that significant reforms will be adopted but with very real concerns that the important work that was entrusted to the members will be undermined. And thus a sad commentary on academic freedom, and surely little regard for veritas.
Second Then: Looking Backward And A New Vanguard Of Interpretation….
When I began college in 1965 I was likely clueless as to who John Dewey was but at the beginning of that academic year, the first semester college student body was assigned a book to read. It was part of a semester orientation to have one common reading that would lead to conversations in dormitory rooms, in the student union, and well even in and out of class rooms: you know, sidewalk conversation.
And an interesting word, “orientation.”
And the book was Human Nature and Conduct.
In addition we were invited to attend a series of lectures by faculty members who would speak to an issue generally on some aspect of a philosophy of education which we were told offered an outline for the cultivation of thoughtful, critical reflection on democratic education, what it has been, what it might become and what it should become.
The “should” didn’t trouble me then as it does now.
I remember one faculty member who referred to this as an educational pragmatic process akin to planting seeds as if in a garden and in time shelling and tasting the fresh pea nuggets of knowledge.
I was a farm kid and liked the analogy.
And since it was pragmatic, the purpose was to “plant” democratic habits as if the receptive mind was a fertile territory in which to plant rows of organic vegetables.
There were vocabulary words like “empowering” and “nurturing” and “transformation” and “social justice” and this phrase I found confusing, “critical thinking.”
So, what was the point and what would come of it?
Upstanding young folk we read Human Nature and Conduct, where we learned that although he never cites Darwin, Dewey, a pragmatist at heart, believed in the certainty of change. Truth, then, is always evolving. Having noted that, Dewey refutes the notion that there are fixed and eternal notions of truth, first principles, wrong-headed notions hoisted upon mankind by Aristotle, et al.
And so another word, “pragmatism” which I learned to pronounce but had little education as to its meaning. So, since I had a new college edition dictionary, I looked for the word in that dictionary:
A philosophical approach that emphasizes the practical consequence and usefulness of beliefs, theories, or actions, judging their truth or validity based on their real-world effects rather than abstract or theoretical considerations.
Other words began to pop up like “epistemology,” a word I liked and used without understanding.
I learned more, however, which included the notion that pragmatism was a concept arguing that all philosophical concepts should be tested via scientific experimentation with subsequent claims that a concept will be true only if it is useful and by useful contributing directly to social progress.
One fellow lecturing referred to this as a “cash value nexus.”
He said it was a metaphor.
And if it doesn’t contribute to that “cash value nexus,” well it’s not worth much.
And another problem I was confronting was how all of this contributed to my understanding of ethics since another word which was being used in relation to pragmatism was “utilitarianism” and used in relation to ethics which I was led to believe were derived from individual preference.
And there was this catch-all: the greatest good for the greatest number.
And another guy stood up in chapel and made the argument that according to the intellectual methods of contemporary theology there was, in fact, implicit in human nature such a thing as a “will” to believe but it would be best if religion were to be set free from the many creeds and cults which had become fossilized. Better, rather, that religion be embodied by any kind of entity, so to speak, and what we know to be sacred is a quality of experience which can be used, pragmatically, to affect an orientation to life and will bring about a sense of security and peace found somewhere in what he called “the variety of religious experiences.”
And so that first semester went on, fall of 1965.
What’s left?
Dewey’s basic idea that moral knowledge is not to be derived from fixed systems of belief which then argues that we must not treat morality as something to be guided by immutable principles which had actually infected our thinking about morality.
OK: Since all things are constantly changing there are no moral truths, ideals or absolutes, that should guide our conduct.
Ah but: What’s the behavioral result when young people are being “sanctioned” to think about morality as satisfying or not satisfying needs and wants as if the whole is some kind of biological function? How do we learn and base our conduct on how real human beings might treat each other when the basic premise in Human Nature and Conduct teaches little about charity, empathy, kindness.
Where are the moral lode-stone stars that guide us and what results if we are taught that we do not need to steer our lives toward them and guided by custom and the wisdom stock-piled over the centuries?
What those young folks were being taught—not surprisingly—is a critique of conservatism salted and peppered with a strong anti-authoritarian streak and in which conventionality is the stupid foe.
Why not teach this? Why not give free reign to all impulses; reform, tinker, experiment, and sweep away all instructions and create a culture not run by custom but rather by love, brotherhood, justice, all guided by experimental reason and evolving like beavers, birds and bees.
It was called “freedom.”
It’s all very coy, is it not?
I know today, however, that the “orientation” adventure was the result of systemic change by young leftist-leaning professors, a generation different from the senior faculty who out of good faith were involved in hiring this new cadre.
My understanding these days is that the camel’s nose was under the tent which at the time might have seemed harmless but actually led to much larger consequences, small concessions which might lead to negative consequences.
Those leftist-leaning young professors in time, and when they became the senior governing faculty, hired leftist-leaners farther left than they which suggests that the camel and tent analogy is accurate since the process opened the door for larger, clearly undesirable, consequences.
Well, even if I were consciously unaware, more likely the intent was to persuade this very young audience that literary interpretation (and thus literary creation) can also never take place in isolation from its political context.
Here, then, was the issue: as young people, we may have been accustomed to interpret “books” from our cultural tradition which we used to understand what we read.
Well, so what?
Let’s say that books from the past belong to a culture that is culturally so different from our present culture. With that in mind, so goes the argument, history and literature are not a single collective but portray socio-political conditions and ideologies peculiar to their own time.
If that’s the case, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Augustine’s Confessions highlight their own historical time but are not applicable in our own time unless there are deeper socio-political issues not apparent through surface-level readings.
Well, surely the point was to develop in the college students a political consciousness which would lead to an understanding as to how our lives are shaped by “systems” which would include every day issues like poverty and inequality. That might require sitting around in a large circle and debating, or dialoguing, about how our economic system thrives on a steady supply of cheap labor by maintaining poverty. The health care system locks out the poor and keeps them irritable. The issues are systematically perpetuating.
There is need for systemic change.
Thus if enough young people have their political consciousness raised, well, the consequence might be that we can live better lives without capitalism. Individual effort will not be enough. What will be needed is a profound psychological transformation ridding the many of a false state of political consciousness.
Well, with hindsight the aim was to begin a decade or decades of radical political change.
But directed against, what?
Social oppression for one and contemporary modes of thought which created (if even surreptitiously) non-integrated minorities, modern consumerism, mass media advertising leading to false needs and all of which was defined by Herbert Marcuse in his One-Dimensional Man published in 1964 and which was another book just floating around and which was touted for its manifesto for oppositional thought and behavior promoting radical thinking.
And again, so what?
How better to define the mid-1960s and following as “the age of oppositional thought”?
And the rejection of the notion that education concerns the transmission of a body of knowledge established and worthy of investigation and about which Matthew Arnold argued was the best the world has thought seen and known.
I suspect the hope would be “transformative,” that students would become advocates of Dewey’s social psychology as outlined in his Human Nature and Conduct, that book we again were obliged to read.
And if a successful transformation, the consequence would be a new vanguard of interpretation with the additional argument that former readings, say Augustine’s City of God, would no longer be applicable such readings creating a form of false consciousness.
And so off to the dust bin with the classics.
It was a labor and as I recall many students of my familiarity found it impossible to understand just what Dewey was arguing.
But there was some terminology that began to be bandied about with a certain coyness by a cadre of students I came to realize were “non-traditional” whose standards, if that’s the right word, were activist and progressive and leftist.
A caveat then about a manifesto about which I knew nothing but the cadre did and they were fond followers of a smallish circle of new professors in history and political science and social science.
The manifesto is a 25,700 word statement best known as the “Port Huron Statement” which emerged from a “retreat” by a group known as the Students for a Democratic Society whose mantra was that the torch was being passed to a new generation; thus let the word go forth into this time and place.
One might best call the document first a broad critique of the contemporary political and social system which would require transformative change in the American system which would come about through nonviolent civil disobedience as the means by which students could bring about in pure form the concept of participatory democracy.
It was not a new concept but derived from the ancient Greeks but the argument here was that the inclusion of the public in the activities of decision-making had eroded leading to the notion that various “classes” including college-aged young people had been disenfranchised.
If asked if I had been so I would have been confused.
So, what was becoming transformative could be summarized under the term “political science” contrasted with “political philosophy” which was thought to be un-disciplined.
Apart, then, from Dewey and others, the cornerstone, if that’s the right word, arises from the word “citizen” as articulated by John Jacques Rousseau and the educational thought in his Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract books to be read in Politics I and Sociology I.
I didn’t know it then but I know it now that the consequence was an increased focus on subjectivity and more introspection and more grievances.
Which led to that moment second semester 1966 and a scheduled concert by the Marine Corps Band and a litany of patriotic songs and the blessings of liberty and so on.
What to do?
Well, protest and hope to chase those horn tooting war-mongers out of town.
Did it work?
No, frankly, and it was a superb concert held in the wonderful comfort of the college chapel where sound reverberates beautifully aided by the voices of so many who packed the place.
A dozen or so non-traditional student folk “felt” themselves proud with let’s say their contemptuous language while marching around the campus sidewalk outside the chapel.
And so we know a slow ferment was in the offing and on to Chicago summer of 1968 and law and disorder and the whole sometimes referred to as the meeting of two Americas what with bitter fighting among the delegates in the arena and the activists outside protesting.
It was in my memory a year of shock and one in which dozens of cities burned.
Turn we then again to Professor Sidney Hook who in 1968 was very concerned about the patterns of thought and action described as a “grave challenge to the stability and continuity of the American tradition of freedom and social progress under law.”
Three: How The Political Imbalance Has Come About
There are demographics illustrating that the 1950s were witness to a developing political imbalance among university faculty which pointed to an increasing trend among younger faculty identified as “left-leaning.” In attempts to gain more comprehensive information, later surveys intending to define faculty experience, respondents were asked to self-identify their political orientation. What’s curious is that the liberal and/or far left increased incrementally over the 1950s and 1960s which suggested in turn methodological problems which further suggested serious ideological discrimination in how academic advancement was administered especially in the humanities and social sciences.
One question, then, is whether there’s evidence that the political inclinations of faculty members affects the political attitudes of students.
The problem is compounded by the “fact,” so to speak, that most college students who matriculate into college are at the beginning more liberal than not. The end game difference seems to occur when those liberal students were more likely to choose academic careers rather than conservative students more likely to choose business careers.
One by product has been the tendency for conservative speakers who arrive on campuses and have been greeted with hostility, some times extreme.
It’s been in the news.
Here’s a personal case on point:
I was asked a few years back to teach a continuing education class to a mixed group of college students and an array of senior citizens. I thought to spend the semester with a survey of one of my favorites, Wendell Berry.
On the first day of class I spent some time going over the syllabus and thought to explain something about myself and my general outlook on, well, life. “I’m a cultural conservative,” I said, and one of the reasons I had been drawn to Wendell Berry is because of what I said were shared cultural interests which I hoped the reading would illustrate.
One of the more senior of the students then loudly voiced that she was a retired law professor from Case Western and had the opinion that all conservatives that she had known needed at last a half-dozen years in therapy. She then flounced out of the classroom while announcing to one and all that I had just spoiled Wendell Berry for her.
That was personal to me since I do not recall any moments in which I struggled with mental illness and have no diagnostic history of schizophrenia. A few mild delusions only.
Well, given a bit of time we might have found common ground on some issues but the disconnect had occurred and had she remained in the class her vocal interventionism might have been more noisy than not and purposely meant to contradict anything if not everything I might say.
Tough to teach a class when every session becomes an exercise in rhetorical fencing: parry, riposte, points scored.
But impinging on my academic freedom if not abolishing while perpetuating a heavy-handed “bruting”: if that’s the right word.
I did not suffer her absence from the remainder of the semester but did avoid her in the hallways, ducking into the men’s when my alarm bells began ringing.
*****
As mentioned above, in 1968 Professor Sidney Hook was asked to deliver an address to The Institute for the Study of Political Systems and Ideologies at the University of Colorado.
The address is titled “Academic Freedom and Academic Anarchy.” It’s prefaced by an Introduction by Edward J. Rozek, at that time Director of The Institute for the Comparative Study of Systems and Ideologies at the University of Colorado.
His argument? The climate of thought and action must change. The developments on college campuses in the 1960s pose a grave challenge to the stability and continuity of the American tradition of freedom and social progress under law.
Professor Hook was at that time a Professor in Philosophy at New York University. I came to know his work best in his book The Hero in History first polished in 1943 but also for the manner in which his later book, Out of Step, surveyed his changes in political alliances leaving him “out of step” with his professional colleagues whom he argued lacked the courage to stand up to numerous contemporary outrages.
Over time he abandoned his early enthusiasm for John Dewey and other leftist leanings while remaining pragmatically faithful to Pierce and James and their pragmatic theory of knowledge which would take time to discuss but in a nutshell it’s a theory arguing that the attainment of knowledge is important for human activity which aided one’s interaction with the environment which also means the ability to control and predict.
He became what’s best known as a “Neo-Conservative” and thus opposed to Communism and radical politics. A Neo-conservative is sometimes defined as a spine-less liberal mugged by reality.
And so, according to some, Professor Hook’s conversion is a bit disquieting, such “advice” coming from what has come to be called “Paleo-Conservatism.” There are also references with some frequency that Neo-Cons are usually Jewish and therefore stringent in defense of Israel. On the other hand, there’s a compelling story about the development of Neo-Conservative Catholic thought in the 1970s and 1980s which covers a wide spectrum relevant to contemporary Catholicism and American politics. [1]
What’s puzzling is his early defense and interpretation of Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism but becoming in time a very vocal critic of the New Left and then in time described as a cultural conservative if not a Neo-Conservative.
Professor Hook begins his address by arguing that the “twentieth century has been called ‘the century of revolution’” to which he adds “the academic revolution” which might better be called the “academic counter-revolution.” Whether it was a generational revolt or flare-up against all authority was/or is yet to be seen but expressions of student discontent must be causally related to sources of that discontent.
In the case of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, students were protesting against political controls by a totalitarian party. And rightly so.
In Great Britain, the protest was against proctors who enforced arbitrary rules such as the wearing of academic gowns or the observance of curfews.
Much ado about nothing.
As for American students, however, Professor Hook argues that there is little from the European scene illuminating the grievances of those American students. Rather student behavior seems to have created a crisis of confidence in the academic life of the country’s universities.
He cites again as an example Berkeley which at one time was the crown jewel in the California university system but had become a shorthand for trouble.
The public had come to hold the university not only in distrust but disgust.
For Professor Hook, in order to assess the events that led to an embattled campus and its outbreak of lawlessness, one must be clear about the nature of the university, the nature of academic freedom and the meaning of student rights.
He turns, then, first to the issue of academic freedom which he notes is less than a century old and an import from Germany and which was at the time defined as freedom to teach and freedom to learn. “Bruited about,” however, when first introduced into this country since little attention was paid to the notion of freedom to learn. The founding fathers of the AAUP paid scant attention to freedom to learn and were more concerned with freedom to teach.
To save on economy and time in his lecture Professor Hook notes that he had at one time defended academic freedom as the freedom of qualified persons to inquire, discover, publish and seek to teach the truth as they see it in their areas of special competence by all rational methods.
He adds that the phrase doesn’t say the right or freedom to teach the truth only the freedom to seek the truth. The difference is not moot. To teach the truth opens the door to the possibility of error which has no rights at least until an issue is decided in the light of evidence and argument. No one can properly claim to be infallible or to possess the absolute truth.
Professor Hook advances his argument by noting that academic freedom is not a civil right but it is a right of professionally qualified persons and a right that has to be earned with the provision that academic freedom does not mean immunity from criticism, vigorous criticism.
What then would make an academic professionally qualified?
Suppose such an academic became a member of the Communist Party or the Klan or any such organization which gave him instructions to slant his position in the classroom which would mean to indoctrinate the party line. Academic freedom asserts that such a person should be disqualified as a teacher.
The same would be the case should a history professor slant 1930s and 1940s European history by arguing that the Holocaust is an historical fabrication.
The reason?
There is no academic right to conspiracy which in turn means that no member of any group engaging in unprofessional conduct in the classroom or on campus is entitled to the protection of academic freedom.
And which, he notes as a sort of by-the-by, is sure to be invoked when an academic is exposed as a member of such bigoted groups.
What’s a penchant for a taxi driver is not so for an academic unless, well, the theory turns out to be true.
It’s not the same as committing a crime, so to speak, but when such comes to the forefront, as if it were a crime, after a hearing in which the academic person would have an opportunity to rebut the evidence which if validated would result in disqualifying that academic person as a teacher.
Whether this principle is these days recognized by all accredited institutions of higher learning is unclear or has become a mere historical perspective dismissed these days and thus less institutional orthodoxy and more from what might best be called “student freedom.”
Professor Hook then adds that in 1968 there are few threats to academic freedom but where there are threats substantially they come from students.
How, though, is this possible?
He phrases his argument this way: Freedom to learn is a basic human right and has not been disparaged in this country. There’s freedom to to attend the kind college one finds congenial and declare a major that meets one’s needs and with a course of study that fits those needs and even extra-curricular needs or tastes.
And above all, academic freedom for students means the freedom to challenge, to contest, to dissent, to debate within the context of intellectual inquiry, which also means American students are much more free than students in the past.
Equally so is the argument that the freedom to learn is implicit in the moral promise of democratic diversity.
So, there’s an agenda of study and items of action but it doesn’t mean that the university must launch itself on a crusade for the reconstruction of society which would transform the university into a political action organization and divert it from its essential purposes of intellectual discovery.
And therein, so to speak, is the “rub.”
It’s a potent argument: action by a university believing it must launch itself into a crusade for the reconstruction of society and supported by the argument that a university cannot be indifferent to the problems of society; indifference is not possible.
And there’s no argument that a university should not explore problems that are part of the social world. But to explore does not mean to indoctrinate and if I may for a moment recall the opening paragraphs to this article, well, the readings from Dewey to Fletcher to Marcuse were liberally meant to create a new vanguard of interpretation and thus raise the political consciousness of a student body.
But to do so would mean to argue that our current political society stifles “critical thinking” and “dissent.” Thus without some kind of challenge to the status quo the consequence is a sort of one dimensionality in students who are integrated into the “system” through false needs and a lack of critical awareness.
So said Marcuse who adds that the absorption of individuals into the prevailing ideology undermines the possibility of revolutionary change and radical transformation.
As I recall from that orientation process lo those years ago, there was an overt emphasis on the failure of the “system” to serve our best interests. Unable to revolt, well, without critical thinking the enslaved would not recognize that they (or we) were able to realize that they (or we) are in fact enslaved.
Prior to reading Marcuse, however, there was little reference to the Frankfurt School or the emergence of the New Left
No, it was much more subtle than that.
Professor Hook then argues that such a course of study in depth provides no ground for a university to reform or revolutionize society to solve these problems. If such becomes the case, a university which espouses one particular solution would become as partisan biased as any other action group that urged special political actions on a community.
The primary purpose of a university education would soon be lost and more to the point the university would be compelled to silence those faculty members who disagreed with the university’s ideology and campaigns for action.
What the public would then perceive would be scholars engaged in a struggle for power completely unrelated to their quest for the truth.
Here’s where professor Hook makes an important distinction to avoid what he calls persistent confusion and misunderstanding.
There are venues in which a university can take an official position and make a public commitment especially when those goals and objectives are related to its educational mission.
Assume for a moment that there is public concern and discussion about why shares of the country’s resources should be devoted to higher education. The university should make its voice heard since implementing its educational mission depends upon a budget amiable to it. Such an assumption is of genuine concern and with the consensus of the faculty but in no case should the university become a political instrument pressuring the community to act in a controversial context.
At that moment ins his lecture, Professor Hook makes note that the whole strategy of the Students for a Democratic Society was to make the university into a revolutionary action organization collaborating with totalitarian ideology to further a particular cause: destroy democracy and convert the university into an instrument for revolution which in turn would mean self-destructing the university and replacing such with far left stratagems.
On every campus there are always legitimate grievances but instead of peacefully seeking to resolve these through channels of consultation and deliberation what is actually found are ungovernable ways to inflame those grievances often without fact.
He cites an example in which the SDS offered advice to chapter members to sign up for certain courses and to overload the number and then denounce university for its large classes.
He adds that freedom of speech and freedom of dissent are never the real issue. What is called dissent is actually confrontation which is a euphemism for violation action.
But why?
What one ideologically finds in Dewey and Fletcher and Marcuse is a reaction against the social and political status quo. Given such an ideology time to ferment even over years and the result is again an effort to convert the university from an active agency of conservatism to one of revolution by, in an unusual sort of way, creating justification for lawless behavior by this “new” vanguard of interpretation.
What are the casualties?
The first is academic freedom under the fabrication of intellectual tolerance.
Here Professor Hook argued that the Crypto-Stalinist Marcuse was given extraordinary resonance, sounded at Berkeley, and found a focal point at Columbia. Young people who came to the university to get an education unwittingly found themselves part of a “movement” in which they set themselves up as authority as to what was educationally permissible.
In the background is a history that made academic freedom possible but in time was fueled by demagogic rallies which led to traditional academic freedom becoming completely destroyed. Professor Hook argues that many young people owning a human nature that is malleable were coerced into acting against what surely should have been better judgment.
Which is not to say, Professor Hook acknowledges, that there are instances which students might properly believe are legitimate and likely justified.
Having said that, to regard student rights as the right to seize university buildings, hold administrators captive, shower others with foul abuse, ransack files filled with letters, and even resort to arson, well, the effect is obvious.
Think of it this way with this piece of history:
On August 24, 1970 at 3:42 AM, Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin which housed the Army Mathematics Center was bombed by what has come to be called The New Year’s Gang. A Ford Econoline was filled with 2000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. A physics professor was killed.
The purpose of the bombing was to protest the Vietnam War. As it was, however, the Mathematics Center had little if any military role and existed largely to pursue pure mathematics.
And this example also:
One professor at Columbia who spoke out against the protestors had ten years of research burned which is much like German Storm Troopers who acted against Jewish professors when Hitler came to power.
One other particular episode stands out as a symbol of the revolt:
David Truman, known as a warm and caring leader and long a political philosophy professor at Columbia and who worked to open channels of communication between students and faculty and who received a standing ovation at a commencement exercise and while walking to his office a student strolled up to him and spit in his face.
It’s unclear what the student’s strategy was or what particular grievance he owned.
What is it other than a marker as to how language and action devolved into the gutter and invaded the academy.
The student in 1968, although known, remained unpunished.
Professor Hook also cites the reply Tom Hayden gave to Gore Vidal during a television debate in which Hayden was asked about the goals of the revolution he and others were preaching to students. Hayden responded crisply, “We haven’t any! First we’ll make the revolution and then we’ll find out what for.”
Professor Hook properly refers to this as the politics of absurdity and as “crimes.” He goes on to argue that those liberals are persons who believe they can be liberal without being intelligent.
If and when faculty support such efforts, well, the result is a violation of academic freedom, free speech, and academic manners as well as academic morals. And to speak of such activity as an example of democratic rights is to invoke a mockery.
In prescient fashion, Professor Hook then notes that when confronting these arguments, faculty and administration too often made tactical errors when dealing with lawless behavior. And lest we are naive, it’s important to a note that what has been happening at Harvard is not a local aberration.
If Professor Hook were still with us he might as well have argued these days that if the university is supporting these goals, the university has become faithless.
He then turns his argument to students who tend to think of their protests as acts of civil disobedience which is less a legitimate act than an illegitimate act which has become a political means of obstructing the freely determined decisions of the majority. Civil disobedience is not a means to get one’s own way but confused by the fabrications of Dr. Spock who encouraged civil disobedience and which led those who were then encouraged to evade the legal consequences of their actions in strict contravention of the true principles of civil disobedience.
Thoreau never ran for the hills and Socrates never used dialectics as evasions to escape his punishment. Furthermore, participatory democracy run riot is illustrated in that novel of juvenile cruelty and tyranny cowing the majority into acting against its better judgment. [2]
Let me pause for a moment and ask a question which Professor Hook would have found interesting: When did antisemitism emerge in our colleges and universities and why. Or is it just a current sort of temporary flare-up?
Evidence suggests that examples have appeared over the years: Jewish students forced in class to stand in a corner; a professor arguing that the Holocaust was really not all that bad.
As it turns out, it’s been pervasive for some time and well before the Hamas attack on Israel.
What’s interesting is the number of colleges and universities who hold Israel responsible for the violence.
Narratives began to emerge and as those narratives gained traction phrasing appeared with words like apartheid, colonialism, genocide and ethnic cleansing becoming thematic.
Israel is accused of violating human rights and anti-semitic incidents thus begin to appear dramatically. Diversity, equity, and inclusion promised to promote fair treatment for all people, but especially for those who suffer discrimination. Palestinians are suffering discrimination,
The problem, however, seems to have become aggravated when university admission programs began to apply what might best be called “diversity quota” admissions even if that “quota” is represented by admitted students who are anti-semitic even at the point of entry into college life.
To that end, anti-semitism has a long history but since the attack on Israel by Hamas in 2023 incidents have reached alarming high rates.
Research, however, is emerging which suggests that most anti-semitism incidents arise from left-leaning students which also means the majority of students at college campuses these days.
Professor Hook refers to much of this as a very odd conception of the democratic process albeit evidence and arguments are weak and lead to the deprivation of of others’ rights.
As he begins to reach his conclusion, there’s no argument that students deserve consolation on certain academic measures such as increases in tuition. But do they deserve consultation when, for example, a particular course is difficult which leads to questions regarding the professor’s authority of the subject matter?
Do they have the right to evaluate their professors? Granted, that the worst teaching likely takes place on college campuses where the greatest educational crime is boredom which suggests, without irony that colleges are obliged to find professors who are not boring but are also not performing novelties or ideologues.
None of this is possible, however, unless a university is understood as a community of scholars and teachers and students bound together by the ties of civility and intellectual respect best characterized as free minds in a free society in pursuit of not the truth but the truths and not the good but the goods, and not the beauty but the beauties.
We know this as the acquisition of an education and not the conquest of political power nor the notion of a “new vanguard of interpretation.”
Fourth Then: In Place Of A Conclusion….
As he nears the conclusion of his lecture, Professor Hook notes that all of his reflections flow from his conception of the nature of a university.
There are three generic conceptions.
First, then, is that the university is a training ground if not a vocational center preparing students for, yes, jobs, but also, perhaps, marriage by which he means preparation for understanding the powerful social forcers for young people straddling the later teen age years to the early adult years. With this in view, the university is a servant of society.
Second is to understand that the university is not a sanctuary preparing ideological weapons for revolutionizing society. If so, the university will lose its traditional privileges and academic freedom. Here he argues that to reconstruct the university as the means to abolish all classes is to invite educational anarchy followed by authoritarian rule.
Having made that argument, Professor Hook refers to the traditional conservative view of the university as a community of scholars and teachers and students bound together by the ties of civility and intellectual respect, pursuing the truths, the goods, and the beauties—multiple visions which inspire the life of the mind, which also means evaluating the traditions from yesterday to mold more feely the traditions born of tomorrow. Those who accept this third conception, he adds, must dedicate themselves to help those misguided students and their allies, that small but influential faculty, who work to wreck the university.
Imperfectly realized in the past, what Professor Hook is proposing is an ideal that which must be sought after to counterpose the nihilists and irresponsible partisans of the cult of violence.
Out of step he was in his time, and one might gather out of step these days, but still a provocative testament for true academic freedom.
A Small Coda:
A few months before he went to be with God, a group of Hillsdale College students traveled to Mecosta and Piety Hill. The purpose of the trip was to plant an American Dogwood on the Piety Hill front lawn, a tradition that had been carried on annually for a dozen years.
Dr. Kirk was bed-ridden on a second floor with a window looking out. He got out of bed, went to the window and raised it which got the students’ attention.
At which point he gathered his voice and said, “God bless Hillsdale College.”
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Notes:
[1] See Todd Scriber’s A Partisan Church: American Catholicism and the Rise of Neoconservative Catholics.
[2] See The Lord of the Flies.
The featured image is “University Professor” by Sir George Reid (1841–1913), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.