Bonfire of the Academy As liberal adults abdicate, the kids take charge on campus.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/bonfire-of-the-academy-1447200535
By bonfire of the academy we mean a conflict of values about the idea of a university that now threatens to undermine or destroy universities as a place of learning. Exhibit A is the ruin called the University of Missouri.
In the 1960s—at Cornell, Columbia, Berkeley and elsewhere—the self-described Student Left occupied buildings with what they often called “non-negotiable” demands. In the decades since, the academy—its leaders and faculties—by and large has accommodated many of those demands regarding appropriate academic subjects, admissions policies and what has become the aggressive and non-tolerant politics of identity and grievance.
This political trajectory arrived at its logical end this week at Missouri with the abrupt resignation of the school’s president, quickly followed by its number two official. The kids deposed them, as their liberal elders applauded either out of solidarity or cowardice.
The cause of President Tim Wolfe’s resignation is said to be his failure to address several racially charged incidents on campus and the threat by its Division One football team to boycott this weekend’s game unless he stepped down.
The university’s campus, in Columbia, is not far from Ferguson, Mo. Among the charges against President Wolfe was that his response to the shooting of Michael Brown was inadequate, which is to say, he did not sufficiently take the side of the protesters or rioters. Since Ferguson, the left-wing Black Lives Matter group has come to prominence and intimidated even presidential candidates. This has been accompanied by successive claims of racial grievance against public and private institutions.
In the United States, by now the instinct of the overwhelming majority of people is to address such complaints in good faith, investigate them and remediate where necessary. Only the tiniest minority would wish to see racial grievances bleed indefinitely. Yet the kids assert that America is irredeemably racist.
Behind the headlines was also a festering dispute between the school administration and graduate students over cutbacks to their health-care coverage. Student Jonathan Butler listed among the reasons for his hunger strike that “graduate students [were] being robbed of their health insurance.”
Less noted in the news coverage is that an August posting on the website of the university’s division of graduate studies explains in detail that the health-insurance cutbacks are the explicit result of the Affordable Care Act. ObamaCare’s regulations forbid employers, such as universities, from paying for their grad students’ health insurance. Another case of progressives eating their own.
So now the University of Missouri and its 35,000 students are leaderless. We can assume that the students who brought Missouri to this pass do not have a clue what comes next—unless one of them would like to step into the presidency and give it a fling. It would serve the faculty right, though not the tens of thousands of other students who want an education.
What was evident at the University of Missouri, and in last weekend’s confrontation over free speech at Yale, is that political dialogue on universities is disintegrating to the level of 1968, when many schools became places of physical and intellectual chaos.
Missing today, as then, is adult leadership. Too often university presidents, their boards of trustees and leading political figures default, and quickly, to the most reactionary progressives in modern student bodies. We want to be clear about this, because so many of these university leaders regard themselves as principled liberals. But their timidity is putting at risk the classical liberal values that are the essence of the idea of a university.
Many of our readers by now have seen the video of the Missouri communications professor calling for “muscle” to ban a student reporter from covering their protest. Or last weekend’s video of a Yale student shrieking at a dean to resign for defending free speech. Professors increasingly acquiesce to student demands for “trigger warnings” about course material that might offend them. Small student minorities ban commencement speakers or boo them into silence.
Today’s progressive activists, unlike their liberal antecedents, believe that ideas with which they disagree or which they deem morally repugnant don’t deserve to be heard. And so they shout them down or tell their speakers to “shut up” or “resign.” They believe that free-speech protection is a quaint obstacle to getting what they want, which is control.
Missouri Governor Jay Nixon said Mr. Wolfe’s resignation “was a necessary step toward healing and reconciliation.” At the White House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said this shows “that a few people speaking up and speaking out can have a profound impact.”
We’d respect these words if they had any purpose beyond progressive political piety. The politicians will walk away. The forces that have been dividing campuses like Missouri’s for years and eroding them as serious centers of learning will stay. That most people staring at what happened at the University of Missouri feel a sense of loss is no accident. Expect more of it.
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