RUTHFULLY YOURS

Academia is once again in the news. Donald Trump’s recent commencement address at the University of Alabama, where he said that America’s “next chapter will not be written by The Harvard Crimson, it will be written by you—the Crimson Tide,” sounded one leitmotif of the new, Trump-inspired populism that is washing over the academic establishment. Trump’s announcement that he was seeking to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status sounded another.

These days, whenever the public’s attention is roused by academia, the oculus of media scrutiny turns up references to my book Tenured Radicals, first published more than 30 years ago but subsequently expanded and updated several times.

Given the renewed interest in academic culture, I thought I would adapt a few thoughts from the introduction to the most recent edition of the book.

Academic life, like the rest of social life, unfolds within a frame of rules and permissions. At one end, there are things that one must (or must not) do; at the other end, there is the rule of whim. The middle range, in which behavior is neither explicitly governed by rules nor entirely free, is that realm governed by what the British jurist John Fletcher Moulton, writing in the early 1920s, called “Obedience to the Unenforceable.”

This middle realm is a place governed not by law or mere caprice but by virtues such as duty, fairness, judgment, and taste. In a word, it is the “domain of Manners,” which “covers all cases of right doing where there is no one to make you do it but yourself.”

A good index of the health of any social institution is its allegiance to the strictures that define this middle realm. “In the changes that are taking place in the world around us,” Moulton wrote, “one of those which is fraught with grave peril is the discredit into which this idea of the middle land is falling.” One example was the abuse of free speech in political debate: “We have unrestricted freedom of debate,” say the radicals, “We will use it so as to destroy debate.”

The repudiation of obedience to the unenforceable is at the center of what makes academic life (and not only academic life) today so noxious. The contraction of the “domain of Manners” creates a vacuum that is filled on one side by increasing regulation—speech codes, rules for all aspects of social life, efforts to determine by legislation (from the right as well as from the left) what should follow freely from responsible behavior—and on the other side by increased license.

More and more, it seems, academia (like other aspects of elite cultural life) has reneged on its compact with society. One of the great ironies that attends the triumph of political correctness is that in department after department of academic life, what began as a demand for emancipation recoiled, turned rancid, and developed into new forms of tyranny and control. As Alan Charles Kors noted in an essay from 2008,

…under the heirs of the academic Sixties, we moved on campus after campus from their Free Speech Movement to their politically correct speech codes; from their abolition of mandatory chapel to their imposition of Orwellian mandatory sensitivity and multicultural training; from their freedom to smoke pot unmolested to their war today against the kegs and spirits—literal and metaphorical—of today’s students; from their acquisition of young adult status to their infantilization of “kids” who lack their insight; from their self-proclaimed dreams of racial and sexual integration to their ever more balkanized campuses organized on principles of group characteristics and group responsibility; from their right to define themselves as individuals—a foundational right—to their official, imposed, and politically orthodox notions of identity. American college students became the victims of a generational swindle of truly epic proportions.

What, as Lenin memorably asked, is to be done? As with any disease, the malady besetting academia requires two stages of therapy: first, accurate diagnosis; then, effective treatment.

In some ways, the diagnostic stage is the most difficult because it is the hardest to sustain. One corollary of society’s natural obedience to the unenforceable is the tendency to assume that those institutions in which we have invested great trust are inherently trustworthy. The common assumption is, “Academic institutions are expensive, socially respected bodies whose imprimatur is a powerful door-opener and tool of accreditation; ergo, they must be doing a good job.”

Some such sentiment is the prevailing one, so when some radical comes along to remove the scab, the shock is great—and unwelcome. One of the chief tasks for critics of what has happened to academic life in this country is to show the extent to which the anti-Semitic, anti-male, anti-white, anti-American, and transfiliac radicals in the Ivy League and elsewhere are not exceptions but the predictable result of institutions that have gradually abandoned their commitment to education for the sake of radical posturing. The prime difficulty of facing the aspirant diagnostician is not the elusiveness of symptoms. They are florid and nearly ubiquitous. On the contrary, the problem is finding and sustaining the patience required to set forth chapter and verse repeatedly and in language that effectively conveys the depredations on view.

If real change is going to come to academic culture, criticism must be ceaseless, pointed, and deep. It is not enough to expose the students and professors shouting “Death to Israel” at places like Columbia University. The academic culture that breeds and rewards such figures—and their name is legion—must be exposed for what it is: a thoroughly politicized rejection of the principles that inform liberal learning.

In one sense, the diagnosis of the calamity that has befallen academic culture is inseparable from the task of treatment. Which is to say that the job of criticism is never finished. Basic questions, the answers to which one could once have assumed were taken for granted, must be asked anew.

To whom is the faculty accountable? To the extent that it holds itself accountable to its pedagogic duties, it is accountable to itself. To the extent that it repudiates those duties, it is accountable to the society in which it functions and from which it enjoys its freedoms, privileges, and perquisites. Faculties often take it amiss when critics appeal over their heads to alumni, trustees, or parents. But ultimately teachers still stand in loco parentis, if not on everyday moral issues, then at least with respect to the content of the education they provide.

Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next, having jettisoned every moral, religious, social, and political scruple that they had been brought up to espouse. Why should parents fund the moral decivilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians? Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a worldview that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold? These are questions that should be asked early and often.

It is time to revisit several large issues—the issue of tenure, for example. An arrangement that was intended to protect academic freedom and intellectual diversity but that has mutated into a means of enforcing conformity and excluding the heterodox. And for those representing establishment opinion in the academy, the institution of tenure has the added advantage that, like a virus, it tends to be self-perpetuating.

For several years now, I have heard several commentators from sundry ideological points of view predict that the reign of political correctness and programmatic leftism on campus had peaked and was about to recede. I wish I could share that optimism. I see no evidence to support it. Sure, students are quiescent. But indifference is not instauration, and besides, faculties nearly everywhere form a self-perpetuating closed shop.

It is the same with the fashion of “theory”—all” that anemic sex-in-the-head politicized gibberish dressed up in reader-proof “philosophical” prose. It is true that names like Derrida or Foucault no longer produce the frisson of excitement they once did. Yet that is not because their “ideas” are widely disputed but rather because they are by now completely absorbed into the tissues of academic life. (Something similar happened with Freud several decades previously: it’s not that his silly ideas were no longer influential; on the contrary, they had merely become commonplace assumptions: still toxic but by now taken for granted.)

The key issue, I hasten to add, is not partisan politics but rather the subordinating of intellectual life to non-intellectual, i.e., political imperatives. “The greatest danger,” the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski wrote in “What Are Universities For?”

…is the invasion of an intellectual fashion which wants to abolish cognitive criteria of knowledge and truth itself. . . . The humanities and social sciences have always succumbed to various fashions, and this seems inevitable. But this is probably the first time that we are dealing with a fashion, or rather fashions, according to which there are no generally valid intellectual criteria.

Indeed, it is this failure—a failure to check the colonization of intellectual life by politics—that stands behind and fuels the degradation of liberal education. The issue is not so much—or not only—the presence of bad politics as the absence of non-politics in the intellectual life of the university.

Deep and lasting change in the university depends on deep and lasting change in the culture at large. Undertaking that task is a tall order. Criticism, satire, and ridicule all have an important role to play, but the point is that such criticism, to be successful, depends upon possessing an alternative vision of the good.

Do we possess that alternative vision? I believe we do. We all know, well enough, what a good liberal education looks like, just as we all know, well enough, what makes for a healthy society. It really isn’t that complicated. It doesn’t take a lot of money or sophistication. What it does require is candidness and courage, moral virtues that are in short supply wherever political correctness reigns triumphant. The bottom line is that those who want to retake the university must devote themselves to cultivating those virtues and perhaps even more to cultivating the virtue of patience, capitalizing wherever possible on whatever local opportunities present themselves.