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Chronicle of Higher Education, January 31, 2019
How the Right Learned to Loathe Higher Education
Conservative dislike of the academy isn’t new. But it is alarming.
By Kim Phillips-Fein
In October 2017, Donald Trump Jr. spoke at a fund-raising event held at
AT&T Stadium, in Dallas, intended to raise money for scholarships at the
University of North Texas. Despite the stated goal of supporting
education, the president’s son used the occasion to lambaste the elitism
and pretense of the modern university. Higher education, rather than
improving the lives of young people, made them "unemployable" by
teaching courses in "zombie studies, underwater basket weaving, and, my
personal favorite, tree climbing." Universities, he argued, offered
parents the following deal: "We’ll take $200,000 of your money; in
exchange, we’ll train your children to hate our country."
In his mockery, Trump Jr. echoed one of the more disturbing works of
literature to be published in recent years — the 2014 novel Victoria.
This strange book (written by William S. Lind, under the pseudonym
Thomas Hobbes) fantasizes about the eruption of civil war in the United
States, driven by a multicultural politics emanating from academia. By
the early 21st century, Lind writes, universities had become expensive
"diploma mills crossed with asylums for the politically insane: howling
Bluestockings, inventors of ‘Afrocentric history,’ mewling ‘advocates’
for the blind, the botched and the bewildered." Knife-wielding Christian
revolutionaries consequently set upon a faculty meeting at Dartmouth,
stabbing 162 "politically correct luminaries" to death as just
punishment for their professed "cultural Marxism."
Generations of conservatives have seen scholars as responsible for
corrupting the young and teaching them to hate their countries.
Lind’s fantasy of disemboweling faculty members is, of course, quite far
from Trump Jr.’s speech. But the two depictions of academia —
overpriced, faddish, engaged in a project of political indoctrination
rather than education — have some queasy similarities. From Milo
Yiannopoulos’s trolling to the website Professor Watchlist (which
purports to "expose and document college professors who discriminate
against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the
classroom") to the popularity of the epithet "snowflake," it is no
secret that the right today views universities as ground zero for
political conflict. As the right-wing self-help guru Jordan Peterson,
based at the University of Toronto, puts it, "Dangerous people … are
indoctrinating young minds with their resentment-laden ideology."
This hostility is not limited to those at the extreme. Rather, such
attitudes have filtered to the core of American politics. A study
conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2017 found that 58 percent of
Republicans don’t trust institutions of higher education (up from 32
percent in 2010) — with confidence declining the older and wealthier the
respondent. State funding for public universities has long been in
decline, but the cuts accelerated after 2008, so that by the end of
2018, overall state funding for two- and four-year colleges was more
than $7 billion less than in 2008. Average annual published tuition at
four-year colleges has risen by 36 percent, and much more sharply in
some states: Arizona, for example, has increased tuition at its state
colleges by 91 percent since 2008.
Today’s conservative dislike of academia — as shrill as it is — is
nothing new: On the contrary, it builds on more than 50 years of animus
directed at higher education, with many of the ideas contributed by
heroes in the conservative pantheon such as William F. Buckley Jr. and
Irving Kristol. Not for nothing did Lind dedicate Victoria to the
granddaddy of conservative intellectuals, Russell Kirk, author of the
1953 book The Conservative Mind.
The conservative hostility toward universities stems from myriad sources
— for some thinkers on the right, the problem has to do with the role of
professors in spreading heterodox economic ideas; for others, the way
that the university opens the door to feminism, gender studies, and
critical race theory. But despite the differences, there are common
themes that surface again and again. Generations of conservatives have
depicted intellectuals and scholars as a disruptive, chaotic force,
people who willfully unsettle what would otherwise be harmonious
societies, corrupting the young and teaching them to hate their
countries, their traditions, their families, and their faiths. For
conservatives, universities are powerful institutions that are not
beholden solely to the market — that operate according to their own
logic and professional standards. This is what makes them so difficult
to trust.
Today’s conservative critique, though, has an additional element: It
suggests that universities, rather than make possible social and
economic mobility, actually reinforce class hierarchies. This populist
thread makes the contemporary assault especially dangerous. As Richard
Hofstadter suggested in 1963, the real power of anti-intellectualism
derives from its ability to tap into a reservoir of skepticism toward
academia that is far from the province of conservatives alone.
Although it can be traced back farther, in the United States resentment
and mistrust of higher education in its modern form begins with the
1930s and the aftermath of the New Deal. Washington, D.C. in the 1930s
had been a haven for intellectuals. Roosevelt’s "brain trust" was one
part of a broader mobilization of academics suddenly given greater power
to reform governments and markets. In the 1950s, during the early Cold
War, intellectuals and the universities that often housed them became
one of the primary targets of the right. Senator Joseph McCarthy
fulminated against "those who have had all the benefits that the
wealthiest nation on earth has to offer — the finest homes, the finest
college education" — whom he accused of "selling this nation out."
Hofstadter quoted the conservative publication The Freeman, which
mounted its critique of higher education in language easily recognizable
today:
Our universities are the training grounds for the barbarians of the
future, those who, in the guise of learning, shall come forth loaded
with pitchforks of ignorance and cynicism, and stab and destroy the
remnants of human civilization. … If you send your son to the colleges
of today, you will create the Executioner of tomorrow.
But the most influential of the conservative critics of academia was
William F. Buckley Jr., founder of the National Review. Buckley burst
onto the intellectual scene in 1951 with a broadside against his alma
mater, God and Man at Yale. When he went to New Haven, "fresh from a
two-year stint in the Army," he possessed "a firm belief in Christianity
and a profound respect for American institutions and traditions." At
Yale he hoped to find "allies against secularism and collectivism" — but
instead, he wrote, he found himself fighting against "those who seek to
subvert religion and individualism." While the all-male Yale of the late
1940s might have seemed as elitist and conservative an institution as
one can imagine, Buckley railed against the secular humanism he claimed
to find there. He said his professors belittled Christianity, insisting
that faith was simply one choice among many. The economics education
eschewed "individualism," advocating instead a strident Keynesian creed.
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Yale promoted its own "value orthodoxy," Buckley argued. Far from being
neutral, it was an institution devoted to promulgating a particular set
of political values that were antithetical to his own Christian,
free-market principles. He ventured that the orthodoxy at Yale was at
odds with the opinions of most Yale trustees and alumni — and that if
they were given more direct power over the curriculum, Yale could be
compelled to articulate a vision that echoed their sense of the
righteous and the good.
Buckley had little use for academic freedom; if a professor wanted to
teach something that fell outside of the boundaries of acceptable
discourse, he or she should be fired: "Freedom is in no way violated by
an educational overseer’s insistence that the teacher he employs hold a
given set of values." Should the university prove incapable of gaining
control over its curriculum, Yale alumni should stop donating
financially. No one "can in good conscience contribute to the ascendancy
of ideas he considers destructive of the best in civilization."
From Buckley, the contemporary right takes its sense that the
university promotes its own distinctive values — and that these are at
odds, in profound ways, with Christianity and the free market. He
emphasized — as do conservatives today — that higher education is not
simply utilitarian, and that colleges and universities are never
entirely beholden to commercial norms; for Buckley, this independence
was precisely what made them dangerous.
During the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives honed their critique of
universities. In some ways, this was ironic: After all, the New Left was
itself fiercely critical of academia for its complicity in the Vietnam
War and reinforcement of social hierarchy more generally. Some of the
most intense protests of the era involved students demonstrating against
university policies, such as at Berkeley in 1964 and Columbia in 1968.
As student protests intensified, so did criticism of the academy from
the right. Only now, in contrast to Buckley’s focus on the faculty, the
heart of the new conservative critique was its antagonism toward student
leftists.
One source of the rising mistrust of universities was the business
community. When Lewis Powell wrote his now-infamous memorandum for the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971 ("Attack on the American Free
Enterprise System"), he pointed out that universities were a prime
example of the ways that "the enterprise system tolerates, if not
participates in, its own destruction." Echoing (probably unwittingly)
the arguments of Joseph Schumpeter in his 1943 classic Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy, Powell noted that the campuses "from which much
of the criticism emanates" were largely supported by contributions from
the rich, while boards of trustees were composed of "men and women who
are leaders in the system." Yet despite this, the college campus had
become "the single most dynamic source" of anticapitalist sentiment.
Social scientists — ranging from Marxists (Powell singled out Herbert
Marcuse) to "the ambivalent liberal critic who finds more to condemn
than to commend" — were especially "unsympathetic" to the enterprise
system, and the result was that students graduated from college having
been taught to hate capitalism. Many of them moved into government
positions, where they were given the power to regulate the businesses
they had learned to despise.
Powell’s fear that universities taught students to reject the values of
capitalism was taken up a few years later by the neoconservative
intellectual Irving Kristol, an editor of the journal The Public
Interest. "When we send our sons and daughters to college, we may expect
that by the time they are graduated they are likely to have a lower
opinion of our social and economic order than when they entered," he
wrote in a 1979 essay. Student Marxists believed that the working class
would lead the revolution, but Kristol noted that radicalism had in fact
found "more fertile ground among the college-educated than among the
high school graduates."
For Kristol (who had been a student leftist himself at the City College
of New York in the 1930s), the university system helped to create an
entire "New Class" in American society — an "intelligentsia" of social
workers, teachers, scientists, journalists, and other professional
white-collar, post-industrial occupations, that "despises the ethos of
bourgeois society," despite being itself created by and dependent on
that which it condemns. These were people who would always feel keenly
the lack of spiritual or moral justification present within a market
economy, who would long to be able to wield greater power themselves so
that they could push the world to more closely resemble their image of a
just society. They rejected the constricting sexual ethos of the family,
and loyalty to church or country, but they sought to impose regulation
on the market. For Kristol, they were the ultimate enemies of freedom.
According to Kristol and the right in the 1970s, writing in the
aftermath of the student revolt of the previous decade, the university
was dangerous because it helped to create and sustain a paradoxical new
kind of elite — one implacably opposed to capitalism.
Kristol’s depiction of the New Class, prim and moralistic in economic
life while libertine and amoral in all other regards, seeped into the
conservative critique of academia that developed in the 1980s, one that
focused on moral relativism. Conservatives in the 1980s argued that the
contemporary academy had abandoned any sense that instructing students
in moral life was part of its project — an anxiety closely linked to the
notion that the university had become antagonistic toward "Western
culture" itself. This argument was framed in terms that might have
seemed quite different from earlier critiques, especially as it often
evoked an image of the university as a space of devotion to great texts
and a life of the mind freed from commercial constraints. But it also
mirrored the complaints that came before, as it spread the fear that
universities had turned against the very culture they were supposed to
protect.
In his 1987 polemic, The Closing of the American Mind, the University of
Chicago classics professor Allan Bloom assailed higher education in
rhetoric that harked back to Buckley’s: The university, Bloom insisted,
failed to put forward any stringent values or moral truths, any sense
that it was intending or seeking to guide young people to a deeper
understanding of life. Far from a love of truth, he argued, higher
education cultivated a narrow, self-interested ambition.
Conservatives tend to present students as empty vessels, and therefore
victims of their professors, rather than interlocutors.
Most memorable were Bloom’s rants against rock music and his
condescending depiction of his undergraduate students as "nice" but
basically idiotic. His caustic depiction of youth culture was linked to
a set of dire warnings about how universities were undermining the
ideals of the West. Requiring that students take a class "in a
non-Western culture," for Bloom, had a "demagogic intention:" it was
intended to "force students to recognize that there are other ways of
thinking and that Western ways are not better."
Bloom’s disparagement of feminism and gender studies, his critique of
relativism, and his celebration of the canon all fit into the
longstanding conservative critique of higher education — that it had
become the province of a silly, self-interested, subversive elite (even
as his general suspicion that universities were too engaged in training
students for narrow economic success set him apart from other
conservative critics). But it also marked a new articulation of Western
culture as in need of defense in the academy. His book became part of
the broader "culture wars" of the 1990s — the continuing conflicts over
which books should be taught, what the boundaries of accepted literature
might be, and the place of formerly marginalized groups in the academy.
Even as Bloom’s book appeared, conservative activists were busy building
new organizations, such as the Federalist Society, to nurture and
develop conservative intellectual networks. Christian conservatives
organized whole institutions (such as Liberty University) to promote
versions of higher education in keeping with their values. They took the
conservative critique of the academy and put it into action. The
university, they argued, had come to form a bastion of culture that was
antagonistic to the proper norms needed for capitalism to operate. It
could be resisted only by building alternative institutions. Mainstream
higher education was beyond saving.
Although their sheer outrageousness might seem to set today’s
conservatives apart from those of the past, the differences are not as
great as they might appear. Much of the contemporary right-wing
animosity toward the university grows out of these older ideas and
arguments. Today as earlier, conservatives tend to depict college
professors as power-hungry ideologues, and students as supine and easily
misled. Conservatives have generally resisted the notion that students
might have minds of their own — that they might resist the teachings of
their professors. Instead, conservatives tend to present students as
empty vessels, and therefore victims of their professors, rather than
interlocutors. The contemporary right shares with earlier thinkers a
fear that higher education is nurturing a narcissistic, self-centered
youth culture — one that leaves young people without the resources to
confront the job market, let alone the difficulties of the world. And it
picks up on Bloom’s claims about moral relativism and the need to defend
the primacy of the cultural tradition that descends from Plato.
At the same time, there are a couple of new elements to today’s
right-wing assault on higher education. First is that today’s
conservative critics depict themselves as proud outsiders (whether or
not this is entirely true): They claim that they are not intellectuals
or scholars, and they openly deride higher education itself as a waste
of time and money. Buckley, Kristol, and Bloom were immersed in
intellectual culture even as they critiqued the academy. Today’s
activists, however, go farther: They reject the institutions of higher
education, which allows them to deploy a freewheeling viciousness that
the older right could not. Bloom wanted to reinvigorate the study of the
classics; the new critics advocate trade schools and STEM classes (and —
since in many cases their hostility extends to elementary school —
homeschooling for younger kids). As Gavin McInnes, founder of the
"Western chauvinist" men’s organization Proud Boys, puts it in a video
titled "20 Reasons Why School Sucks": "Now that they’ve made college
totally and utterly useless, it’s cheap to have kids! Don’t send kids to
school!"
In its paranoia as well as its desire to single out scholars for public
shaming and abuse, the conservative critique today echoes the
McCarthy-era idea of a "watchlist" intended to intimidate those whose
names appear on it. The taunting, cruel tone is not different from
earlier conservative mobilizations — but it comes to the forefront more
quickly, as when Yiannopoulos describes "social justice" as a "cancer"
rotting universities from within (as he did in a 2016 speech at the
University of California at Irvine), mocking the liberals who want to
keep him from speaking: "You have the right to a useless gender- or
race-studies degree for which we will make you pay the rest of your life
and possibly sting the taxpayer, too."
The rhetorical vitriol is closely connected to another distinctive
aspect of this politics: its intense focus on race and affirmative
action. A recent article in the online publication of the Foundation for
Economic Education (a digital-age descendent of The Freeman, the
publication that Hofstadter quoted in 1963) argued that because of
affirmative action, Ivy League institutions no longer effectively embody
a meritocracy. Rather, they are "race-obsessed," manipulating admissions
to ensure "‘diversity’ (except for diversity of opinion, of course)" —
while they jack up tuition prices in large part to generate more funds
for financial aid. In this way, they try to help one group of students —
members of historically underrepresented groups — while actively
excluding white men.
The idea (reflected in Yiannopoulos’s speeches, which are studded with
penis jokes and asides exalting the attractiveness of the police) is
that universities have become spaces of privilege that specifically
benefit women, African-Americans, and Latinos, while systematically
denigrating, even humiliating, white men. This theme shines through, as
well, in the rantings of McInnes, who argues that formal education is
set up to make it hard for boys to succeed (which, he argues, also
accounts for diagnoses of ADHD and the use of Ritalin). And, of course,
it runs through Jordan Peterson’s suggestion that people should abandon
universities (which have been hopelessly corrupted by their adoption of
"women’s studies") in favor of trade schools. The conservative critique
of universities today is closely bound up with reclaiming a sense of
masculinity, the idea being that higher education has become a way to
control men.
And this relates, in turn, to a third aspect of the new right-wing
assault on the academy: its focus on high tuition prices. The cost of
higher education is further evidence of the flimsy morality of the
entire enterprise. The Foundation for Economic Education author touted
his own decision to attend a state university instead of an Ivy League
college, thus saving what he estimated at $200,000; this was also a
focus of Trump Jr.’s Dallas speech. The high sticker price (even if
often defrayed through financial aid) seems to render suspect all
theoretical or academic rhetoric about challenging power, making it
clear that a university education is primarily about the rise of a new
elite. The university thus becomes an agent of exclusion and division.
For the contemporary right, universities are supposedly bent on
undermining traditional norms and hierarchies, teaching the young to
resent religion, reject family, and hate capitalism. As a result, the
young are going crazy. ("Education is child abuse," as McInnes puts it.)
Yet at the same time, conservatives portray the university as the
institution that more than any other acts as a gateway to social power.
The university’s function as a subversive gatekeeper is what marks it as
especially dangerous.
The image of the university as a monopolistic enterprise, doling out
credentials that are meaningless yet essential to economic success, also
sets the argument apart from the older broadsides. Again, this builds on
the longstanding posture on the right of venerating the common wisdom of
the people as opposed to the book-learning and theoretical flights of
the "pointy-headed" college professors once castigated by George
Wallace. It even echoes Buckley’s famous if disingenuous suggestion that
he’d rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the phone book than by
the Harvard faculty.
It is hardly surprising that universities would emerge as a target of
rage. They symbolize who can and cannot get in, who is and is not worthy.
But this vision of the university also taps into a change in the role of
higher education in American society more broadly. When Buckley and
Kristol (and to a lesser extent Bloom) wrote, the public-university
system was steadily expanding, and access to higher education was
widening. This was part of a broader social pattern toward greater
economic equality. True, Kristol wrote about a "new class" of
professional do-gooders emerging from institutions of higher learning —
but this intelligentsia was defined in part by its modest consumer
habits, its distance from the very rich.
Today, however, the whole debate over higher education cannot but be
inflected by competitive desperation and anxiety — not just about
college, but about the whole social order.
The tremendous pressure to get into an elite college, the financial
sacrifices and sheer gambles families make, give universities a shakier
moral status than once they had. The right is not altogether wrong that
higher education seems to be the only clear way to secure a place in the
middle class, let alone anything more. An elite credential stands in for
social mobility, economic security, and prestige. Universities do in
fact channel students into certain kinds of high-prestige, well-paid
jobs (for example, the active recruitment carried out by investment
banks, particularly at Ivy League institutions). It’s not that obtaining
a college education necessarily places one in the economic elite — far
from it. But in a highly stratified society, attending college — and
especially an elite college — comes to bear a new symbolic weight. Those
at the top, we are told, are there because they proved themselves the
best: the smartest, the most gifted, the most talented, those with the
most evident and obvious merit. Given this, it is hardly surprising that
universities would emerge as a target of rage for those who fear
downward mobility. Universities symbolize who can and cannot get in, who
is and is not worthy.
The violent fantasies circulating on the right pick up on and reproduce
a social sadism far more broadly evident. In this context, the
university seems simply another institution bent on diminishing the
living standards and opportunities available to working-class people
(and in the iconography of the right, especially to blue-collar white
men). No longer an engine of mobility or uplift — let alone a space that
cultivates a citizenry capable of governing itself — it instead appears
to uphold an exclusive politics, a privileged elite.
The aggressiveness of today’s right, its oft-noted flirtation with
violence, its combination of machismo and disdain, set it apart from the
conservatism of the mid-20th century. But those aspects are not the most
distinctive and dangerous. Rather, what is most troubling is the way
that the right has managed to tap into certain hypocrisies present
within academic institutions as they are.
There has long been a tension between conservatism and intellectual
life, a rift between the right and higher education; as Hofstadter wrote
in 1963, "In a certain sense the suspicious Tories and militant
philistines are right: Intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is
nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question." That may
be inevitable. But what is less certain is the extent to which the
right-wing critique resonates with the broader society. As participants
in the maintenance of economic privilege, universities open themselves
up to these attacks from the right and also undercut their own ability
to nurture true intellectual freedom. Were universities to do more to
actively challenge the harsh inequality that governs so much of our
society, the critique of the right would be far less likely to catch on.
Making higher education less expensive and more democratic might help to
defang the caricatures of academia promoted on the right. The university
should stand for the idea that developing one’s intellect, and learning
to think more deeply and freely about the world, is possible and
important for everyone. It is a fundamental right, and one for which
society is better off the more widely people are able to exercise it.
Ending legacy admissions, lowering tuition, supporting unionization
efforts for faculty and staff at all levels, pressing for greater aid
for public universities and more financial assistance for students
(including the calls for free tuition), and ceasing to mirror the
corporate sector in the rising salaries for university presidents and
other top administrators would be steps in the right direction.
This vision of the university as a counterforce to economic inequality
may be alienating to Donald Trump Jr., as well as to many university
boards of trustees. After all, as anyone who actually works at one
knows, the idea of the university as a hotbed of revolution exists only
in the imagination of the right. But this is a time to articulate
principles anew, to claim a moral high ground, to ask ourselves what our
institutions are doing and why.
Kim Phillips-Fein is an associate professor of history at the Gallatin
School of Individualized Study at New York University. She is the
author, most recently, of Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the
Rise of Austerity Politics (Metropolitan Books, 2017).
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