THE UNIVERSITY AS PROPAGANDA INSTRUMENT
The Destruction of Intellectual Creativity and Dissent in America’s Universities
David Barnhizer
Professor of Law Emeritus, Cleveland State University
The main analysis offered here is based in large part on the themes presented in my most recent book, Conformity Colleges: The Destruction of Intellectual Creativity and Dissent in America’s Universities (Skyhorse Publishing, January 2024). That work is something of which I am quite proud, and Conformity Colleges analyzes the dynamic and largely harmful changes that have taken place in our universities and dramatically affected much of our K-12 educational systems. In its 400 pages Conformity Colleges covers a far greater range of issues than can be discussed here, but the following perspectives offer thoughts on the nature of the modern post-Enlightenment university as institution, the role it was intended or at least thought to serve for individuals and collectively for society. The analysis also examines how the best elements of that role have been captured and corrupted to the extent that the university of the past fifty years has become an instrument of propaganda rather than a center of compelling intellectual substance.
Several Reviews of Conformity Colleges
For anyone who might be interested in looking at the extended analysis, Conformity Colleges: The Destruction of Intellectual Creativity and Dissent in America’s Universities has received a number of reviews and comments from people for whom I have great respect.
These include Jeffrey Tucker, the founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and an individual whose intellect and energy I find stunning. He writes:
“COVID feels like a turning point, a time when universities fully embraced the ideology of control, censorship, and compulsion, represented by universal quarantines, masking, and vaccine compliance, all rooted in symbolism rather than scientific realities. Freedom is the last thing you will find at elite institutions today. The ESG and DEI bureaucracies are deeply entrenched, and an anti-Western, anti-Enlightenment, anti-reason curricula pervades the whole of the elite establishment. It is reinforced at every level, including publishing, promotion, and tenure demands. Already by 2019, anyone in this realm who identified as a conservative was in the extreme minority. And yet this period might be more correctly seen, as it is in this brilliant book by David Barnhizer, as a codification of deep problems that already existed.”
Mark Bauerlein, senior editor, First Things magazine, and professor emeritus, Emory University states:
“It is grimly satisfying to read the words of an observer who understands the value of the university in American life and the extent of contemporary threats to it. David Barnhizer has produced an exhaustive roster of decay, a source book that contains little good news and lots of depredation. The ideals of academic life—disinterested judgment, peer review, Ivory Tower seclusion—have fallen again and again to identity politics, resentment, and cowardice. This book is a sobering compilation of events on the road downward, valuable because people who wish to defend the traditional conception must understand exactly how far we've fallen and how ruthless are the vandals still at work.”
William A. Jacobson, clinical professor of Law and director of the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School; and founder and president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation offers his perspectives:
"David Barnhizer's book on intellectual conformity in higher education exposes the personal and systemic tragedies of what we call 'cancel culture.' Behind every story described in his 2021 work “Un-Canceling” America, and further developed in the analysis in Conformity Colleges, are people whose lives have been upended and careers damaged by Identity Groups pushing political agendas by punishing innocent victims seeking nothing more than an understanding of the vital significance of the hard-fought vision of Western society and the Rule of Law. Prof. Barnhizer has gathered their stories in Conformity Colleges: The Destruction of Intellectual Creativity and Dissent in America’s Universities, as historical evidence of the damage groupthink and enforced conformity have inflicted on the integrity of academia and on an American society whose moral, intellectual, and economic integrity is dependent on the honesty and quality of education.”
James Gorrie, Epoch Times writer and author of The China Crisis stated:
"I haven't read a more comprehensive taxonomy about the Woke Left's toxicity on the intellectual integrity of our education system. If Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind was the warning signal of the Left's danger to our culture, Conformity Colleges is the post-mortem. Exceptionally detailed, Barnhizer articulates the intellectual and practical applications of 'Wokery' and its far-reaching consequences to Americas' ability to think clearly and freely. This book should be required reading for every freshman university humanities major."
Barbara Kay, opinion columnist for Canada’s National Post and Epoch Times observes:
“As someone who writes frequently in the mainstream press about the ruinous effects of woke ideology on society, I truly appreciate David Barnhizer’s unique contribution to the literature on this subject. Conformity Colleges: The Destruction of Intellectual Creativity and Dissent in America’s Universities is 'a one-stop shop' for journalists, often working under time constraints, who seek well-organized, intelligently triaged evidence that is essential ballast in the creation of persuasive columns.”
George Leef, is the director of editorial content at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, and the author of The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale: A Political Fable for Our Time. He offered his assessment Conformity Colleges in The National Review.
“Do you know someone who thinks that our higher education system is working just fine? Perhaps he or she believes that all the “right-wing” complaining is much ado about nothing — merely another attempt to discredit something that propels the country forward.
If you, you might suggest that he or she read the new book Conformity Colleges by professor emeritus David Barnhizer, which I review here for the Martin Center. He laments “the destruction of intellectual creativity and dissent” on so many of our campuses. That has been replaced by incessant pressure to adopt the leftist line on a wide array of issues. Disagree, and your career can be ruined by a vengeful academic mob.
Furthermore, Barnhizer observes, leftist groupthink has spread outward from higher education into K–12 through our malignant “education schools” where future teachers are molded into social justice warriors. They may not be any good at teaching children to read and write, but they can hector them all day long about the evils of America.
Barnhizer packs the book with well-documented cases to help overcome reluctance to believe that things are as bad as they are. For instance, he recounts the disgusting treatment by NYU of veteran chemistry professor Maitland Jones, who was terminated after a group of students griped that his course was too hard. Traditional academic standards are falling while the ideological obsessions of progressivism and DEI take root, even in medical schools. What we desperately need, Barnhizer concludes, is a rebirth of academic integrity, where truth and knowledge matter, not any set of political beliefs. His book deserves a wide reading and much discussion.”
Leslie Eastman writes in a review for the Legal Insurrection Foundation:
“Barnhizer loves education, and that passion comes across on every page of Conformity Colleges. His book should be in the library of anyone who wants to understand the current state of American universities and precisely how they have strayed so far from their goals and missions. I give the book five stars out of 5.
Barnhizer’s book brilliantly describes how woke activists are still working to change the university systems to entrench themselves even further. For example, tenure track positions are being replaced by term-specific contracts, making educators more vulnerable threats and less likely to challenge narratives.
Conformity Colleges is an engaging analysis of the experiences of men and women who have tried to engage in honest debate and utilize their free speech to nurture the minds and promote critical thinking in young men and women who are thwarted by dogma and an environment that is exceptionally hostile to personal liberty. One of the early chapters is devoted to Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He is best known for his insight that “the medium is the message.” Conformity Colleges focus on the power to use the university as an overarching “medium” that creates the illusion of legitimacy to flawed and poisonous dogma, such as Diversity-Equity-Inclusion (DEI), Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), and Critical Race Theory (CRT). Barnhizer succinctly and engagingly provides examples highlighting the nature and impact of the ideological creep that has essentially become a landslide.
The “Academic Dogma”
Historically, the ideal of the university has been described as the “Academic Dogma”—the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and independent of bias and self-interest.. The asserted importance of this is that “knowing” in and of itself has an important purpose in the evolution of the human race and the health of our communities. Inevitably, the gap that has always existed between the university ideal and the university reality has never been bridged, but we are currently experiencing a transformation that is undermining the ideal itself as an aspirational drive—a shift that is unlikely to be reversed.
While the changes have been taking place for more than a generation, the reality of what now exists in much of the university world is best captured by Maxine Greene’s prescient 1973 warning that slogans and propaganda have replaced real dialogue in the university world. Greene was the William F. Russell Professor in the Foundations of Education at the Teachers College of Columbia from 1975 to 1998. She describes slogans as, “rallying symbols” that “in no sense describe what actually exists, yet they are taken—wishfully or desperately—to be generalizations or statements of fact.” Maxine Greene, Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age 70 (1973).
Propaganda, Stereotypes, and Fanatics
Sanford Pinsker warned that “an increasing number of professors no longer believe in the ‘pursuit of truth’ because they no longer believe that truth exists.” Sanford Pinsker, “Tenure Can Rescue the Academy”, Washington Times, Oct. 31, 1996, at A23. He adds:
“They do, however, believe in politics - and most especially in identity politics. Thus, efforts to equalize genders, races, and cultures become the value that academic freedom presumably protects, while the criteria of truthfulness (as argued through evidence and rational argument) is seen as that which continues to exploit women, people of color, homosexuals, the poor and other victimized groupings. Not surprisingly, the two conditions usually overlap; and the results [sic] so muddies the waters that defending academic freedom is harder now than at any time in this century.”
Bradford Wilson argued there is a “progressive political orthodoxy that currently dominates the public life of the academy.” He warns that:
“What is unhealthy for the interests of higher learning is less the existence of a political orthodoxy on the campuses than the replacement of intellectual criteria for determining what kinds of expression should be defended with non-intellectual criteria -- be they political, sexual, or otherwise…. This sacrifices, on the altar of political correctness, what the sociologist Edward Shils has called ‘the central academic value of truthfulness.’” Bradford Wilson, “Point of View; Politicizing Academic Freedom, Vulgarizing Scholarly Discourse,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 19, 1997, Opinion; p. A52.
Finally, I fully adopt Ayn Rand’s view of the vital importance of the intellectual in American society. As such, I lament the fact that the continuing conversion of the university to “groupthink” and suppression of alternative perspectives that don’t fit the ideologies of specific identity groups has severely undermined the ability of university faculty to fulfill this critical role. Rand explains the social responsibility of the intellectual—and here I am including both university faculty and “public intellectuals”.
Posed against her earlier background in the Soviet Union, Rand emphasizes why honest intellectuals are so vital for the preservation of a free and democratic society.
“The intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society: it is [the intellectual’s] … job to observe the events of the world, to evaluate their meaning and to inform the men in all the other fields. A free society has to be an informed society.” Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual 26 (Signet 1961). Rand adds: The more specialized and diversified a society, the greater its need for the integrating power of knowledge; but the acquisition of knowledge on so wide a scale is a full-time profession. A free society has to count on the honor of its intellectuals… Rand, at 27.
The worst of it is that, even though we continue to proclaim the virtues of free thought and communication, we think and communicate through stereotypical interactions. Ellul tells us that:
A stereotype is a seeming value judgment, acquired by belonging to a group, without any intellectual labor …. The stereotype arises from feelings one has for one’s own group, or against the “out-group.” Man attaches himself passionately to the values represented by his group and rejects the cliches of the out-groups …. The stereotype, … helps man to avoid thinking, to take a personal position, to form his own opinion. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda.
As the recent anti-semitic protests on college campuses have demonstrated, along with the abject failure of university administrations to take effective actions to stop violent actions by what has come to be described as “mostly peaceful” protests that transcend any rational interpretation of the Constitution’s freedom of speech under the First Amendment demonstrate much too clearly, university faculty and administrators have increasingly eroded our ability to listen, discuss rationally, negotiate and compromise. They have become almost fanatical in their allegiance to ideological causes, and consumed by their individualized identity politics to the point that they deny any possibility of alternative viewpoints. Ellul warns against this mindset that uses stereotypes rather than evidence and reason: “The conflict of propaganda takes the place of the debate of ideas.” The Technological Society at vii (1964).
It is almost impossible to change this mindset once it takes hold. A main reason is, as Gabriel Marcel warns: “the fanatic never sees himself as a fanatic; it is only the non-fanatic who can recognize him as a fanatic; so that when this judgment, or this accusation, is made the fanatic can always say that he is misunderstood and slandered.” Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Mass Society 136, 137 (1969).
This is consistent with my own experience in more than thirty years of university teaching in the US, UK, and Russia. It is also consistent with my extensive experience working as an advocate and activist with many liberally-oriented US and international groups that would now be called “social justice” organizations. It is truly amazing how the power of “group think” and “identity allegiance” takes over minds.
The fact is that, in many instances, faculty members and external activists of a particular political persuasion simply cannot contemplate that any other position than their own, their organization, or identity collective could have any validity. While this might be more or less understandable for organizational activists, many academics consider themselves free from bias of any kind or are what Eric Hoffer powerfully described as “true believers”.
When this capture occurs it is predictable that the “believers” are adept at denying they could be controlled by such things. This includes becoming indignant if a question is raised whether they have political and ideological preferences that infuse their research and teaching. This is the case even though numerous studies have indicated a very significant political bias among US university faculty to the point that over 90 percent of academics have a specific Liberal or Left political loyalty.
You can’t “fix” a system in which the participants don’t understand it is “broke” or, if they do, are proud of the fact of its demise and their contribution to that outcome. Speaking of a “broke” system and linguistic control, one of the most powerful tools has been the invention of the idea of “hate speech”, “hate laws” and the ability to label people as “haters” if they don’t agree with the views of an identity group. The problem with the rapid expansion of “hate” speech and hate crime offenses is that, by infusing the society with a sensitivity to things that are labeled “hate”, we internalize the attitude and, as Linguist Ruth Nanda Anshen explained, we can ourselves become “hate” because that is the lens through which we interpret the world and its events.
This not only affects the way we are able to look at the world, but how we judge others who are not part of our own group. The willingness to impose our template on anyone who doesn’t agree with us defines the “language” of who we are and what we have become.
An example of the “hate speech” transformation is captured vividly in a policy announced by a Louisiana State University faculty member stating she was “keeping a list of names” and would drop from her classes any student who in her judgment engaged in “hate speech” in class or elsewhere. Another LSU faculty member immediately indicated he would follow her lead. Caleb Parke reports:
A Louisiana professor called on her colleagues to keep a list of students who engage in "hate speech" and "drop" them from classes at the public university after George Floyd's death, Campus Reform reports. Louisiana State University Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Alyssa Johnson made the comments after the school's official Twitter responded to those calls, saying, "we are subject to constitutional limitation on our ability to take action in response to free speech.” Johnson wrote, in a now-deleted tweet: "If @LSU won't take action, we as professors can. Keeping a list of names and if I see them enrolled in my course, I will drop them. It's not just free speech, it's hate speech and it's a threat to student safety. #safespace #BlackLivesMatter”. https://www.foxnews.com/us/lsu-professor-hate-speech-black-lives-matter. “LSU professor vows to 'drop' students on 'hate speech' list”, Caleb Parke, 6/10/20.
A Few Striking Examples of Academic Tyranny
There are numerous examples of how bad the situation within academia has become. This is highlighted by a demand by a group of Progressive academics, including former Nobel winner Paul Krugman and University of Michigan’s Justin Wolfers, that a University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig, a senior editor on the prestigious Journal of Political Economy, be removed from his editorial position. Uhlig’s sin?—criticizing the push by Black Lives Matter to defund police departments.
The petition seeking Uhlig’s removal accused him of: “trivializing the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement” and “hurting and marginalizing people of color and their allies in the economics profession.” https://www.foxnews.com/politics/paul-krugman-professors-demand-top-economist-lose-his-job-for-criticizing-black-lives-matter. “Paul Krugman, professors seek top economist's removal from influential job for criticizing Black Lives Matter”. Gregg Re, 6/10/20.
Such inanities from university faculty members and what some call “public intellectuals” demonstrate just how low the integrity of the system has sunk. It also demonstrates the stunning and intolerant ignorance of supposed “public intellectuals” operating from within and beyond the university who have revealed themselves as one-sided bigots. This includes not only academics, but far too many journalists and media “talking heads” who, as we witness on an almost daily basis, have brought public respect and distrust of mainstream media sources to an all-time low.
To this stunning example of “reverse bigotry” can be added the ongoing conflict at Cornell University’s law school involving law professor William Jacobson, who has taught at that institution since 2007. Jacobson is politically conservative. His offense, writing a blog post critical of Black Lives Matter and what he perceives as the true motivations of its founders. Jacobson describes his situation:
“There is an effort underway to get me fired at Cornell Law School, where I’ve worked since November 2007, or if not fired, at least denounced publicly by the school” … “I condemn in the strongest terms any insinuation that I am racist.” The conservative professor and media critic who founded the influential website Legal Insurrection wrote that he’s been in an “awkward relationship” with the “overwhelmingly liberal faculty and atmosphere” for years, specifically since his website launched in 2008. “Living as a conservative on a liberal campus is like being the mouse waiting for the cat to pounce,” he wrote. “For over 12 years, the Cornell cat did not pounce. Though there were frequent and aggressive attempts by outsiders to get me fired, including threats and harassment, it always came from off campus.” https://www.foxnews.com/media/cornell-law-school-professor-black-lives-matter. “Cornell Law professor says 'coordinated effort' launched against him for criticizing Black Live Matter, condemns insinuations he’s racist”, Bryan Flood, 6/10/20.
It doesn’t stop there, just ask UCLA Accounting Professor Gordon Klein. He was placed on academic leave and his classes reassigned while UCLA decided what to do with him for refusing to reschedule his final examination for black students who were concerned about George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. See, https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2020/06/10/ucla-professor-on-leave-gordon-klein/. “UCLA Professor On Leave After Students Blast Response To Request To Postpone Final Exam As ‘Woefully Racist’”, 6/10/20. This led to a petition drive with a large number of “outraged” individuals seeking his termination. One reader’s comment drew my attention.
I’m a color-filled person and I think his response was very logical and appropriate. Many people have involved themselves [in calling for Klein’s dismissal] out of guilt, fear, or desire to fit in, in this isolated situation. Division of such that was requested would only perpetuate racism, giving “special” privileges to one group vs. others. People are too sensitive and quick to hurl terms like “racism,” at people and it enables real dialogue between persons, and instead promotes superficialities.
The Bizarre Case of NYU’s
“Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group”
An NYU professor posting on Twitter and criticizing political correctness and student coddling was booted from the classroom after his colleagues complained about his “incivility”. A New York Post report indicates that Liberal studies professor Michael Rectenwald stated he had to go on paid leave from NYU based on the organized reactions to his criticisms. He claimed: “They are actually pushing me out the door for having a different perspective”.
Rectenwald posted on an anonymous Twitter account called Deplorable NYU Prof, arguing against campus trends like “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings”, policing of Halloween costumes, and academia’s growing culture of Political Correctness. “It’s an alarming curtailment of free expression to the point where you can’t even pretend to be something without authorities coming down on you in the universities,” Rectenwald [said]. … A 12-person committee calling itself the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group, that included two deans, several faculty members and multiple students published a letter to the editor in the same NYU paper [in which Rectenwald admitted he had written the posts]. The Deans and “Committee” stated:
“As long as he airs his views with so little appeal to evidence and civility, we must find him guilty of illogic and incivility in a community that predicates its work in great part on rational thought and the civil exchange of ideas,” they wrote. “We seek to create a dynamic community that values full participation,” they argued.
The “Committee”—with two deans, departmental faculty and students—also suggested that Rectenwald was in need of mental health assistance due to his views, so we might question how open, civil, and logical their collective position was. The point is that the issue we are dealing with involves the systematic suppression of alternative viewpoints and, as a long-time member of a law school faculty, I feel confident in asserting that any untenured assistant professor in any university in the US would feel threatened and intimidated by being publicly castigated by a collection of two departmental deans, four faculty members, and a number of politically active students who, rather than responding to that individual with rational, civil and emotionally neutral analysis and refutation, condemned the person as being in need of mental health assistance, as well as being illogical and uncivil. Several of Rectenwald’s now former “colleagues” distributed e-mails throughout the Liberal Studies department containing even worse personal comments.
The same day the letter from the “Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group” was published, Rectenwald was summoned to a meeting with his departmental dean and a Human Resources representative. He indicated: “They claimed they were worried about me and [that] a couple people had expressed concern about my mental health. They suggested my voicing these opinions was a cry for help.… Then they said I should leave and get help.”
Some students then told him that professors in the department had openly discussed with students how he might be fired. It is worth noting that the website Rate My Professor contains student posts that are quite positive about Rectenwald’s open mindedness and teaching ability. Rectenwald stated in relation to his ordeal: “I’m afraid my academic career is over.” That observation has proved accurate. https://nypost.com/2016/10/30/nyu-professor-who-opposed-pc-culture-gets-booted-from-classroom/. “Professor who tweeted against PC culture is out at NYU”, Melkorka Licea, October 30, 2016.
He sued NYU and four female faculty members for defamatory online posts, and resigned his faculty position in 2019. He told the New York Post that the twenty “hateful” e-mails had made his academic life a nightmare, stating: “I’ve been universally shunned by the entire department” .… “In academia, to be called a ‘racist’ and a ‘sexist’ is like the kiss of death.” https://nypost.com/2018/01/13/deplorable-nyu-professor-sues-colleagues-for-defamation/. “‘Deplorable’ NYU professor sues colleagues for defamation”, Melkorka Licea, 1/13/2018.
Such examples demonstrate that we should not over-idealize the university and certainly not overrate university faculty as fair minded and objective intellectual giants even if, as in Krugman’s case, they were awarded a Nobel Prize. Universities have always been in service to and influenced by powerful interests, both overtly and subtly. That process has been both good and bad. For example, the incorporation of Aristotelian thought into the doctrines of the Catholic Church and consequently into the content of what was taught and written in European universities influenced the structure of thinking about reality, morality, jurisprudence, and politic theory. The connection was so close that Hobbes called universities the “handmaid of the Romane religion.” Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan (1651), Part IV, Ch. 46, at 523 (Clarendon Press edition 1909).
Universities have also always been captives of the numerous flaws of human nature, including the desire for status, security, admiration, and control. It is also a fact that, while generally more muted, politics and ideology have never been completely absent from the university world. At this point, however, the culture has become savage. Rather than simply being irritating peripheral elements in universities, ideology and politics have become repressive parts of the institutional culture. In the past three decades, universities have become captives of intolerant ideological activists intent on using universities as propaganda instrumentalities. The aim is to advance preferred causes through every available pathway, including teaching, research and publication, public presentations, social media, and by the suppression of alternative perspectives.
Aggressive Ideology Has Replaced the Traditional University Model
Daniel Bell warned that: “Ideology is the conversion of ideas into social levers.” See, Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology 370-371 (1960). He added: “For the ideologue, truth arises in action, and meaning is given to experience by the “transforming moment.” ” I fully understand the importance of the transformative moment, and have spent much of my life as an activist in the US, and working with social justice and community advocates in Asia, Europe and Latin America.
I have also represented victims of police abuse, trained public defenders and civil rights lawyers, organized conferences and published on topics of social justice, human rights, served as legal counsel to a Cleveland-area Black-on-Black Crime Committee, provided legal representation for poor and underprivileged clients in Legal Services offices in Colorado Springs and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and directed my university’s program in clinical legal education representing poor people in both criminal and civil matters.
But I am also a teacher and a scholar and understand the roles between these actions and those of dedicated “revolutionary” ideologue are distinct. There are times when ideology and activism go too far and endanger other equally fundamental values. We have entered a moment in which extremism has triumphed over the ability to develop and implement intelligent and effective reforms. The threats we are now facing include ongoing damage to the integrity of the Rule of Law which is probably the most fundamental value system of our culture. There are also attacks on critical and honest intellectual inquiry, and on the ability to engage in productive social discourse conducted in ways that create effective solutions.
Long thought of as primary mechanisms for the development of vital knowledge and the paths to wise leadership in a comprehensive liberal society responsible for balancing an array of competing values and interests, universities have been particularly fertile ground for activist collectives of ideological faculty. Outside these often rabid and intolerant collectives, most faculty simply want to be left alone to pursue their own professional and personal goals. They are also easily intimidated and sufficiently passive in character that they are largely incapable of banding together to condemn what is happening, in part because they don’t want to be attacked or, as is increasingly the case, “cancelled” with student and activist faculty demanding they be fired due to some “insensitive” transgression. But for some, the reticence is because they share some of the concerns being advanced, albeit at significantly lower levels of intensity and engagement.
“Academic Scribblers”
As to such academics, Keynes concluded insightfully that, in his experience most university faculty were little more than “academic scribblers”. See, John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money 383, 384 (1935). The “scribblers” are content to live their lives within the safe confines of the system of rewards in which they were initially indoctrinated and from which they extract significant benefits. He indicates that, to the extent some university faculty are truly creative, it tends to occur relatively early in their careers, often before they receive tenure and settle into the snug and privileged zone of traditional academia.
Such “advanced” long-tenured individuals turned out to have little defense against the activist faculty and administrators who have flooded into universities over the past several decades. Arthur Brooks offers an intriguing analysis concerning the relatively early peaking of a creative career and the sense of irrelevance that afflicts many academics regardless of earlier success. Brooks writes:
The data are shockingly clear that for most people, in most fields, decline starts earlier than almost anyone thinks. According to research by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis and one of the world’s leading experts on the trajectories of creative careers, success and productivity increase for the first 20 years after the inception of a career, on average. So if you start a career in earnest at 30, expect to do your best work around 50 and go into decline soon after that. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/work-peak-professional-decline/590650/. “Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think: Here’s how to make the most of it”, Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic, July 2019 Issue.
If Brooks and those he cites are correct, then we must not delude ourselves by assuming that independent and free thinking intellectuals make up the main body of university faculty and administrators. As suggested by Keynes in his comment about “academic scribblers”, the challenge of “saving” the university is not solely one of resisting and reversing a takeover by aggressive groups of activists and ideologues seeking to use the university to advance their concept of a “brave new world”. An important part of the challenge, as contained in the Rapper Zuby’s statement offered in Conformity Colleges, is that university faculty and leadership that do not agree with the repressive actions and forces in operation throughout American universities need to “Grow some ….”. Actually, Zuby phrased his words somewhat differently and this was also contained in Leslie Eastman’s review.
[Eastman adds] I will conclude with another reference to a pandemic: The pandemic of silence, proposed by a rapper named Zuby. “Over the past 10 years, we have had this pandemic of cowardice, and people are unwilling to say things in many cases that are objectively true. They are afraid of repercussions,” he said, adding that cowardice and courage are both habits and they’re also both contagious. When people start acting like cowards, it can affect others around who will start behaving like cowards, Zuby said. “When one person stands up, starts speaking out, and using their platform to either state their opinions or to state objective facts, it encourages other people to do the same.”
Language Control and Propaganda: Are We Mirroring China?
While I am focusing on American and the Western political democracies, what is happening in Chinese universities presents a troubling parallel because it relates directly to language control, curriculum, and what is allowed to be learned or said. Chinese Premier Xi Jinping understands the power granted by controlling education and language through the institution of the university. Xi has commanded that the tenets of the Chinese Communist Party must dominate the curriculum of the nation’s universities, issuing an order requiring universities to put the Party and its aims at the center of their educational process. This converts the university into an instrument of state propaganda and brings stark meaning to the idea of political correctness. In language that should give pause to the numerous supporters of linguistic controls in American universities, a report explains Xi’s strategy.
Chinese authorities must intensify ideological controls on academia and turn universities into Communist party “strongholds”, President Xi Jinping has declared in a major address. “Higher education ... must adhere to correct political orientation,” Xi said in a high-profile speech to top party leaders and university chiefs that was delivered at a two-day congress on “ideological and political work” in Beijing. Universities must be transformed into “strongholds that adhere to party leadership” and political education should be made “more appealing”, the president ordered, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency. … Xi … said teachers needed to be both “disseminators of advanced ideology” and “staunch supporters of [party] governance”. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/09/china-universities-must-become-communist-party-strongholds-says-xi-jinping. “China universities must become Communist party 'strongholds', says Xi Jinping: All teachers must be ‘staunch supporters’ of party governance, says president in what experts called an effort to reassert control”, Tom Philips, 12/9/2016.
Power and the “Argument Culture”
In his 1969 book, Power, Adolf Berle warned that control of institutions is the best way for people to extend their power beyond the limited and often counter-productive reach of overwhelming violence. Peter Drucker echoes this view, warning about what he called the new pluralism. Drucker explains: “The new pluralism … focuses on power. It is a pluralism of single-cause, single-interest groups—the “mass movements” of small but highly disciplined minorities. Each of them tries to obtain through power what it could not obtain through numbers or through persuasion. Each is exclusively political.” Peter Drucker, The New Realities 76 (1989). As we have seen within the university world and society generally, this power is magnified when the “small but highly disciplined minority groups” learn they can gain even more leverage by creating alliances that extend their reach even further.
Deborah Tannen, writing in The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue (1998), relates how after she made a presentation another participant attacked her relentlessly in ways that Tannen felt were unfair and even in bad faith. At a break in the proceedings Tannen asked her critic why she had been so aggressive and was surprised at the response. Tannen explains: “The answer crystallized when I put the question to a writer who I felt had misrepresented my work”. The other woman’s answer was: “It’s an argument!” This led to an epiphany on Tannen’s part relating to the state of discourse in much of academia.
“It’s an argument!” …. [means] When you’re having an argument with someone, your goal is not to listen and understand. Instead, you use every tactic you can think of—including distorting what your opponent just said—in order to win the argument.” (5).
In rhetoric and advocacy “winning” is everything. Aristotle long ago described the essence of rhetoric and it has not changed. Rhetoric is about argumentative persuasion, not truth. The function of the process then and now is to elevate one’s own arguments and undermine an opponent’s. That is what we are experiencing and, while the mindset may be fully applicable to the function of the advocate, lawyer or even politician, it is an offense to the core integrity of the university and any honest intellectual. There is a cost to such “by any means” systems. Avoidance behavior is one price paid when everything is turned into an adversarial battle. This occurs because many people do not like hostile and emotion-laden struggles and withdraw physically or emotionally when they feel attacked. Even if they are not the direct object of the attack, they work to avoid being caught up in such exchanges and feign allegiance to the most powerful and threatening side.
A result of this avoidance behavior is that many people, including university faculty and students, become skilled at self-editing and masking. They seek to avoid unpleasant confrontations, or being labeled by someone whose good will they need as a “deplorable” or undesirable. There are other undesirable side effects. As Tannen indicates: “When a certain kind of interaction is the norm, those who feel comfortable with that type of interaction are drawn to participate, and those who do not feel comfortable with it recoil and go elsewhere.” The Argument Culture at 20.
The most effective constraints on real intellectual freedom and quality of scholarship are implicit rather than overt. Anthony Diekema explains our dilemma: “Faculty simply do not always say what they believe, or what they know to be true, because they don’t want to deal with what may be the resulting hassle—peer alienation, negative student opinions, or the ire of a constituent community.” Anthony J. Diekema, Academic Freedom and Christian Scholarship 45-46 (2000).
The aggressive intolerance of the repressive ideologue is strategic, not accidental. In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer describes how the “fault finding man of words” uses language to attack a dominant orthodoxy to undermine its perceived legitimacy. Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements at 120 (1951). The goal is to weaken and then supplant the existing system. Five years ago Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt published an analysis in The Atlantic that detailed what was occurring in American universities. See, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/. “The Coddling of the American Mind”, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, September 2015.
Haidt, who has taught at Virginia and NYU, also authored an exceptional analysis in 2012 titled The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Harvard’s Edward Wilson praised that work as: “A remarkable and original synthesis of social psychology, political analysis, and moral reasoning.” As to the “coddling” culture in American universities, Lukianoff and Haidt write:
Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. … Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. … Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. … [A] professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said.
The authors go on to warn:
This new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion. … [T]he deans and department chairs at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”
The “new climate” has unfortunately come upon universities far more rapidly and institutionalized much more deeply than suggested above. This is in large part because one of the unanticipated consequences of the Internet is that it has allowed such a degree of collaboration among ideological groups that powerful and relentless attacks on anyone unfortunate enough to be chosen as a target of “the mob” have become the norm in politics, the media, and universities. The warnings voiced by Berle, Hoffer, Drucker, Tannen, Lukianoff and Haidt describe behavior that is being played out everywhere in American universities and Western societies generally.
Consider, for example, the recent resignation of an editor at the New York Times, supposedly a journalistic bastion committed to the protection of free speech and dialogue. After James Bennet authorized publishing an op-ed by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton relating to the possibility of Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act to to back up overwhelmed police departments and help quell ongoing violence in numerous American cities if that became necessary, the Times’ staff rebelled and Bennet was forced to resign. Opinion Editor James Dao was reassigned.
This was all about the fact that the “journalistic” staff at the Times was outraged that the “Gray Lady” would dare publish something contrary to their own political positions. Apparently, Progressives have no problem “eating their own”. This basically renders the New York Times a purveyor of propaganda rather than interactive analysis. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board responded to the Times’ actions by saying:
The purge of senior editors at progressive newspapers this weekend is no cause for cheering. Their resignations are another milestone in the march of identity politics and cancel culture through our liberal institutions, and American journalism and democracy will be worse for it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/cancel-culture-journalism-11591658340. “Cancel Culture Journalism: Two liberal editors fall for violations against progressive orthodoxy”, The Editorial Board, 6/8/20.
Propaganda, ideology and schism dominate our political and intellectual interactions. Control of the institutional university has in far too many instances been ceded to powerful groups advancing political interests. They are intent on using the institutions of education to define what can be learned and talked about. As Deborah Tannen suggests, this has an effect on the willingness of creative people to expose their ideas because, permissible speech as defined by ideological collectives has become so fluid that, you never know what is going to lead to harsh criticism, demands for suspension or dismissal, or organized protests. Tannen, The Argument Culture 19.
The majority of academics are not activists. They have no intention of being forced to live out their academic dream by fighting continuous battles over language and revolutionary politics. They are therefore intimidated when vocal and unforgiving groups of ideologically driven faculty, students, and external groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter to name just a few, proclaim areas to be taboo and sanctionable. Traditional academics are “running scared”.
For purposes of survival, it has become important for the cautious academic to act as if the naked “Emperor” still deserves praise for parading in his “stylish new clothes”. The situation has reached the point where anyone who deliberately or even inadvertently trespasses the shifting boundaries of allowable language is attacked as a bigot, a “phobe” or by some other label that has the power to end academic careers. One example of what can happen if you offend the “Emperor” is described in the next several paragraphs.
The Strategy of Using Shifting Language to Intimidate and Control
Language control is a vital part of the strategies of those seeking and maintaining power once achieved. This is because the concepts we use to interpret our world dictate how we perceive, define, and interact with that world. Linguistic specialist Ruth Anshen offers a vital insight in explaining that humans do not only “use” language but “become” the language they use to the extent it defines their identity and sets limits on their ability to perceive reality. See R.N. Anshen, Language: An Enquiry into Its Meaning and Functions (1983) where she explains: “man is that being on earth who does not have language. Man is language.” When this occurs, particularly with activist collectives, “their” language becomes “their” personal reality. Those who do not share that language simply “don’t get it”.
The systematic takeover of the university and much of the educational and political processes is being done through what might be called “ideological colonization”. As Eric Hoffer notes, a group seeking power asserts its “ownership” of the right to define allowable discourse and behavior even though they may represent only a small portion of a population. These linguistic control strategies have a variety of forms. They include what is called “cancel culture”, deplatforming of speakers through shutdowns and threats of violence, claims to cultural appropriation and other forms of political correctness, ever changing rules on speech, or uncovering long ago behavior of a targeted individual or group that can be used to condemn someone no matter how ancient, or non-contextual, it might be.
The struggle to control language is a major battlefront. Great power is obtained by being able to control the nature of the particular “quicksand” of what is deemed linguistically offensive at any particular moment. Daphne Patai suggests that elements of feminism deserve much of the blame. She argues that: “In feminist circles in particular, academic freedom is under attack by those who advocate and put into effect coercive sexual-harassment policies that are so broad, vague, and all-inclusive that their application routinely violates the due-process rights of the accused. In these feminists' view, harassment is an ever-expanding concept, the depths of which have yet to be plumbed.” Daphne Patai, “Speak Freely, Professor -- Within the Speech Code,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 9, 2000, pg. B7.
As an example, consider the words of the feminist scholar Mary Joe Frug. “The liberal equality doctrine is often understood as an engine of liberation with respect to sex-specific rules. This imagery suggests the repressive function of law, a function that feminists have inventively sought to appropriate and exploit through critical scholarship, litigation, and legislative campaigns.” Mary Joe Frug, "A Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto (An Unfinished Draft)", Harv. L. Rev. 1045 (1992).
In words that echo Ruth Anshen’s conclusion that humans don’t just use language but are the language they use, Frug argues: “The postmodern position locating human experience as inescapably within language suggests that feminists should not overlook the constructive function of legal language as a critical frontier for feminist reforms.” Frug went on to say that: “This is not a proposal that we try to promote a benevolent and fixed meaning for sex differences. … Rather, the argument is that continuous interpretive struggles over the meaning of sex differences can have an impact on patriarchal legal power.” Frug, "A Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto, id.
Frug clearly offers the language of political struggle, strategy, and a war of attrition fought through linguistic control, not that of the detached and independent scholar. She adds:
“[T]he oppositional character of the style arguably coincides with the oppositional spirit of feminism. Irony, for example, is a stylistic method of acknowledging and challenging a dominant meaning, of saying something and simultaneously denying it. Figures of speech invite ideas to break out of the linear argument of a text; they challenge singular, dominant interpretations.” at 1047, 1048.
In “Objectivity and Truth: Problems in Doing Feminist Research”, Acker et al write: “Understanding the processes that result in inequalities is a necessary step toward changing women’s position [in the social sciences]. For us this understanding comes from a theoretical perspective which has its roots in feminism, Marxism, and critical theory.” They continue, “The emancipatory aim of a women’s sociology derives … from its close connections with the contemporary women’s movement as well as from our particular position as women researchers. Women’s research is intimately connected with the political aims of the women’s movement...” Joan Acker, Kate Barry, and Johanna Esseveld, “Objectivity and Truth: Problems in Doing Feminist Research,”, in Fonow & Cook, Beyond Methodology 134.
The effort to acquire or defend political control over the university, as institution, is the essence of the struggle for the new generation of activist scholars, and they have largely won the battle. In such a contest for control, it is natural for the competing interest groups to strive to elevate their preferred goals and methods and repress potential competitors. Within the university the fact of a political struggle for control means that the professed culture of intellectual freedom and independence has changed into one of political allegiance and conformity.
Former US Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist once described what takes place when people with strong agendas acquire power. Rehnquist quotes John Stuart Mill: “The disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything but want of power.” Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 467 (172) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting) (quoting J.S. Mill, On Liberty 28 (1885). Max Lerner provided similar insights, stating: “Mill was a pioneer in seeing, with the growth of social egalitarianism and mass culture, the shadow of “an oppressive yoke of uniformity in opinion and practice.” Max Lerner, Mill’s Essential Works, 250 (1965).
It Is All About Gaining Power, Control and Advantage
for One’s Identity Group
There is a cultural symbiosis between the ability and willingness to engage in freedom of thought within the university and the general society. If it is suppressed and devalued in either venue it begins to die in both. Who better to highlight the price we pay if we fail to protect freedom of thought and speech than Salman Rushdie. Rushdie expressed his horror at the British government’s failure to even bother criticizing violent and threatening Sikh protesters in the UK who forced the closure of Behzti, a play depicting rape and murder in a Sikh temple. Rushdie, forced into hiding for years after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death for writing The Satanic Verses, said government ministers should have protected freedom of expression. Instead, he said: “It’s been horrifying to see the response. It is pretty terrible to hear government ministers expressing approval of the ban and failing to condemn the violence when they should be supporting freedom of expression.’” Lee Glendinning, “Rushdie attacks closure of Sikh play”, December 27, 2004, The Guardian.
Ruth Sherlock writes about students changing how education works, including demanding the elimination of words and ideas that oppose their own. See, Ruth Sherlock, “How political correctness rules in America’s student ‘safe spaces’ ”, November 28, 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/12022041/How-political-correctness-rules-in-Americas-student-safe-spaces.html. Sherlock discusses students’ claims they suffer emotional “trauma” when subjected to unpleasant situations. They speak about “micro-aggressions”, “trigger warnings” and the need for “safe spaces”.
The “safest space” for a teacher, scholar, or student who is not a member of one of the protected identity groups is to simply be quiet. The problem with doing this is that such self-oriented prudential quietude betrays the basic ideal of the university. This includes betraying the responsibility to provide the quality of learning for students who need to be prepared for a world that does not follow the rules of a sequestered “hot house” environment. In this incredibly complex world it also betrays the society’s needs for honest interpreters of what we face, and keeps us from developing the ability to create effective strategies for resolving problems. This service to the social community is one of the main purposes of universities.
While the idea of “safe space” was first used to describe a refuge for people exposed to racial prejudice or sexism, Sherlock reports that it now has a changed meaning. That changed meaning too often implies protection from “exposure to ideas that make one uncomfortable”, according to Nadine Strossen, a prominent law professor and former head of the American Civil Liberties Union. [Sherlock adds] “This hesitancy to engage in the dialogue of debate – and, in its most extreme form, the sense that hearing opposing opinions can cause damage to the psyche – has seeped from the campus to the classroom.”
A similar tactic to demands for a “safe space” for specific identity groups has arisen under the concept of a teacher’s responsibility to provide “trigger warnings”.
The introduction of “trigger warnings” may have been designed to protect people who have suffered serious trauma, but critics fear they are now a means to prevent the free discussion in class that is an essential part of academic learning. “The language of trauma, which started as a term to describe extreme events, started to be used much more loosely,” [Harvard] Prof [Jeannie] Suk said. “So trauma is now colloquially used to mean lots of different things including non-extreme, even everyday events.” Sherlock, id.
Are We Seeking to Produce Free, Rational, Intelligent, Knowledgeable Individuals or Pathological, Angry and Intellectually Childlike Graduates?
John Gardner explains that our challenge is whether we can overcome the growing trend toward intolerant and controlling ideological purity in universities and our society. Gardner warns:
[E]very line of behavior has its pathology, and there is pathology of dedication. … [T]heir commitment to worthy goals becomes so fanatical that they destroy as much as they create. And there is the “true believer” who surrenders himself to a mass movement or to dogmatic beliefs in order to escape the responsibilities of freedom. A free society does not invite that kind of allegiance. It wants only one kind of devotion, the devotion of free, rational, responsible individuals. John W. Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? 180 (Harper & Row, N.Y. 1961).
In the face of the efforts to control our ability to engage in honest discourse by narrowing the cognitive structures that allow us to think complexly and by chilling our willingness to reveal our beliefs and values, we need to think about how to resist what is going on. In theory, at least as it has been explained for the past several centuries, our modern universities are supposed to stand for the pursuit of our highest levels of learning across a range of disciplines, intellectual insights and personal development. The compelling dictate underlying this ideal is that we must strive for the highest insights we are capable of achieving. The belief is that this is important for our social community’s growth and qualitative evolution.
Peter Drucker captures the dilemma concerning the primary purposes of not only the university but all educational systems. He explains:
Education for what, is the wrong question, a teacher would, or should, say. Education is for somebody, not for something. The product of education is not knowledge or learning; it is not skills, ability or virtue, jobs or success, dollars or goods. It is always a person, who acquired knowledge or skills or virtue, who gets a job and an income or who produces goods .... The purpose of education in educated society therefore means first: What does an educated person have to be? What does he have to learn to achieve the most, make the greatest contribution, succeed the best and develop the furthest as a person? Peter F. Drucker, Landmarks of Tomorrow 137 (1965).