David Barnhizer
A “Lament”
The primary impetus for writing this analysis is that after more than thirty years in university teaching, research and service I am totally tired of hearing the “Big Words” indignant university faculty, presidents and the like are throwing around as if they are actually true even though many critiques show quite clearly they have been corrupted by many of our supposedly elite educational institutions including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, UCLA, USC, Duke and a disturbing number of others. Free speech and thought? Forget it! Open discourse in class? Forget it! Courageous faculty members insistent on philosophical, creative and intense intellectual inquiry? Forget it!
I love what universities stand for as an Ideal to which we should aspire and strive to achieve to the extent we are capable both as individuals and as a society. The Ideal is fantastic. All intellectually and open societies of the kind we casually refer to as democracies need the ability to think, discuss, tolerate, seek fuller justice and equality, and infuse their people with the skills, vision and quality needed to sustain and evolve as the best they are capable of becoming.
While the Ideal of truth and comprehensive thought and understanding is, like all worthwhile goals, impossible to fully achieve the effort and aspirational focus is a vital part of who we become and what others and the overall society becomes. Our universities and educational systems are absolutely essential elements in our quest. The challenge is that we are not only failing in achieving our aspirational journey—but we have rejected the goal itself and are sliding backward on the difficult slope we had been climbing toward the Ideal. Our reality is now dismal and increasingly bleak. At this point I have a great deal of contempt for what we have become.
In my search to figure out what universities—and the entire educational system have become, I offer several analyses. They include Conformity Colleges: The Destruction of Intellectual Creativity and Dissent in America’s Universities (Skyhorse 2024). “UnCanceling” America (Amazon 2022). The Artificial Intelligence Contagion: Can Democracy Withstand the Imminent Transformation of Work, Wealth and the Social Order? (Clarity 2019). They reflect a longstanding focus on the nature and responsibilities of universities. The list also includes a number of published law review articles focused on the university and education but I will leave those for another time and context.
“A Chilling of Discourse”
Two decades ago, in “A Chilling of Discourse,” I wrote thoughts that unfortunately turned out to be accurate.
A key consequence of the collectives of multiculturalists, postmodernists, radical feminists, critical race activists, sexuality advocates, and others working for radical change is not only the politicization of knowledge in what is after all a realm of politics we call law, but the incoherence of knowledge and the loss of the quality and integrity of our pursuit of knowledge through scholarship. One result is that much of the scholarship and teaching found in the humane and political or noncumulative disciplines such as law are forms of self-interested propaganda in which honesty is muted or excluded and truth-seeking and balance are subordinated to predetermined political agendas.” David R. Barnhizer, “A Chilling of Discourse,” St. Louis University Law Journal 361 (2006).
Liberal comedian Bill Maher recently stated: “In today's world, when truth conflicts with narrative, it’s the truth that has to apologize.” Maher is one of our last “true Liberals” in the sense he is open to alternative viewpoints and has been a strong voice against the repressive behaviors of the Woke and the Crits. His motives are not aimed at supporting the political agendas of what is generally referred to as the “Right”, but at defending the fundamental values and behaviors essential to Liberalism and a healthy democratic community. Fox News reporter Charles Creitz writes:
Bill Maher roasted the woke concept of “presentism,” where historical figures and events are judged in the prism of the present—further arguing against the oft-claimed leftist position that White people are usually to blame for history’s lesser moments. … “[I]n today’s world, when truth conflicts with narrative, it’s the truth that has to apologize—Being woke is like a magic moral time machine where you judge everybody against what you imagine you would have done in 1066: And you always win.” Charles Creitz, “Bill Maher roasts woke ‘presentism’: ‘A magic moral time machine’ where you always win: ‘It's not all up in the air to change or delete or make up based on what makes you feel better today,’” Fox News, September 17, 2022, https://www.foxnews.com/media/bill-maher-roasts-woke-presentism-magic-moral-time-machine-you-always-win.
The “Dogma Day” Parade
It is far too easy for politicized scholars to mistake their personal beliefs for more valid insights. In that context one becomes convinced that anything said by use of their personal “voice” is a form of irrefutable “truth.” Ironically, or perhaps prophetically, the “anti-truth” phenomenon of the Woke is starkly revealed in a cartoon describing “The Dogma Day Parade.” Wiley Miller’s 2002 cartoon captures our dilemma perfectly. The panel describes “The opening ceremony of the annual dogma day parade,” and depicts an urban intersection at which four men stand. Each is poised to march in a different direction, and each man is carrying an identical sign proclaiming “Follow me to the truth.” Wiley Miller, “Non Sequitur,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 23, 2002, E5.
Since that cartoon appeared, the situation has only become much worse. We are caught in a Dickensian A Tale of Two Cities scenario involving the “best of times” and the “worst of times.” The “worst of times” political conflict that is ruining the American university and degrading the American society is driven in significant part by the emergence of Big Tech social media outlets.
The Big Tech systems are controlled by deeply political and almost uniformly Woke staff and proud of it. Although it is an almost amusing and seemingly trivial development, Elon Musk, after having moved into Twitter (now X) headquarters after buying the company, found t-shirts stored in closets with the message “STAY WOKE” emblazoned on them. Over 600 examples of “canceling” and intellectual repression can be found in my 2022 book “UnCanceling” America (Amazon) and there are more in the 2019 book I co-authored with my son Daniel Barnhizer, The Artificial Intelligence Contagion: Can Democracy Withstand the Imminent Transformation of Work, Wealth and the Social Order? (Clarity Press).
“MY Truth Is the ONLY Truth”
True believer’s cage of assumption and agenda renders them unable to hear or comprehend other viewpoints except to consider them heresy or the voices of the enemy. This closed-mindedness is a danger even for an individual activist-intellectual without ties to a group, but the risk expands by orders of magnitude when someone becomes part of a political collective. This results in a sterile—though impassioned—form of discourse that offers little beyond the speakers’ prejudices. It traps and blinds due to the extreme personalization of the speaker’s reality and pursuit of political ends.
A scholar who is critical of aspects of postmodernism argues:
“Truth, among postmodernists, is whatever you can get away with saying in whatever specific context you find yourself. Power lies in the context (the prevailing mentality) and, thus, power becomes truth. Obviously, then, this movement influences our concern for the future of academic freedom. Indeed, if there is no truth but only power, the need for academic freedom ceases to exist.” Anthony J. Diekema, Academic Freedom and Christian Scholarship 34.Wm. B. Eerdmans-Lightning Source; New Stiff Wraps edition (August 8, 2000) Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK.
It is far too easy for politicized teachers and scholars to mistake or substitute their personal beliefs for more valid and truth-filled insights. In that context one becomes convinced that anything said by use of their personal “voice” is a form of irrefutable “truth.” The controlling cage of assumptions and identity agendas renders them unable to hear or comprehend other viewpoints, except to consider them heresy or the voices of the opposition.
Martin Buber argues:
“In our age, in which the true meaning of every word is encompassed by delusion and falsehood, and the original intention of the human glance is stifled by tenacious mistrust, it is of decisive importance to find again the genuineness of speech and existence as We.... Man will not persist in existence if he does not learn anew to persist in it as a genuine We.” Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man,108 (Maurice Friedman & Ronald Gregor Smith trans., Maurice Friedman ed., 1965).
A society without the ability to negotiate reliable terms of what will be considered true and thus authoritative is one in which promises are meaningless, nothing is reliable, and betrayal is a predictable and even inevitable condition of relationships. Western societies cannot afford to surrender such a basic principle without devolving into a system operating on the increasingly prevalent use of force and Machiavellian machinations by powerful political cliques.
At the center of my concern is the distinction between the intellectual, who traditionally has been a prophetic critic of power, and the careful scholar who has long been thought to be at the heart of the university's mission in both teaching and research. Along with this distinction between intellectual and scholar is that between the aggressive advocate-activist and the reflective independent thinker seeking the deepest understanding, whatever its implications.
Each has an important role but we delude ourselves when we fail to understand that the roles are distinct to a significant degree and often incompatible.
The Erosion of the Ideal of Truth
“Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie.” Miyamoto Musashi
There has been an erosion of the ideal of truth as a guiding force for what we do. This includes a dishonoring of the tradition of the truth-seeking function of scholars. For the university-based intellectual, including legal scholars, the problem with commitments to ends other than truth-seeking is that once we accept a mission distinct from the pursuit of truth and honest discourse, most of the remaining options are suspect - including falseness, hypocrisy, self-deception, subordination of self to a collective, profit, dogmatism, devotion to tradition, and propaganda.
What we intend by the idea of truth - legal, scientific, political and otherwise - is obviously subtle, wide-ranging, functionally disparate and perhaps impossible to make entirely concrete. A society without commitment to the ideal of truth pursued with integrity and honesty (even if not entirely real or provable) is not a community but only a collection of disparate people seeking to take advantage of each other while never being able to trust the validity of anyone or anything.
The erosion of the ideal of truth as a guiding force for what we do dishonors the tradition of the truth-seeking function of scholars and teachers. It also rejects the idea that we teachers are responsible for teaching our students how to differentiate truth from falsity. The sacred duty of the teacher is not to inculcate, intimidate, or indoctrinate in the teacher’s values and frames of reference. Yet, too often, “truth-obstructing” indoctrination is what is being produced by our educational systems, not to mention the growing reality of schools providing substandard quality of instruction in foundational intellectual and analytic skills. We are too often refusing to honor a teacher’s duty and are refusing, or are incapable of teaching our students the richness of independent thought and analysis. As the educational system moves even further in the direction of “Your truth must be MY truth” we face totalitarian domination.”
For the university-based intellectual, the challenge created by commitments to ends other than honest truth-seeking is that once we accept a mission distinct from the pursuit of truth, evidence, and honest discourse, the remaining options are highly suspect and subject to psychological manipulation because—if there is no “truth”—we lack the intellectual anchors needed to keep us grounded and stable. This opens us to alternative paths to decision-making that include falseness, hypocrisy, power, self-deception, subordination of self to a collective, greed, dogmatism, indoctrination, intimidation, and propaganda. This is obviously not a good path but we have too many people already traveling it.
There is a problem with maintaining the role of truth and evidence in the aggressive antagonism being undertaken by postmodernists and so-called “critical” scholars. Heather Mac Donald has been describing the decline of American universities for years and offers powerful insights.
“In this new scholarship, factual accuracy is no longer important. Writes Stuart Alan Clarke in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities: “It is naive, if not disingenuous, to suggest that all that matters is the promotion of the truth.” Patricia Williams’s portrayal à clef of her teaching stint at Stanford Law School is deeply distorted, according to former colleagues there—leftists all. Williams fittingly takes refuge against such charges in the shadow of Tawana Brawley: “When students . . . believed and then claimed that I had made . . . up [another of her personal victimization stories], they put me in a position like that of Tawana Brawley.” Indeed, Brawley, whom Williams beatifies as the patron saint of victimized black women, is the perfect symbol of the movement: as Brawley’s supporters on the radical left would have it, it didn’t matter if her story of racial brutalization wasn’t actually true, because it could have happened that way.” Heather Mac Donald, Law School Humbug, City Journal, Autumn 1995 at 52.
A society without the ability to negotiate reliable terms of what will be considered true, and thus authoritative, is one in which promises are meaningless, nothing is reliable, and betrayal is a predictable and even inevitable condition of relationships. In my own international experience think Russia and China in considering whether their promises can be relied on. The fact is they cannot. As events change the context of the interaction and the advantages and balance of power shifts, you can find yourself with a useless set of promises and commitments on which you had relied. Western societies cannot afford to surrender such a basic principles as truth without devolving into a system operating on the increasingly prevalent use of force and Machiavellian machinations under the control of powerful political cliques committed to preserving their power and advantage or seizing it from others.
A “Gutenberg Moment”
What we intend by the idea of truth—legal, scientific, political, and otherwise—is obviously subtle, wide-ranging, functionally disparate according to the area of inquiry, and impossible to make entirely concrete in many instances. But a society without commitment to the ideal of truth pursued with integrity and honesty (even if not entirely real or provable) is not a community. It is only a collection of disparate people and controlling factions seeking to take advantage of each other while never being able to trust the validity of anyone or anything. That is what we are creating in America.
The dominant internet and social media systems have created tools of sweeping power to which groups both within the nation or from outside its boundaries have access. The Internet is an incredibly powerful weapon to which those intent on undermining the American political, economic and social system would never otherwise have had access. We are experiencing a historical “Gutenberg Moment” in which the emergence of a transformational technology has facilitated the creation of interactive communications and monitoring networks. These capabilities are far beyond anything previously available. With the full cooperation of Big Tech, and our dominant legacy media systems, this has given governments and single-minded activist groups powers they would never otherwise have had, and that they should not possess. That is what my son Daniel and I explored at length in our 2019 book The Artificial Intelligence Contagion: Can Democracy Withstand the Imminent Transformation of Work, Wealth and the Social Order?.
The Corruption of Thought
The incompatibility of subjectivity and objectivity in the process of serious analytic work is pointed out in Albert Camus’s poignant observation voiced in the context of the creativity of the artist and the need to keep sufficient distance from the heated conditions of society in order to retain a clear perspective. He writes:
“[I]t is not possible to be a militant in one’s spare time. . . . [T]he artist of today becomes [either] unreal if he remains in his ivory tower or sterilized if he spends his time galloping around the political arena. . . . [T]he writer must be fully aware of the dramas of his time and . . . must take sides every time he can. . . . But he must also maintain or resume from time to time a certain distance in relation to our history.” Albert Camus, The Wager of Our Generation, in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death 237, 238 (Justin O’Brien trans., Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1961).
Consider the meaning of Camus’s warning that the militant must periodically withdraw from the subjectivity of the struggle to regain perspective as a commentator on society. Within the university, the activist-intellectual never withdraws from the “dramas” of the culture and thus never regains the greater perspective of distance. Rather than lament our new-found clouding of perception, we have glorified it.
The continual tension between reality, politics, and independent balanced thought generates a need to gain sufficient experience to understand the context on which one is commenting. It also implies the moral responsibility to take action to improve society, but ultimately accepts that real understanding requires some distance from the fray for one’s perspective to be accurate. Plato made this clear in The Republic in which he described the lengthy educational and experiential process extending over years before an individual should be allowed to be his “Philosopher King”. The US Constitution echoes this to an extent when requiring a President to be at least thirty-five years of age when elected.
The problem is that many members of the academic collectives never withdraw from the “dramas” of their core agendas. They consequently never achieve the essential distance that would allow them to understand the full context being critiqued. One result of the ever-present subjectivity is that many groups of collective-scholars are speaking almost exclusively to each other.
The independent teacher and scholar’s task is to test and question everything, not to accept convenient assumptions—no matter how attractive, comfortable, or personally advantageous. But conflict and “truths” that don’t conform to the dominant assumptions make people uncomfortable, and scholars tend to be easily discomfited. Traditionally, those who entered the cloisters of academia sought peace and reflection, not conflict. The desire to avoid conflict and to receive the privileges and life-time benefits flowing from alignment with the in-group have inhibiting and directive effects on scholars’ work—both in terms of what they say and what they leave out or don’t pursue. The real challenges to the lack of diversity of politics and values in academia have been made outside the university through other forms of communication, including the Internet.
A Takeover by Activist Faculty, Administrators, and “Woke” Hypersensitive Students
Our universities have become filled with militant faculty and administrators seeking to proselytize others into accepting and advancing their vision of society. As shown in the excerpts set out below describing the culture at Duke University, Woke and hypersensitive students are a core part of a repressive system. Their perspectives are heavily oriented toward what their political movement is seeking to achieve.
This is what Camus described as a distortion that occurs whenever individuals who are engaging in the struggle to achieve what they think to be social justice, simultaneously claim to be clear-thinking scholars or philosophers. He discussed the subjectivity of this self-deluding phenomenon in the context of the creativity of the artist versus the scholar’s need to keep a sufficient distance from the heated conditions of society in order to retain a clear perspective and avoid excessive subjectivity.
In challenging us to resist the effects of excessive subjectivity, Camus added that: “Real mastery consists in refuting the prejudices of the time, initially the deepest and most malignant of them, which would reduce man, after his deliverance from excess, to a barren wisdom.” Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt 30 (Anthony Bower trans. 1956). He goes on to warn:
“We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others. Rebellion, the secular will not to surrender . . . is still today at the basis of the struggle. Origin of form, source of real life, it keeps us always erect in the savage, formless movement of history.” In this situation: “it is essential that we must never let criticism descend to insult; we must grant that our opponent may be right .… It is essential … that we remake our political mentality.” “Defense of Intelligence“, in Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death at 38 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1961) translated from the French and Introduced by Justin O’Brien.
Academic freedom and the strong commitment to truth-seeking have suffered as aggressive activists have flooded into the university professoriate over the past thirty years. Alexander Hall reports on an episode of the Dr. Phil TV show in which Greg Lukianoff, the President of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, was interviewed.
"There have been concerns about free speech on college campuses, with professors increasingly 'canceled' for their opinions … People are looking over their shoulders and watching their words out of fear of someone pointing a finger publicly and saying ‘You can’t say that! You can’t say that! You’re canceled and banished from society forever because you can’t say that!’" … [Dr. Phil] brought on executive director of the USC Race and Equity Center Shaun Harper and Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, to represent both sides of the cancel culture debate. “Dr. Phil guests duel over cancel culture: ‘You can't say that!’ Alexander Hall, 10/11/22. ”
Greg Lukianoff warned that while things were not "great" for free speech even in 2001, cancel culture on campus has become exponentially worse in recent years, saying, "I have never seen anything like it in my career than I’ve seen over the last two years, and particularly going back to 2015."
"2015 is when I started seeing tenured professors getting fired for what they said. And to be clear, from a culture war standpoint, sometimes those cancelations come from the right as well, and we have data on this at thefire.org, but when you start getting up to 770 attempts to get professors fired, about 2/3 of those attempts result in some kind of punishment, hundreds of professors either stepped down, fired or suspended, we can’t find a historical parallel to this."
Lukianoff recalled ideological purges from America’s past, suggesting they are dwarfed by modern cancel culture.
"Even when we look at the old — the Red Scare, McCarthyism, the best we can find is about 75 to 130 professors being fired or punished during that time," he said. "That’s really bad. So I am at a point where I’m fairly frustrated with people who are saying that cancel culture.”
A “Brutal Cancel Culture at Universities” Piers Morgan
“[W]hat is going on college campuses, not just in America but around the world, is brutal. Censorship of any views by anyone that differs from this woke, cancel culture, mob mentality. … What you discover is that nearly 600 educators at faculties around America have been punished in some form for expressing opinions. And the rate of these punishments being handed out is now multiplying four or five-fold every year, which means that there's a real, ongoing attempt to suppress freedom of speech on college campuses. … One of these professors actually got canceled because he was holding a class, educating people about how to deal with offensive language. And as part of the lecture, he used offensive language to illustrate what he was talking about and was immediately branded a homophobe, a racist and so on, using offensive language deliberately to make a point about offensive language. That is how ridiculous this has all gotten.” “Piers Morgan rails against 'brutal' cancel culture at universities: 'A complete disgrace’”, Alexander Hall, Foxnews, 5/22/22.
A Sampling of Academic Political Affiliation at Duke University Found Zero Faculty Diversity in Multiple Departments
Hunter Lewis, in Political Debate Sweeps Campus, The Herald-Sun, 2/13/2004, at A1, writes that the DCU [Duke Conservative Union] revealed the political affiliation of faculty from several departments [at Duke University] to be in favor of registered Democrats over Republicans. These included history, literature, sociology and English. [Lewis reports] The departments had a [political] ratio of 32-to-0, 11-to-0, 9-to-0 and 18-to-1, respectively. Such a distortion is … mind-boggling and could never occur solely by accident.
Duke’s “diversity” has not improved during the ensuing seventeen years. Ivan Petropoulus, a Chemistry student at Duke, demonstrated great courage in publishing the following remarks in the Duke Chronicle. Among his most telling observations is one that describes the culture not only at Duke, but at far too many of America’s universities. He writes: “If Duke’s purpose is to cultivate the future leaders and freethinkers of our generation, then I can’t help but think that we’ve failed in that regard.” He adds:
“Coming into Duke, I imagined it to be a melting pot of ideas, where everyone could be heard without fear of being rebuked, silenced, or ostracized. My friends on the right know more of the opposite to be true. They worry that if they express their political views, they run the risk of losing friends, lower grades and fewer job opportunities. … Here, you don’t learn how to carefully formulate your own ideas, how to present and debate your own beliefs, or how to peacefully negotiate a middle ground with your political adversaries–you only learn how to properly rehearse the truths deemed acceptable by the university and the student population.” https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2021/02/stand-up-for-dukes-conservative-voices. “Stand up for Duke's conservative voices”, Ivan Petropoulos, 2/17/21.
“Academic Freedom Is Dead!” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
An example of the intolerance that is taking place in America’s universities is provided by the experience of Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya who is now serving in the Trump Administration as Director of the National Institutes of Health. Bhattacharya is a tenured professor at Stanford and an experienced, respected and extremely professional scientist. His sin? He dared to challenge the “official” controlling narrative of the COVID-19 Pandemic’s insistence on lockdowns and shuttering schools. The fact that he and his colleagues have been proven correct doesn’t seem to matter even now. They didn’t go along with the dominant but severely flawed narrative being pushed by the federal government, mainstream media, by Big Pharma, the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, and politically powerful segments of the “scientific” medical profession. A report describes Dr. Bhattacharya’s experience at Stanford.
“A Stanford University professor of medicine says “academic freedom is dead” after his life became a “living hell” for challenging coronavirus lockdown orders and the “scientific clerisy” during the pandemic. “The basic premise is that if you don't have protection and academic freedom in the hard cases, when a faculty member has an idea that's unpopular among some of the other faculty – powerful faculty, or even the administration … If they don't protect it in that case, then you don't have academic freedom at all.” … Bhattacharya … came under fire during the pandemic after co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, which was an open letter signed by thousands of doctors and scientists in 2020 denouncing lockdowns as harmful. Bhattacharya was joined by Harvard professor of medicine Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Oxford professor Dr. Sunetra Gupta in co-authoring the document. The declaration was quickly denounced by other health leaders, including National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who slammed the call for herd immunity in the document as "nonsense and very dangerous.” “Stanford professor who challenged lockdowns and 'scientific clerisy' declares academic freedom ‘dead’: Stanford's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya says his life became a 'living hell' when he challenged Dr. Fauci over 2020 COVID lockdowns”, Emma Colton, 11/21/22.
University of Alabama Professor Leaves the Institution: “Universities Are No Longer Places that Embrace the Freedom of Exchanging Ideas.”
“A University of Alabama professor left a teaching position due to the “obsession” over the university’s push for equity in science and the “rise of illiberalism.” Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki, a Polish immigrant and Earth Science professor, …[stated] “over the last decade or so, but especially the last few years, the obsession with universities and grant-funding institutions on immutable characteristics of faculty and students and the push for equity in science above all else has dramatically changed the profession of an academic professor,” Wielicki said. Wielicki added that the “rise of illiberalism in the name of DEI is the antithesis of the principles that universities were founded on.” “University of Alabama professor leaves due to ‘obsession’ to push equity in science: ‘Rise of illiberalism’: 'These are no longer places that embrace the freedom of exchanging ideas,' the professor said”, Joshua Q. Nelson, 1/24/23.
“Thank goodness it’s not me.” Fear and Trembling in the University
What is happening in our main educational systems is not a fake “conspiracy theory”. It is real. Philip Carl Salzman, no stranger to being a target of the Woke, describes the intolerant Identity culture that has emerged in American and Canadian universities.
“Almost every university in North America has committed to what is called “social justice,” which is the implementation of identity politics through the mechanisms of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Identity politics divides everyone into one of two categories: evil oppressor or innocent victim. Through official mandatory policies, universities have transformed academic culture from a quest to discover truth about the world and its beings, to the indoctrination of identity politics and enforcement of “social justice” policies.” https://www.theepochtimes.com/hate-and-fear-are-now-major-motivators-on-campus_4785439.html, “Hate and Fear Are Now Major Motivators on Campus”, Philip Carl Salzman, 10/11/22.
The Pursuit of Knowledge for Its Own Sake
Ward Madden, in his foreword to Robert Nisbet's The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, claims that the university “is based upon an historic ideal that is incompatible with many of the forces of modernism”, asserting that the university is “the last surviving medieval institution, and that it is now being destroyed by a secular Last Reformation.” Madden, Foreword to Robert Nisbet, The Degradation of the Academic Dogma: The University in America 1945-1970, at v (1971). There is more truth to this assertion about degradation of the search for truth and valid knowledge than is comfortable.
Madden describes the heart of what he calls the “academic dogma” as the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. This includes the belief that knowledge and the processes of coming to know are good in themselves, and that the university, above all institutions, is - or used to be - devoted to them. Investigating, seeking to understand truth and reality, organizing and contemplating knowledge, are all what the university is supposed to be about.
In America, the Yale Report trumpeted that the "two great points to be gained in intellectual culture are the discipline and the furniture of the mind; expanding its powers, and storing it with knowledge."-- This result was to be achieved by the study of classical subjects rather than the "practical" subjects of science and business (or practical law). Day & Kingsley, Yale Report of 1828, in 1 American Higher Education: A Documentary History 275 (R. Hofstadter & W. Smith eds. 1961).
The Honest Search for Truth Is the Loser and the “Black Night of Dictatorship”
Martha Nussbaum explains that some elements of the political movements now taking place are concentrating their attacks on principles long seen as fundamental. One of those is rejection of the search for truth itself. She explains the attack strategy of activist university faculty who deny even the validity of the rational search for truth, characterizing their argument as follows:
“The very pretense that one is engaged in the disinterested pursuit of truth can be a handy screen for prejudice.” [Conversely] the independent scholar’s task is to test and question everything, not to accept convenient assumptions—no matter how attractive or comfortable. But conflict and “truths” that don’t conform to the dominant assumptions make people uncomfortable, and scholars tend to be easily discomfited. Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1998).
In the same vein as Nussbaum, Albert Camus warns about what he calls “the black night of dictatorship”:
“If you merely make an effort to understand without preconceptions, if you merely talk of objectivity, you will be accused of sophistry and criticized for having pretensions. …. I know as well as anyone the excesses of intelligence, and I know as well as anyone that the intellectual is a dangerous animal ever ready to betray. But that is not the right kind of intelligence. We are speaking of the kind that is backed by courage, the kind that for four years paid whatever was necessary to have the right to respect. When that intelligence is snuffed out, the black night of dictatorship begins. …. [T]here is no freedom without intelligence or without mutual understanding.” Albert Camus, “Defense of Intelligence,” 38 in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’ Brien (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).
“All things with no teacher”
In my 1997 book, The Warrior Lawyer, a significant part of the focus was on Sun Tzu’s Art of War and Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings. David Barnhizer, The Warrior Lawyer: Powerful Strategies for Winning Legal Battles (Bridge Street Books, Irvington-on-Hudson, NY). The point of using those classics of strategic thought and action was to take my students outside the boundaries of Western thought and vocabulary in order to open their minds and actions to alternative systems and methods. It was always satisfying as a teacher to see their awareness grow to the point that, for most students, somewhere about halfway through the semester, you could see “the light” coming on and the ways in which they planned, perceived, thought, and acted was expanded.
One fundamental goal of the course was to end up with what Musashi called “All things with no teacher” when describing his purpose. The concept stands for seeking to allow the students to “go beyond” the teacher, and for teachers to supply their students with a system that continues to “grow” them into a comprehensive and strategic way of perception and thought that begins with what the teacher offers, but understands that the teacher’s knowledge, beliefs, values, and perceptions are only that person’s and therefore inherently subjective. The goal is that the students must be given the ability and responsibility to “become” who they are through the combination not only of their formal learning but the combined power of their growing thought and experience as they develop their full and unique identities.
This process ultimately creates an evolutionary methodology that no longer depends on a teacher because the point is that the goal is for the teacher to assist students in the creation of a dynamic system of thought and action. Imparting “All things with no teacher” is the teacher’s function. The point is to facilitate creation of the student’s unique system with understanding derived from within their growing personal system, capabilities, and experiences.
Down the Anti-Intellectual and Anti-Merit “Rabbit Hole”
The intensity, ideological nature, and passion of the several “righteous” movements—along with the general effects of academic Leftism—have politicized knowledge and pressed it into the service of increasingly intolerant political activists who themselves gained power through asserting the compelling need for tolerance. For a strong portrayal of modern academic culture as being based on dishonest political argumentation rather than discourse, see Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture: Moving From Debate to Dialogue (1998).
Deborah Tannen described the argument culture as one where everything is said as part of a struggle to “win” an interchange rather than to actually understand the subject of discussion and reach agreement on its truth, validity, probability, or consequences. This collapse of the processes of honest discourse challenging the deceptions and processes of politicized argumentation makes a mockery of the pretense of reasoned discourse that underlies the principles of academic life and a democratic system where decisions are supposedly based on evidence.
A painfully appropriate Mallard Fillmore comic by Bruce Tinsley captures the essence of many university students’ expectations and how far the educational system has fallen. In Tinsley’s comic, a university professor reads out loud to his class from a student’s “essay”.
“Give Me an ‘A’ on this essay … Or the campus will burn…” [The Professor adds] “That’s the entire essay … [He then adds] Wonderfully concise, with vivid imagery, Kevin!” Bruce Tinsley, “Mallard Fillmore”, The News-Press, Wednesday, December 2, 2015 at E1.
In the Tinsley episode, we don’t know if the teacher is using Kevin’s words as a critique to demonstrate its absurdity, or if he is voicing true appreciation for its Wittgensteinian conciseness. If he is using Kevin as a foil to demonstrate how not to fulfill the assignment, then he will have “insensitively” violated Kevin’s “safe space” and “dehumanized” him by “victimizing” Kevin and making him “feel bad” and even “threatened” because of the consequences of turning in a failing essay. That would mean he used Kevin as a “thing” for the purposes of others’ learning.
On the other hand, if the teacher is actually praising Kevin, he is offending the entire purpose and responsibility of the university as institution, that of instilling critical thought and useful knowledge in the students who are subject to the institution’s control during a vital moment in their intellectual and personal development. This doesn’t even begin to consider the negative educational impact on students in terms of their sense of how to write an essay, or whether they can obtain whatever they desire through intimidation and threats of violence. I wonder, however, if Kevin’s professor felt threatened, thought his classroom “safe space” was violated, or locked himself in the room’s storage closet and cried?
The Internet and Social Media Have Felled the “Ivory Tower” and Left a Pile of Debris
C.G. Jung aptly warned that the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man’s outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconstant, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are. He explained:
“The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny . . . . Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies.” C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self 4–5 (R.F.C. Hull trans., 1957).
Joseph Hamburger says John Stuart Mill’s his mission was to cause a restructuring of society and human from the ground up. See Joseph Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control 18 (1999). Eric Hoffer describes the role of “faultfinding [men] of words” whose role is to undermine the principles of an existing orthodoxy, in effect softening up the existing system so another can replace it. See Eric Hoffer, The True Berliever: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements 127 (1951).
External activists and students are joining together to launch angry protests against campus presenters—even to the point of violence. There is no longer significant separation between universities and other areas of society. The symbolically revered “Ivory Tower” is now little more than an historical artifact. John Patrick Diggins explains the political reality of what took place over time as the Left built up its critical mass of administrative and faculty control..
“Once inside academe, the New Left gave up all pretense of reaching “the people,” to whom “all power” was supposed to belong. Unlike veterans of the Lyrical Left and Old Left, or true public intellectuals who carried on as editors or journalists for widely circulating magazines, New Left veterans regrouped as a professoriate and wrote primarily for each other in small, arcane academic journals.” The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism at 290 (1984).
Eight years later Diggins wrote:
“Today the Left’s life-support system is the university, which has produced a ‛new class’ credentialed with advanced degrees and enjoying elite status, what Thorstein Veblen—whose Higher Learning in America bears the subtitle ‛A Study in Total Depravity’—would probably have called ‘The Leisure of the Theory Class.’”. The Rise and Fall of the American Left 290 (1992).
A significant part of the Left’s strategy operates through control of language. Seth Stevenson describes the cancellation situation in the context of the development of university speech codes. He writes:
“These codes have their roots in theories, which gained favor with campus radicals in the 1960s, contending that (as Silverglate and Kors put it) ‘[i]f the powerful and the weak were required to play by the same rules . . . the powerful always would win.’ In other words, as this theory goes, the disadvantaged need different rules, ones more permissive and lenient. What’s more, these rules should extend to speech, not just to actions, because speech can be just as powerful and hurtful.” Seth Stevenson, “The Thought Police,” January 2003.www.bostonmagazine.com, Archives.
The intensity, ideological nature, and passion of the several “righteous” movements—along with the general effects of academic Leftism—have politicized knowledge and pressed it into the service of increasingly intolerant political activists who themselves gained power through asserting the compelling need for tolerance. For a strong portrayal of modern academic culture as being based on dishonest political argumentation rather than discourse, see Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture: Moving From Debate to Dialogue (1998).
Deborah Tannen described the argument culture as one where everything is said as part of a struggle to “win” an interchange rather than to actually understand the subject of discussion and reach agreement on its truth, validity, probability, or consequences. This collapse of the processes of honest discourse challenging the deceptions and processes of politicized argumentation makes a mockery of the pretense of reasoned discourse that underlies the principles of academic life and a democratic system where decisions are supposedly based on evidence.
One of the greatest sins is that many faculty, particularly in the “soft” non-science areas where “open-textured” language can represent a range of interpretive meanings and therefore is ideal for indoctrination by those who select the “allowed” or politically immutable interpretations are not only projecting their ideological beliefs onto students, but do so against other faculty members who do not share their context. This is being done through various modes including through intimidation, administrative complaints and procedures, speech codes and the like. The consequences include that otherwise free-thinking and otherwise neutral academics tend to take the path of least resistance to avoid conflict and protect their careers.
They are caught up in a “spiral of silence” that further legitimates the resort to intimidation and violence threats and actions by protesters because of the resulting silence of the “victims” and the lack of accountability for the activist individuals, students, activist “true believer” faculty, and administrators who contradict the traditional educational ideals of the university. The University of Chicago’s Martha Nussbaum writes: “The very pretense that one is engaged in the disinterested pursuit of truth can be a handy screen for prejudice.”
“Foraging on the Enemy”
In essence, our core beliefs and our culture have been “foraged on” by opponents using our core ideals against us in “Orwellian” ways designed to keep us off balance. This is what is happening with Cancel Culture. It is a strategy using the invention of strange new words and concepts while insisting that we use essentially silly pronouns, agree with them on the reality and legitimacy of psychological gender shifts that seem to violate fundamental scientific fact, and do this based on assertion and proclamation rather than scientific evidence or even defensible and rational proofs. If this doesn’t work and we don’t go along with the dictates there are always violent rabid protests and other attack strategies.
As is common, when purported “victims” gain the upper hand, they turn out to be as repressive as those they previously condemned as “oppressors” and “haters”. At this point, the anti-Semitic and “Death to Israel” Pro-Hamas protesters have morphed into radical and oppressive terrorists. One truly ironic element is that they claim the right to act as they do based on the First Amendment to a Constitution that many have rejected as being nothing more than an instrument of power created by a privileged elite described often as “Old White Men”.
This hiding behind the Constitution being done by provocateurs and fledgling terrorist “protesters” is a strategic example of what Sun Tzu described in his absolute 3000 year-old classic The Art of War. Sun Tzu explained that an invading army wins by “foraging on the enemy” and using the opponent’s resources to pave the path to victory. In that way, you “feed” your forces through resources on which the enemy depends and consequently weaken the opponent by consuming that on which it relies.
America’s critical political resources include devotion to the Rule of Law and to protection of the freedom of speech. The violent and radical protesters go well beyond what rational common sense considers the appropriate limits of that right. The problem is that we struggle to cope with the resulting assault on that fundamental freedom and are “thrown for a loop” in terms of where the limits should be drawn.
The deliberate technique of the linguistic strategy is to create an interaction in which our focus is diverted to back-and-forth consideration of “proper” limits and responses according to the accusations being made and to create a situation in which new are required to “prove a negative” in a context when that judgment is in control of the people implementing the Orwellian strategy—with the result we are confused, limited, and weakened by the effort to understand what is right, fair and just.
Somehow, it has become appropriate behavior to subject those with whom you disagree to such hurtful and offensive behavior. The “treat others as you wish to be treated” principle that undergirds much of the world’s philosophies only applies in one direction. The “Cause” rules all and the simple fact is that the “Cancel” movement is two-faced and hypocritical. But since its goal is gaining power and control through silencing any opposition, hypocrisy is an essential and deliberate part of the Movement’s strategy.
Heather Mac Donald offers a fact-based example of the skewed approach that too often characterizes the practice of critical theory in American law schools. She reports:
“[A] professor . . . asks students in his critical race theory seminar to write an essay about race relations, challenging, among other things, “the assumption that blacks, Jews, and Latinos are allies.” When a black student wrote about her indelible dislike of white people, . . . [he] knew he had struck gold. He asked the student to read her essay aloud in class; [as this occurred] an Italian-American woman burst into tears and fled the room. 91
Mac Donald continues:
[C]ritical race teachers are prepared for such disruptions. “Getting in touch with your feelings is difficult,” explains . . . [the law professor]. “We let [the Italian-American woman] experience out her grief. She sat out a class or two, and when she came back, she wouldn’t talk.” It was a useful lesson, [he] concludes: “She was naive to think there’s not a lot of cross-racial hatred.”
Mac Donald concludes that the criticism may be tolerated only if it flows in one direction, noting that:
“[H]owever open-minded critical race teachers may be about ‘cross-racial hatred,’ it is difficult to imagine this story coming out as it did had a white student written of his dislike for blacks.” In fact, the insights of cross-racial hatred are important if we are to have a useful dialogue on these matters. My concern is not in the fact of bringing out the existence of such intense feelings but how to use the opportunity to enrich the communication among all the participants on issues of such social and personal consequence.” Heather Mac Donald, Law School Humbug, City Journal, Autumn 1995 at 46-49 & 52.
“Soft” Repression and “Mild Authoritarianism” in a Pseudo-Democracy Filled With Progressively One-Sided and Ignorant People
The “criticism of criticism” is vital because of the acceptance of the postmodern genre’s view that truth is socially constructed and relative and represents the claim to legitimacy that justifies and benefits existing power relationships.59 Postmodernist and collectivist critical interpretations are a relatively thin and largely incoherent set of interesting but limited observations that emerge more from the extreme intellectualization of French academic culture than from any deep understanding of the human condition. But whatever its deficiencies as an intellectual system, the rejection of the ideal of truth and the interpretation that it and other social rules are means of unjust discrimination is an assault on the legitimacy of social institutions and rules of operation.60
Certainly anyone who examines the abhorrent history of the slave trade must (or should) acknowledge the significant participation of both North African Muslims and other Africans who willingly profited from the obscene system.88 This in no way relieves America and other Western nations from the fact of their participation. But it insists that others who operated in non- Western and non-market cultures be called to account for their participation. Honesty demands that we question why a continuing slave trade still exists in East Africa.89 The same question can be asked concerning the widespread sexual enslavement that is rampant in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Thailand.90. 89. See Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy 7 (1999); see also New Slavery Case in Mauritania, AFROL NEWS, Feb. 9, 2004, http://www.afrol.com/articles/11247.
Political correctness can also be enlisted in what Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, called “democratic despotism.” Roger Kimball indicates in Roger Kimball, Political Correctness, or, the Perils of Benevolence, NAT’L INT., Winter 2003/2004, at 158, 159–60. The idea of “infantilizing” us and our discourse is traced by Kimball to de Tocqueville. Kimball reports:
In pre-democratic societies, Tocqueville noted, despotism tyrannized. In modern democracies, it infantilizes. Democratic despotism is both “more extensive and more mild” than its precursors: it “degrades men without tormenting them.” In this sense, Tocqueville continued, “the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world.”
Tocqueville’s analysis, although written in the 1830s, seems remarkably contemporary. Let me quote a few sentences. The force of democratic despotism, Tocqueville wrote:
“[W]ould be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood. . . . [I]t every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. . . . [T]he supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided. . . . Such a power does not destroy . . . but it enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”