Academia is finally asking honest questions about what it has become and why. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a brutally honest op-ed about what went wrong in academia, entitled simply “We Asked for It.”
When Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016, dozens of university officials put out statements on the issue, but this time around, only a few have. Public opinion of the American higher education system has reached new lows, and the Trump administration has said it will take a scalpel to higher education.
In the article in the flagship magazine of American higher education, English professor Michael W. Clune recognizes that many academic disciplines have forgotten their original purpose in favor of political activism. Clune writes, “Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.”
As Clune notes, nearly every professor, administrator, academic journal, and institution now tries to justify their work on political grounds. Valid, rigorous, and worthwhile intellectual work is that which relates in some way to identifying injustice and enacting political change — invariably of a left-wing, often neo-Marxist character.
The impunity with which academics have forced politics (and one specific brand of politics) into the classroom and conference room is stunning. I’ll never forget the literary theory class period during which my professor came out as transgender. We were studying so-called “queer theory” one day, and the professor slapped the textbook down on the desk and declared, “This is not theory; this is gospel!” With obvious glee, he then proceeded to explain that he would be “transitioning” to a female the following summer. At first, I thought I must be misunderstanding him, but it was no joke.
That we were studying the queer theorists — a group of 20th century malcontent intellectuals who dressed-up their own sexual deviances and fetishes in academic lingo — was bad enough. But the fact that the professor unabashedly turned this lesson into an opportunity to unveil the inner workings of his personal life and sexuality was even worse — not to mention horrendously unprofessional. But, of course, he was perfectly safe in this radical academic irresponsibility because his personal life conformed to the prevailing and protected academic orthodoxy of the moment. Any attempt by the university to discipline this individual would have been met with accusations of oppression and bigotry, and contradicted the university’s own motto of “tolerance,” the queen of virtues for the progressive left (although that “tolerance” extends only to correct positions, beliefs, and behaviors).
I could share many such stories from my own experience and that of my father, who spent most of his career teaching English at a state school that became, year by year, more Orwellian in its atmosphere.
But for most readers, I’m not telling them anything new. The fact that only 36 percent of Americans have much confidence in our higher education attests to this. Americans have woken up to the “woke” mind-virus infecting our universities and scrambling the brains of so many otherwise intelligent people.
Universities Begin to Recognize the Problem
What’s new is this: the universities themselves are beginning to recognize — and in rare cases admit — that they took a wrong turn. The Chronicle’s publication of Clune’s critique of higher education is one piece of evidence for this claim. Five or ten years ago, would the following words have been printed by the country’s top magazine on higher ed?
Even if one wholeheartedly agrees with every faculty-lounge political opinion, there are still very good reasons to be skeptical about making such opinions the basis of one’s academic work. The first is that, while academics have real expertise in their disciplines, we have no special expertise when it comes to political judgment … No one should treat my opinion on any political matter as more authoritative than that of any other person. The spectacle of English professors pontificating to their captive classroom audiences on the evils of capitalism, the correct way to deal with climate change, or the fascist tendencies of their political opponents is simply an abuse of power.
The publication of Clune’s piece is evidence of the sea-change that might be taking place in academia. But there are other indicators. Clune notes that grand political proclamations by university administrators have dropped off since the House of Representatives’ hearings on antisemitism and the related resignation of Harvard University President Claudine Gay. More surprising still, a number of universities have begun scrapping their DEI departments and positions.
The Humanities Herald Change
In February of 2023, The New Yorker ran a feature on the collapse in enrollment in humanities classes. In that piece, Nathan Heller notes that people may be less interested in the humanities because of the politicization of the field. Heller writes, “Once, in college, you might have studied ‘Mansfield Park’ by looking closely at its form, references, style, and special marks of authorial genius … an intensification of the way a reader on the subway experiences the book. Now you might write a paper about how the text enacts a tension by both constructing and subtly undermining the imperial patriarchy through its descriptions of landscape. What does this have to do with how most humans read?”
One critic leading the charge against this kind of reading is Rita Felski, whose books such as “The Limits of Critique” have challenged what she calls the “hermeneutic of suspicion” in literary studies, a perspective that reads everything in terms of power dynamics and oppression, forgetting the emotional experiences that make a person fall in love with literature in the first place. She’s helped launch an interpretive movement called “postcritique,” which, in many ways, returns to an older, saner way of reading and studying.
Notably, the humanities programs that continue to thrive are often those that follow a more postcritical method. They’ve jettisoned the tired neo-Marxist mantras in favor of what literature has always been about: the discovery of the good, the true, and the beautiful in the mystery of human life. The rejection of objective truth by academics in the 19th and 20th centuries deprived universities of their purpose. Politics came in to fill the vacuum. But the failure of politicized academics may be a sign of hope and a step toward the restoration of truth.
In the end, reality will have its way. Bankrupt ideas lead to bankrupt institutions, and there’s no hiding from that anymore. The universities are going to have to do some serious soul-searching, and I expect that the ones who recover their original mission — the pursuit of truth — will survive and flourish, while the others wither away into irrelevancy and financial collapse.
Jesus Christ is King
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