a huge serving of
ACADEMIA NUTS
DAVID
SOLWAY
David
Solway's most recent book is The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism,
and Identity. His editorials appear regularly in FRONTPAGEMAG.COM
and Pajamas
Media.
As
we survey the intellectual scene today, what appears perhaps
most disconcerting is the spectacle of the modern Western university.
There is nothing sacrosanct per se about the university which,
like any human institution, can profane its founding principles
and grow corrupt and oppressive. The German universities of
the 1930s, for example, despite their long tradition of rigorous
scholarship, were by no means citadels of informed thought and
genuine research, but outright propaganda factories, preparing
students’ minds for the absurd theories of National Socialism,
the restriction of free expression, and the absorption of sundry
false doctrines.
The
university may as easily become an engine of indoctrination
as a generator of intellectual vitality or a transmitter of
knowledge. Here we must remain skeptical of slogans and professed
ideals, for the principle of “academic freedom”
can be misused as a cover for illiberal thought and slavish
conformity to a ruling ideology.
In
a 1965 essay entitled “Repressive Tolerance,” Herbert
Marcuse inspired a generation of teachers and students to embrace
this principle of epistemic subversion. “The restoration
of freedom of thought,” he argued, “may necessitate
new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the
educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts,
serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of
discourse and behavior.” Translation: in the name of “freedom
of thought” and under the rubric of “academic freedom,”
independent judgment is closed off and critical reflection emasculated,
making the university safe for ideologues and spin Doctors.
By “restrictions,” of course, Marcuse was thinking
selectively — he meant imposing a moratorium on conservative
thought and teaching. Leftist and socialist doctrines were given
carte blanche.
While
avoiding the diabolical extreme of the German paradigm, this
is more or less what is happening today in many of our erstwhile
seats of learning. “The defenders of what now passes for
academic freedom,” writes Manfred Gerstenfeld, “should
largely be seen as an elitist interest group that tries to protect
acquired privileges … enabl[ing] universities to present
the current, ostensible academic freedom as a moral value, whereas
actually it is an expression of extreme corporatism.”
The pedagogical bias which it fosters “includes elements
such as political correctness, the promotion of ideology, the
distortion of knowledge, and the protection of the hate promoters
and falsifiers of knowledge as well as other malfunctions of
campus administrations.”
The
fact is that the university, as we now know it, has become a
major contributor to the dissolution of the foundational values
upon which the life of the West has been erected. Under the
mantle of diversity of opinion, free expression, and the unfettered
exchange of ideas, it has even given the dais to homicidal despots
and enemies of the state — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being welcomed
at Columbia is only the most publicized such mummery —
while protesting against and even prohibiting conservative thinkers
and patriots from speaking freely and engaging students in discussion.
This
administrative/pedagogical disease has now penetrated to the
very minutiae of everyday existence on college campuses. In
an article for Pajamas Media, Adam Savit reports that
during the University of Maryland’s Palestinian Solidarity
Week held in March 2009, it was not the inflammatory words of
speaker Mauri Saalakhan, who conflated Israel with apartheid
and disputed its right to exist, that created a backlash, but
legal dissenting fliers posted by a group of Jewish students.
Savid comments, justly: “our colleges have become a preserve
of reactionary liberal orthodoxy, with facile phrases like ‘diversity’
belying an oppressive ideological conformity.”
David
Horowitz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, ruefully
points out that he and other conservative speakers are now accompanied
by bodyguards when they address campus audiences. Physical assaults
against conservative spokespeople have become common practice,
whereas, he continues, “I don’t know of a single
leftist speaker among the thousands who visit campuses every
term who has been obstructed or attacked by conservative students,
who are too decent and tolerant to do that.” In his 2007
book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in
America, Horowitz estimates that 10% of the American professoriate,
or 60,000 academics across the country, preach ideology rather
than teach scholarship.
Horowitz
may have underestimated. In its 2009 report on campus speech
codes, “The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s
Campuses,” the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
recorded that 77% of public universities and 67% of private
universities were in violation of the First Amendment of the
American Constitution, restricting the constitutional right
to freedom of expression. Cui bono? Certainly not genuine liberal
institutions and true intellectual scholarship.
It
is clear that something must be done about this lamentable state
of affairs. In his recent book The War of Ideas, Walid
Phares speaks of the pressing need to clean up “the diseducating
process that [has] blurred the intellectual vision of a whole
generation.” Dennis Prager concurs, writing in an online
article: “Our universities are run by fools who are breeding
a generation of fools.” The exceptions, he continues,
“have little impact on the deconstruction of civilization
and the breeding of anti-intellectuals taking place at our universities.”
Edward
Bernard Glick, author of Soldiers, Scholars, and Society:
The Social Impact of the American Military, trains his
sights on the American university in particular. “American
universities,” he writes, “have been transformed
into the most Marxist, postmodernist, know-nothing, anti-American,
anti-military, and anti-capitalist institution in our society.
It is now a bastion of situational ethics and moral relativism
. . . American academia is now a very intolerant place.”
Former
Muslim and founder of the [10] Arabs for Israel website Nonie
Darwish would surely agree: sorting through the hate mail she
receives, she [11] finds that “the worst comes from university
professors.” No longer disseminators of truth and centers
of impartial scholarly research, American universities —
and Canadian and European universities as well — have
become strongholds of a left-wing cultural anthropology.
Despite
the damage they can do, contemporary academics and intellectuals
(or anti-intellectuals), by and large, strike me as the Mr.
Beans of the vaudeville clerisy, epitomes of conceptual ineptitude
and an almost farcical soft-mindedness. They seem no less retarded
than some of their more celebrated precursors, reprocessing
in their mental posture and congenial temperament the ineffable
Bertrand Russell. In The Flight from Truth: The Reign of
Deceit in the Age of Information, Jean-François
Revel cites a 1937 speech in which Russell declared that “Britain
should disarm, and if Hitler marched his troops into this country
when we were undefended, they should be welcomed like tourists
and greeted in a friendly way.”
Revel
comments on Russell’s incredible foray into the domain
of public policy: “Bertrand Russell may have been an eminent
philosopher in his specialty — symbolic logic —
but he was nonetheless an imbecile on the subject dealt with
in those sentences.” Revel deplores those intellectuals
who “have employed their talents to justify falsehood
… even foolishness.” Plus ça change! And
let us not forget that our current crop of errant and pontificating
intellectuals is bred in those very universities which claim
the privilege of extraterritoriality, responsible only to themselves.
It
is distressing to note the degree to which such attitudes, as
Robert Conquest points out in The Dragons of Expectation,
have “permeate[d] the media and lower-middle academe.”
But in the four years since his book appeared, it has become
increasingly evident that the contagion has spread through the
general public as well, an illustration of the efficacy of trickle-down,
voodoo politics.
One
could continue to exceterize. No doubt many professors, in order
to protect their perks and salvage their working environment,
feel impelled to go along for the ride, Julius Kelps and Sherman
Klumps transformed into contemporary effigies of Buddy Love.
(Pace Jerry Lewis and Eddie Murphy.) But this is only a case
of an aggregation of nutty professors succumbing to the political
designs of their more sinister cohorts and thereby endorsing
the ideological conformity that reigns in the academy.
Alternatively,
what we are seeing is the corporate expression of that familiar
disposition which Czeslaw Milosz in The Captive Mind,
drawing from the Arabic, characterized as ketman, the wimpish
position taken by those who desire to be “at one with
others, in order not to be alone.” One way or another,
everyone keeps step. And as time goes on, it becomes evident
that the choreographers of this macabre dance have no intention
of relenting. So much for diversity of opinion, intellectual
propriety, and freedom of expression!
Indeed,
the epidemic of ignorance, false knowledge, and partisan didactics
is well advanced — a black plague of the mind. The harm
it can wreak is incalculable.
As
a former professor and guest speaker on the education circuit,
I have seen its ravages at first hand. If this mental infection
is not checked, we may well find ourselves in an analogous position
to that described by Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That.
Graves records the carnage unleashed upon a nation by the misguided
conduct and sentiments of Britain’s elite schools. In
Graves’ day, the dilemma was a collective outbreak of
national chauvinism; in our day, it is just the opposite, the
betrayal of our own nation and culture.
Education,
to put it bluntly, is neither jingoism nor treason. Scholarship
must be disinterested, differing points of view should be presented
and debated, strict research methods must be inculcated, and
the mind needs to be trained to learn, judge, and think independently.
Pedagogical influence is meant to be cognitive, not political.
Bias, obviously, is humanly inevitable, but the work of the
moral conscience in the act of teaching, which monitors our
prejudices and proclivities and keeps them under relative control,
is by no means to be scanted.
The
situation today, however, has deteriorated markedly. Far too
many professors and their nominal superiors have forgotten or
have simply overridden the proper business of the university.
It is surely time to initiate a public campaign of watchdog
legislation and purse-string vigilance to address the monumental
aberration embodied in the modern academy. For if we do not
get our act together sooner rather than later, we will have
been complicit in subsidizing not universities but animal farms
feeding the multitudes with tainted provender.
“Goodbye
to all that” has become “Hello to all this.”
Which is why, in the absence of a stringent auditing program
applied to university curricula, hiring parameters, and administrative
policies, the current intellectual devastation will likely prove
no less socially destructive than it did in Graves’ long-ago
England.
