Austin Bay Blog

Long ago Roger Kimball (The New Criterion) saw the symptoms and made the correct diagnosis. (Example symptom: Ward Churchill. Diagnosis: academic systemic illnesss.) Now he offers a plan to treat the disease.

Read the entire essay.

The essay demonstrates once again why the New Criterion is the best arts and literary magazine in America….In North America…on the planet.

Money quote? It’s got a bank vault. But try this as a tease:

The chief issue is this: should our institutions of higher education be devoted primarily to the education of citizens?or should they be laboratories for social and political experimentation? Traditionally, a liberal arts education involved both character formation and learning. The goal was to produce men and women who (as Allan Bloom put it) had reflected thoughtfully on the question ??What is man?? in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs.? Since the 1960s, however, colleges and universities have more and more been home to what Lionel Trilling called the ?adversary culture of the intellectuals.? The goal was less reflection than rejection. The English novelist Kingsley Amis once observed that much of what was wrong with the twentieth century could be summed up in the word ?workshop.? Nowadays, ?workshop? has been largely replaced by the word ?studies.? Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Afro-American Studies, Women?s Studies, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Studies: these are not the names of academic disciplines but political grievances. They exist not to further liberal education but to nurture the feckless antinomianism that Jacques Barzun dubbed ?directionless quibble.?

Think back to Ward Churchill. He was invited to Hamilton College by ?the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture,? a left-wing, activist redoubt that for the decade of its existence has devoted its considerable resources to transforming a liberal arts education into an exercise in radical repudiation of American society, its manners, morals, and political filiations. It was the Kirkland Project, for example, that invited Susan Rosenberg, the convicted felon and former member of the Weather Underground, to be an ?artist- and activist-in-residence? and teach a seminar on ?Resistance Memoirs: Writing, Identity and Change.? It was a satellite of the Kirkland Project that a couple of years ago invited Annie Sprinkle, the former prostitute and porn star, to preside over a workshop (but of course) designed to educate ?students and faculty on how better to pleasure themselves.?

Now the point about the Kirkland Project is not how extreme it is but how ordinary. (I use the term in its statistical, not its normative, sense.) There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of similar organizations at American colleges and universities. Their undeclared goal is to radicalize American society by betraying the intellectual and moral standards whose general observance they depend upon for their very existence. When challenged, proponents of such organizations will instantly retreat to the mantras of ?free speech? and ?academic freedom.? But it has long been obvious that the academic notion of ?free speech? is like the academic notion of ?diversity?: it means strict intellectual and moral conformity on any contentious issue: Free speech for me but not for thee. As the historian Robert Paquette?perhaps the only self-identified conservative at Hamilton College?observed, in all of its history the Kirkland Project has never invited anyone to Hamilton who was ?libertarian, conservative or even centrist.? In other words, ?academic freedom? has mutated from being a protection into being a weapon.

As for treatment? Roger tackles tenure:

It is time to revisit several large issues. The issue of tenure, for example. An arrangement that was intended to protect academic freedom and intellectual diversity has mutated into a means of enforcing conformity and excluding the heterodox. For those few conservatives who have managed to obtain tenure, it doubtless functions to protect them. But for the faculty in general it seems to have become a prescription for political correctness and lassitude.