Hamilton College Alumni for Governance Reform

How to Fix the Universities

Not easy, if you don’t have tanks

by ROGER KIMBALL

F or quite a while now, whenever I’ve thought about the job of “reforming” or “retaking” the university, a little voice emerges to ask, “Are you mad?” For the most part, intelligent opinion about the problem of reforming the university is divided into two camps. There are those who think it cannot be done, that the university is beyond redemption, and that more’s the pity. And there are those who think that it cannot be done, that the university is beyond redemption, and that it doesn’t matter.

Of course, those alternatives do not exhaust the options. Shortly after I wrote an essay on the subject of “Retaking the University” in The New Criterion, one thoughtful Internet commentator responded with an alternative that I must have had somewhere in the back of my mind but had never articulated explicitly. This forthright chap began by recalling an article on military affairs that poked fun at yesterday’s conventional wisdom that high-tech gear would render tanks and old-fashioned armor obsolete. Whatever else the war in Iraq showed, it was a demonstration that tried and true military hardware was anything but obsolete. The moral is: Some armor is good, more armor is better. “It makes sense,” this fellow concluded, “to have some tanks handy.”

And with this, he segued into my piece on the university, outlining some of the criticisms and recommendations I’d made. By and large, he agreed with the criticisms, but he found my recommendations much too tame. “Try as I might,” he wrote, “I just can’t see meaningful change of the academic monstrosity our universities have become issuing from faculties, parents, alumni, and trustees.” What was his alternative? In a word, tanks. He called his plan Operation Academic Freedom, and I think you will agree that it has that virtue of simplicity which William of Occam famously recommended. Here’s the plan:

We round up every tank we can find that isn’t actually being used in Iraq or Afghanistan. Next, we conduct a nationwide Internet poll to determine which institutions need to be retaken first …
The actual battle plan is pretty simple. We drive our tanks up to the front doors of the universities and start shooting. Timing is important. We’ll have to wait till 11 a.m. or so, or else there won’t be anyone in class. Ammunition is important. We’ll need lots and lots of it. The firing plan is to keep blasting until there’s nothing left but smoldering ruins. Then we go on to the next on the list. If the first target is Harvard, for example, we would move on from there to, say, Yale. So fuel will be important too. There’s going to be some long-distance driving involved between engagements.

Well, perhaps we can agree to call that Plan B, a handy recourse if other proposals don’t pan out.

And there have, let’s face it, been plenty of other proposals. Indeed, the task of reforming higher education has become a vibrant cottage industry, with think tanks, conferences, and special programs, institutes, and initiatives cropping up like mushrooms after a rain. I think, for example, of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Robert George’s James Madison Program at Princeton University, and an upcoming conference in New York to mark the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.

Naturally, many of these initiatives — those whose home is at a college or university, anyway — run into stiff resistance. When a couple of dissident professors at Hamilton College wanted to start a center named for Alexander Hamilton and dedicated to “excellence in scholarship through the study of freedom, democracy, and capitalism,” the roof caved in on them. You remember Hamilton College. It’s the wretched place that was only too happy to invite the “post-porn feminist” Annie Sprinkle to campus to demonstrate sex toys for the young scholars, that wanted Susan Rosenberg — the former Weather Underground member whose 58-year sentence was commuted by Bill Clinton on his last day in office — to be an “artist- and activist-in-residence,” and that asked Ward “Little Eichmanns” Churchill to enlighten Hamilton students about 9/11 and American culture. But just let someone try celebrating the achievements of America and, bang, the predominantly left-wing faculty at Hamilton, terrified that there might be an initiative they don’t control, start whining about “governance” and “accountability.” Fifteen minutes later, the administration capitulates and kills the center.

This particular story has a happy ending, however, because the Alexander Hamilton Center for the Study of Western Civilization went ahead anyway — but not at Hamilton College. It’s just down the street in Clinton, N.Y., in the old Alexander Hamilton Inn, a separate educational entity with no official ties to the college.

I applaud all of these initiatives — indeed, am involved with several of them. I suspect, however, that they will remain minority enterprises, a handful of gadflies buzzing about the left-lunging behemoth that is contemporary academia.

There are several reasons for this. One is that the left-wing monoculture is simply too deeply entrenched for these initiatives, laudable and necessary though they are, to make much difference. For the last few years, I have heard several commentators from sundry ideological points of view say that the reign of political correctness and programmatic leftism on campus had peaked and was about to recede. I wish I could share that optimism, but I see no evidence to support it. Sure, students are quiescent. But indifference is not instauration, and, besides, faculties nearly everywhere form a self-perpetuating closed shop.

It is the same with the fashion of “theory” — all that anemic, sex-in-the-head, politicized gibberish dressed up in reader-proof “philosophical” prose. It is true that names like Derrida and Foucault no longer produce the frisson of excitement they once did. Yet that is not because their “ideas” are widely disputed, but rather because they are by now completely absorbed into the tissues of academic life. (Something similar happened with Freud a couple decades ago: His toxic ideas, once passionate assertions, became commonplace assumptions.)

A few years ago, The American Enterprise magazine created a small stir when it published “The Shame of America’s One-Party Campuses,” providing some statistical evidence to bolster what everyone already knew: that American colleges and universities were overwhelmingly left-wing. That’s all old hat now. Just a couple weeks ago, the Yale Daily News ran a story revealing that faculty and staff at Yale this year have contributed 45 times more to Democratic candidates than to Republicans. “Most people in my department,” said the one academic known to have contributed to the Giuliani campaign, “are slightly to the left of Josef Stalin.”

The key issue, I hasten to add, is not partisan politics but rather the subordinating of intellectual life to non-intellectual (i.e., political) imperatives. “The greatest danger is the invasion of an intellectual fashion which wants to abolish cognitive criteria of knowledge and truth itself,” wrote the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski in his essay “What Are Universities For?” He added, “The humanities and social sciences have always succumbed to various fashions, and this seems inevitable. But this is probably the first time that we are dealing with a fashion, or rather fashions, according to which there are no generally valid intellectual criteria.” Indeed, it is this failure to check the colonization of intellectual life by politics that fuels the degradation of liberal education. The issue is not so much — or not only — the presence of bad politics as it is the absence of non-politics in the intellectual life of the university.

I used to think that going over the heads of the faculty and appealing to trustees, parents, alumni, and other concerned groups could make a difference. I have become increasingly less sanguine about that strategy. For one thing, it is extremely difficult to generate a sense of emergency such that those groups will actually take action, let alone maintain that sense of emergency along the path from indignation to concrete action.

What’s more, trustees, parents, and alumni are increasingly impotent. Once, a prospective hiccup in the annual fund would send shivers down the spine of an anxious college president. These days, as James Piereson pointed out in The Weekly Standard, many colleges and universities are so rich that they can afford to cock a snook at parents and alumni. Forget about Harvard and its $30 billion, or Princeton or Yale, or Stanford, or the other super-rich schools. Even many small colleges are sitting on huge fortunes.

Consider tiny Hamilton College again. When I reported on the Susan Rosenberg case in the Wall Street Journal, the story appeared the day that Hamilton kicked off a capital campaign at the New-York Historical Society. My article was highly critical and it generated a lot of comment. Donations to Hamilton, I am told, simply dried up. But so what? The college sits on an endowment of some $770 million. That is over half a billion dollars. So what if its annual fund is down a few million this year? They can afford to hunker down and wait out the storm.

Some observers believe that the university cannot really be reformed until the current generation — the Sixties generation — retires from faculties. That’s another couple of decades, minimum. But in any event, deep and lasting change in the university depends on deep and lasting change in the culture at large. Undertaking that task is a tall order. Criticism, satire, and ridicule all have an important role to play, but the point is that such criticism, to be successful, depends upon possessing an alternative vision of the good.

Do we possess that alternative vision? I believe we do. We all know, well enough, what a good liberal education looks like, just as we all know, well enough, what makes for a healthy society. It really isn’t that complicated. It doesn’t take a lot of money or sophistication. What it does require is candor and courage, moral virtues that are scarce wherever political correctness reigns triumphant. In large part, those who want to retake the university must devote themselves to a waiting game, capitalizing in the meanwhile on whatever opportunities present themselves. That is Plan A. Of course, it may fail; there are no guarantees. But in that case we can always avail ourselves of the more dramatic Plan B.

Mr. Kimball is co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________

© 2007 by National Review, Inc., 215 Lexington Avenue , New York , NY 10016

Reprinted by permission for which we are grateful.