The dawn of the new year always generates ambivalent emotions. People resolve to overcome all the bad habits that gave some pleasure to their lives, media outlets compile their best of everything lists, while professional doomsayers sing their yearly Jeremiads, warning that the next year will be the year when everything that has been falling apart for the past year, and the year before that, and the year before that, finally collapses. The climate, the return of Trump, runaway malevolent AI, another pandemic, nuclear conflict with Russia … we are all going to die!
But maybe we will struggle through another year, despite Trump and natural gas stoves. And if we are still breathing come January 2nd, we will have to soldier on, facing the mundane problems we have always faced about how to run major social institutions, how to communicate with each other, how to evaluate where we are as societies, how to identify and solve problems. For most of human history these tasks were reserved for social elites, typically men with some sort of aristocratic pedigree which they took to be a sign of superior talent and capacity which entitled them to decide on behalf of everyone else how society would be governed. These elites were capable of works of epochal intelligence (as in ancient Greece, whose language gives us the English world aristocracy– rule of the best). But the free time required to walk, reflect, and compose the words that still resound today was– as Aristotle admitted– purchased at the cost of the freedom of women and slaves who did the work so that the “great souled” people could spread their genius.
We easily forget that the canonical Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, were critics of Athenian democracy and defenders of slavery. Plato’s Republic is an extended reflection on how the principle of democratic equality corrupts the polis. In a democracy, he argues in Book Nine, the slave is as valuable as the master, the son as valuable as the father, and everyone’s position on matters that concern them is considered in the deliberative assembly even if they lack the expertise that wise decisions require. Therefore, he concludes, democratic equality is a contradictory equality between unequals, doomed to collapse. Democracy, he concludes, is a violation of the social conditions of intellectual excellence, a dangerous consorting with the lowest of human desires, and a fatal step towards disorder that can only end in tyranny.
There are shades of this aristocratic critique of democracy in the left-liberal reaction to the re-election of Trump. While they do not always say so out loud, there is an undertone of disdain for working class Trump voters: maybe they just aren’t smart enough to understand their own interests. After all, the core of Trump’s base are men without university degrees. If people were better educated, then perhaps they would stop entrusting their interests to autocrats like Trump and Putin. Had they read The Republic they would know that tyrants are elected because they promise to protect the interests of the poor.
In contemporary politics as in Newtonian mechanics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The left-liberal critique of the masses produces an abstract democratic-populist defense of the masses. It is difficult to assign any precise ideological identity to those who disagree with Trump but would defend the right of working class people to vote for him, but one common thread that links what I might call left-conservative populists with right-conservative populists is a gnawing angst about the state of popular culture and the educational institutions that produce the people who shape it. (i am not sure this term is correct, but it is at least not oxymoronic. Andrew Collier has written an excellent essay on the philosophical overlap between Marx and classical conservatism). Rather like Plato and his aristocratic friends, left and right populists worry that there is a destructive slackening of standards and values and that the educational system, and in particular, universities, share a great deal of the blame.
One could understand such a criticism coming from classical conservatives, for whom the democratization of higher education after World War Two was synonymous with slackening of standards. “Undergraduates without Latin and Greek!! Preposterous! What’s next, eating fruit with one’s hands at High Table!?!” But how can populists, who, after all, claim to be on the side of the people, worry that the consequences of the democratization of higher education are in effect destroying it? The question is not easy to answer. I want to look at two recent examples of what I am calling, for lack of a better word at the moment a left-conservative populist critique of higher education to tease out what is true in their arguments from what is a false romanticization of a past that never existed.
Joanna Williams (“The Death Throes of the University are Upon Us”) and Joel Kotkin, (“The American University is Rotting From Within”), both writing in spiked-online, warn that the cultural politics of the twenty-first century campus are destroying the intellectual integrity of the institution. They are not wrong to warn that universitiess in the United States, the United Kingdom (and Canada) are in a period of serious crisis. Kotkin notes that undergraduate enrollment in the United States has declined from 18.1 million in 2010 to 15.4 million in 2021. The decline is even steeper in the arts and humanities. In England, Williams adds, amidst the general decline in enrollment symbolically important programs like Philosophy at the University of Kent and English at the University of Canterbury have closed. In Canada and especially Ontario, universities, in particular smaller and comprehensive schools, are facing dramatic budget crises as a result of decades of government underfunding and a sharp decline in international student enrollments as a result of recent changes to federal immigration policies. My home institution, the University of Windsor, is facing a deficit of perhaps as much as 30 million dollars, which is about ten percent of its annual revenues. The Vice President of Finance has warned that the deficit could require “catastrophic” cuts.
(At present the administration has not presented a comprehensive plan to address the crisis. When they do, I will return to the political economic dimensions of the crisis of universities. Here I want to focus on the pedagogical and political thrust of Kotkin’s and Williams’ critique).
That thrust is nicely summed up by the subheading of Kotkin’s essay: “The modern academy is a threat to reason, liberty, and Western civilization.” What follows is mixture of anecdote and statistics that purports to prove that there has been a fundamental transformation in the nature of academic reason. Whereas universities were once focused on the dispassionate pursuit of objective truth that mission has been overtaken by a Cultural Revolution-like indoctrination campaign led by tender-hearted, weak-kneed, and soft-minded left liberals. Williams paints an analogous picture of the English university.
The targets will be familiar to those who follow the institutional politics of the contemporary English language university. There are purportedly absurd infiltrations of a “social justice” agenda into science, such as the engineering assignment that Williams discusses that asked students at King’s College to create ‘a product for LGBTQ+ people focused on providing education or safe spaces.” There are complaints about the decline of literacy, the capacity of students to read complete texts, lamentations about the proliferation of trigger warnings on classic literary and philosophical texts, politically correct changes to departmental nomenclature, and a climate of general hostility to the achievements of Western civilization adapted from anti-imperialist critiques of colonialism and racism. Kotkin sums up the problems:
“Ideologically homogenous universities have become something akin to indoctrination camps, where traditional Western values are trashed while woke ideology is promoted. Not surprisingly, the graduates of today’s universities are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues, confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity while being intolerant of other views. They also tend to be not particularly proud to be American. The kind of support professors gave to the war effort in the Second World War would be hard to imagine today.”
There is much truth is Williams’ and Kotkin’s arguments. Trigger warnings are childish and anti-intellectual; there have been dozens if not hundreds of cases of academics fired for violating institutionally imposed ideological lines; scientific method is often caricatured and misunderstood as an ideological construct of ‘the West,’ “inclusion” is often promoted at the expense of intellectually essential confrontation, contestation, and rational debate, and the research and teaching mission of universities too often clouded by platitudinous and practically useless commitments to extraneous political goals like “decolonization.” Williams is correct: academics who value their vocation as teachers and researchers must oppose these tendencies to the extent that they interfere with the teaching and research mission of the university.
However, both Williams and Kotkin are both guilty of romanticizing the history of the university and confusing demographic uniformity of the student body and professoriate with “reason, liberty, and Western Civilization.” The historical fact of the matter is that the nineteenth century model of the university which still forms the basic structure of the contemporary university was populated exclusively by white middle and upper class men who had time to devote to their studies because they did not have to work to pay tuition. The university system expanded rapidly in the nineteen sixties to absorb the Baby Boom generation, allowing working class students to access higher education for the first time, but also women, Blacks, and other minority groups. The transformation of curricula still ongoing today and often denounced as intellectually weak and anti-Western, the introduction of various forms of critical theory that questioned the philosophical, literary, and artistic canon and exposed links between political, economic, and cultural power and science, objectivity, and truth, was largely the result of struggle against a suffocating normality which young people in revolt against their parents’ world refused to accept without question any longer.
One generation’s revolution is the next generation’s normality and the new generation’s object of struggle. The ‘critique of Western civilization” that Kotkin decries is largely a function of the fact that Western societies and student bodies have become even more multicultural at the same time as voices from the Global South and Indigenous peoples refuse to be spoken for any longer and rightly insist on speaking in their own voices against the worst of Western civilization: imperialism, colonialism, racism. While the nations of the Global South have achieved political independence, the forces that oppressed them politically continue to operate on the socio-economic level. All one needs to do is to examine the flows of wealth from Global South to North and consider the degree of material inequality to understand that the history of imperialism and colonialism continues to damage the lives of people in the Global South. If the worst of Western civilization is that legacy of racism, its best aspect is its capacity for self-criticism that underlies both scientific method and philosophical questioning. Indeed, systematic criticism of “Western civilization” was the hallmark of The Enlightenment: read Condorcet, or L’Abee Raynal, or Diderot if you want to find impassioned denunciations of what passed for civilization at the time. Far from a dispassionate and neutral exercise of reason in pursuit of objective truth, the best scientists and philosophers at the time consciously deployed science and reason against established structures of rule and assumptions about what is true, valuable, and just. Today’s critics of Western civilization carry on that legacy (even if they often misunderstand ‘Enlightenment reason’ as part of the problem).
Kotkin and Williams might agree, but would perhaps rejoin that social criticism is not the problem but the illiberal and anti-intellectual effort to mold the university exclusively in their own ideological image. These efforts extend to efforts to get institutions themselves to take positions on key political struggles like the Israel-Gaza war. These are both real problems: the university, as the name implies, is an institution devoted to the free production, dissemination, and critique of knowledge. Academic freedom is an institutional right whose purpose is to ensure that these defining missions can be pursued. It cannot be qualified by any institutionally-imposed political postures. Moreover, the mission also cannot be qualified by groups outside of the university, whether corporate donors or politically mobilized groups trying to impose their agenda on teaching and research. The academic mission of universities is negated to the precise extent that the principle of freedom of inquiry, teaching, and mutual criticism is subordinated to money or particular political-cultural agendas.
At the same time, just because it is a space for free inquiry, teaching, and argument, the university campus is a politicized space. The wave of encampments that swept North American and UK campuses this summer were fully in keeping with the best traditions of the critical exercise of reason. What side do you think Voltaire or Diderot would have been on were they alive to witness the systematic destruction of cities that were home to 2.3 million people? Are babies being left to freeze, women and children forced to beg for food, and men stripped to their underwear and paraded around being treated with the dignity that Kant argued was the due of every human being? The fact that some protesters made some stupid comments in support of Hamas does not negate the right to protest the Israeli response. What is Israel’s reflex attack on any critic as anti-Semitic but an attempt to short-circuit debate of its history and policies?
As for the much maligned Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda, one must not forget that its original incarnation as “Affirmative Action” was necessary to open the academy to women and Blacks. It too was attacked as a dangerous weakening of standards, when in fact it was an expansion of perspectives beyond the white middle and upper class men who completely dominated all academic fields prior to the 1960’s. The broadening of voices engaged in teaching and research inevitably broadened the range of subjects and methodologies taught and utilized, but that broadening was– and should still be understood as– rooted in the university’s mission to encompass the evolving whole– the universe– of human intellectual work. The universe of human knowledge encompasses both empirical methods that must be judged on the basis of their results and critical methods which expose the historical and social forces that always act shape knowledge production. That social and political forces shape knowledge production does not mean that knowledge and truth are nothing but social constructions. The atomic weight of nitrogen is the same in Beijing as it is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But who gets access to scientific education, who gets positions at the most prestigious universities, which research programs are regarded as credible and which regarded as pseudo-science, have all been affected by non-scientific forces and assumptions. The belief that there was a a time when science was a pure pursuit of objective truth now compromised by ideological agendas is simply untrue. Consider only the history of military funding of scientific research at the best American universities. Is the US military not motivated by ideological concerns? Truth is not reducible to a social construction, but the institutions that pursue the truth are always structured by social forces that are motivated by social, political, economic, and ideological motives that determine what is regarded as legitimate and illegitimate scientific work. When critical methodologies help us understand those forces they actually make scientific work more scientific. Ideological influences compromise scientific objectivity, but if they remain undiagnosed their distorting influence cannot be corrected.
That is not to say that the DEI agenda cannot become a threat to academic freedom. David Robinson, Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers argued in a recent edition of the CAUT Bulletin that there is a difference between academics committing themselves to curriculum development and institutions mandating commitment to administrative DEI programs as a condition of hiring and promotion. (David Robinson, “EDI Statements: A Threat to Academic Freedom?” CAUT Bulletin, Vol. 70, No. 6, September-October, 2023, p.7) When DEI becomes an imposed public confession of faith it is indeed a threat to the mission of the university as an institution of free, open inquiry and argument. And it is not only administrations that are to blame here. Kotkin and Williams are right to focus attention on students and (mostly younger) academics for mobilizing against perspectives and people with whom they disagree. There have been too many instances of talks being cancelled, colleagues being publicly shamed, mobbed, and fired, for articulating positions that run afoul of left-liberal orthodoxy. George Elliot Clarke, Professor of English at the University of Toronto and past poet laureate of the City of Toronto sums up the problem: “It is cowardice and hypocrisy to pretend that the only threat to ourselves arises from Neanderthal administrators or authoritarian (foreign) governments or states, We also need to reject forthrightly censorship calls from both leftist and rightist, self-righteous “activists” as well as from their often nicely tenured allies who will okay bullying tactics so long as the Putsches are conducted against persons whose ideas they dispute.” (George Elliot Clarke, “Letter to the Editor, CAUT Bulletin, Vol. 70, No. 6, September-October 2023, p. 18). Such efforts are a direct threat to the university as a space for open inquiry and argument. Those who insist on the need for ideological conformity are free to resign their academic position and start a revolutionary party. Otherwise, tolerance and the unforced force of the better argument (Habermas) must prevail on campus.
But that principle cuts both ways. Curriculum reform, questioning and opening the canon, exposing the ideological and social forces that shape the disciplines, exposing the role of economic and political power in the determination of what counts as legitimate knowledge production, and allowing free play and learning to listen to formerly silenced voices is actually the best of what the university is. What have the best artists, philosophers, and scientists done over history other than break free of imposed orthodoxies that had become barriers to the growth of knowledge and the creation of beauty? That is what Copernicus, Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo did with regard to Aristotelian physics, that is what Einstein did with regard to Newtonian mechanics, and it is what critical race theorists and feminists and Marxists and anti-colonial scholars are doing today when they deploy their analyses to promote the growth of knowledge rather than obfuscate material reality.
Is the human intellect constricted or expanded when it listens to the voices of the colonized speak about their experiences? Is out literary sensibility constricted or expanded when we read literature in English written by authors from outside England? There is too much of the middle-aged scold in arguments like Kotkin’s and Williams.’ One fears that they would have been on the side of the salon directors who refused to show Impressionist works, or amongst the stampede of outraged concert goers fleeing Stravinski’s Sacre de Printemps, or nodding in agreement with Einstein’s rejection of quantum mechanics. But God does play dice with the universe, paintings do not have to be constructed on the basis of Renaissance theories of perspective, poems do not have to rhyme, and philosophy can criticize traditional standards of objectivity and truth. Science does not thereby cease to be science, painting and poetry art, or philosophy critical engagement with knowledge claims in the service of the goal of understanding our world in all of its aspects as broadly and deeply as we are capable of understanding it.
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