Campus Rebellion
It's a story told regularly in the conservative media. A student pleads for advice: The professors at his college or university are left-wing, and he must choose between regurgitating the leftist propaganda in class discussions, term papers, exam answers, and essays for an A, or telling the truth for a low grade. What to do?
The reporter or journalist almost always responds that the student should say and submit (for four years!) whatever the professor wants and graduate to the real world with his honors degree. Such a course of action leads to self-deception and, gradually, sincere conversion—or to lying throughout one’s postgraduate career. At minimum, it leaves less independent students in that class thinking that everything the professor teaches must be true, or someone would have spoken up. Many parents, if they knew all this, would bankrupt themselves to send their child to one of the handful of honest, scholarly, military or religious colleges and universities in America, or refuse to pay a cent for “higher education” and probably doom their child, however academically gifted, to a career in fast-food restaurants or garages, while the colleges swing further leftward.
I faced this same dilemma for many years, three postgraduate degrees and two successful careers ago. The choice was especially difficult for me because I had a double major: English and history, both playgrounds for the left. To make things more difficult I had little time to write in subtle double-meanings, because I worked my way through university with full-time jobs. Scholarships (outside of sports) were almost unheard of, and my boarding prep school had nearly bankrupted my parents. I did, however, find enough time (usually by sleeping during select classes) to found my university’s first chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, which had about 200 nominal members, of which about 30 were very active. It was in self-defense, as the commons were ruled by the Trotskyite “Students for a Democratic Society.” (So much for the myth that the left wasn’t active on campuses until the late 60’s.)
I quickly learned what my professors demanded and spewed it back. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I began to learn tactics to pacify my conscience. In history, for example, the professor would assign a term paper requiring that we prove that the United States would be better under an extremely centralized “Hamiltonian” system but toward ridiculously “Jeffersonian” ends; “Interpret these Founders as we [I] did in class.” I wrote a sophisticated paper according to the instructions, parroting my professor’s lectures, while simultaneously writing a contrary thesis. I handed in only the former. Our grades were posted on the bulletin board after being turned in to the administration. I then visited the professor in his artfully book-strewn office and told him I had made a mistake, and could I please still turn in the paper that I actually wanted graded, handing him the one that truly reflected history. He told me that it was not possible to change my grade (the highest in the class) this late, but he would truly enjoy reading a paper of mine that I considered even better. The next I heard of the matter, he was fruitlessly begging the dean to let him flunk me. So I guess he read it. But all that was too much work for me, with minimal results.
After a few false starts I found a partial solution that will work from Yale to Podunk Junior College, so long as the school contains a committed leftist professor whose classes consist of his opinions and 30 or so students.
At our university I would get as many conservatives together as I could, usually many more than the average classroom would hold. We would wander into registration, held in the basketball gym, ahead of time. We would already have chosen the worst of the worst among the professors. We’d find the table with his course and its grad-student registrar, line up at it, and sign in until the class was overfull. It was delightful to see the smile on the professor’s face if he happened to be in the building and looking at his table. So crowded, and by 9 a.m.!
Usually, the professor would begin with his inanities or lies at the class’s first meeting. One or two of us would raise our hands, attempt to reason with him and, after failure, walk out. The next meeting went the same. Within a week or two the classroom was empty but for a bewildered professor. We still had time to add or drop courses, according to the rules. We dropped that course and added another if we hadn’t already signed up for an extra, better course in advance.
I do not know what happened to the aged propagandists when they realized they had to teach to empty classrooms for a semester, and I don’t really care. I do remember hearing that the worst one we targeted had begun teaching at what we considered a far lesser school. Of course, there were always other bad teachers, so compromise was necessary. But even limited trials provide self-respect. Every school has some sort of conservative club. If it can publish an alternative newspaper, the student right can certainly do what we did. If enough students followed our example, administrations would have to begin selecting their faculties more carefully, and tenure would be rarer. (Incidentally, one of my careers was as a professor, but I taught my most controversial courses honestly and fairly.)
The absence of student rebellions explains why we face today a population of “educated” men and women lacking principles and honor, with whom one cannot hold a reasonable conversation and not encounter attention deficit disorder, and who possess nothing that would pass in Europe as an education. In America they head up corporations, law firms, and hospitals; professional schools provide no escape. After 30 years practicing law in a large city I have not met a single attorney who admits to having read a book cover to cover since college—not even since law school, because cases are selected from “casebooks.” Blackstone, Grotius, even Cicero or other writers touching on jurisprudence are unavailable and discouraged, as is questioning professors in class. I was forcibly reminded by the other students that they go to get a piece of paper, not to learn law. Other “learned” boot camps are the same.
Students who conform for a grade should keep in mind that lip service is often the most valuable service one can provide, and stifling what one knows to be the truth only gives one four full years of practicing deceit for selfish reasons. There is a rule that the Soviet Union as well as the United States had to learn: Moles often turn, intentionally or not. Over the years I have run into several conservative classmates for whom I once had great hope, but who had preferred to knuckle under “just for awhile.” Years later, they had become brainless sycophants.
This article first appeared in the October 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
Entries(RSS)
The Soviet analogy is an apt one. When I learned Russian at the Defense Language Institute, 1978-88, all our teachers were Russian emigres. They said that, to get their degrees from Moscow U. or wherever, they had to include some quotes by Marx and Lenin in whatever they wrote, even if it was on botany. But there, at least, everybody knew it was a sham.
If we Americans had any sense we would end all tax subsidies for our Soviet universities and colleges. Let these pampered academic commissars go out and make a living in the real world.
Mencius Moldbug, the blogger, has used the term "Cthulhu's Cathedral" to describe todays academic institution in the west, ruled over by a high-priesthood steeped in Marxist-Leninist-Marcusian-Gramscian ideology, which is very similar to a religion. I've seen the homeschooled kids of Evangelical Protestants or Traditionalist Catholics go off to such places only to come out as "twice the disciples of hell" their mentors are (if that's even possible), naive ideologues known in some circles as the "indoctrinentsia."
Countless private "Christian" liberal arts schools scattered throughout the hinterland are no different in terms of the type of dogma they serve up from the great towers raised to the giant vampire squid in locales such as Cambridge, New Haven, Berkeley, and Palo Alto.
The disease is pervasive, existing at all levels of our society. What are the chances that a legislative act which ignores the accepted ‘truths’ will pass? Ask the common man his opinion on any topic and you will find he must first give obeisance to the gods of abstract ideology, as though there were a fundamental truth inherent in it. And to question the validity of this supposed truth is the equivalent of blaspheme. Dr. Wilson is correct that the disease in this country began with Emerson. I would only add that it began when someone gave Emerson any credibility whatsoever.
#1. "If we Americans had any sense . . . "
"If we Americans had any sense we would end all tax subsidies for our Soviet universities and colleges. Let these pampered academic commissars go out and make a living in the real world."
4 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 22 January 2010:
#1. “If we Americans had any sense . . . "
So should the people be lined up for a refund for all the "tax subsidies" for a certain "academic commissar" who wrote a pretty good account of James Johnston Pettigrew? Dan Bauer, I want my money back!
In all seriousness (and there are about 3 people in the world who will get my lame attempt at humor), higher ed is a problem. I was hopeful that the emergence of a host of schools that only taught certain trades from nursing and accounting and computers would help things. But things have gotten worse. The rules of the market, such as cost going down with competition, can be thrown out since the taxpayers hard earned cash is still being tossed around too much. The problem is not with the schools. The problem is with federal funds and financial aid. Take out Pell, Stafford, Title IV etc and I think some of the other problems in higher ed can work themselves out.
Rob, I admire your optimism.
My experience with student watchdog groups, taken from my undergraduate years, is that these days they are far too focused on political partisanship and hot-button "issues" to be at all effective against the more subtle philosophical propagandizing in the classroom. To the extent that these groups have absorbed any philosophy, it is usually tinged with Straussianism and is only slightly deeper than the Fox News ring. Part of the problem is the incredibly inadequate standards in linguistics and the humanities during preparatory education, but another issue is the near-monopoly of these teachers on the students' intellectual development. I was well aware of this by the second semester of my second year I decided to major in history, having learned from a horrifying first freshman semester studying film that the apparatus of these departments will bury the student in philosophical sewage (I do not thank God nearly enough for making it a huge shock and a rude awakening), and had I lacked Chronicles and a foothold in the SSPX as launching points for concurrent formation and fact-checking I would never have dared major in history. I do not say that Internet search engines and research obsessionalism saved me, but I do owe a great deal of what has happened these last seven years to those strangling octopodes.
Regarding education, if a student chooses to study literature, history, or philosophy there are probably only two acceptable choices: Christendom College and the Institut Universitaire de St-Pie X, and this must be qualified by an acknowledgment that both schools are too small and myopic (by nature more than by fault) to single-handedly carry more than a morcel of the vast wealth of knowledge accumulated through the ages. To my knowledge there exists nowhere in the Occidental world a reliable database of books that are trustworthy or that are worth reading along with a commentary for surveillence of the enemy. (That is a project that would be worth taking up; unfortunately I lack the time and the competence to spearhead any such compilation.) It is on this latter point that the aforementioned universities are especially weak. The other alternative is to do as I did: suffer through a mediocre programme and scrounge out scraps from the other side, filtering everything one hears for four years. Regrettably, in some cases there will be no other option.
Let's see. To summarize: They'll pretend to teach us and we'll pretend to learn - paraphrasing the lament of the former Soviet citizenry.
The brick and mortar institutions of higher education are dinosaurs that are stuck in the digital age tar pit. Distance learning is the future...Dr. Gary North sees this. http://www.garynorth.com
Mr. Moses @7
Entities like the Rockford Institute with Chronicles and the Abbeville Institute are enclaves in which excellent scholars are nurturing younger emerging scholars and rehabilitating some of us more elder who spent too many years in the institutions of the anti-culture. My spouse, the good wife, calls these institutes "intellectual deer camps," including the cyber versions thereof, into which we men retreat, noting that there are some but few ladies who frequent the cyber fora, although that is less true of the face-to-face conferences and symposia, from the tedium, whatever that may be. The post-modern academe which many of us have had to endure would be a part of that tedium.
"The reporter or journalist almost always responds that the student should say and submit (for four years!) whatever the professor wants and graduate to the real world with his honors degree."
I'm not sure this claim is accurate. If anything, mainstream conservative journalists seem to always be spoiling for a fight where academic matters are concerned.
I remember reading this in the print edition and thinking, "This is completely at odds with my experience as an undegraduate at a large state university and at law school." I was surprised to find it in Chronicles because it reminds me of the whiney "conservatives" Dr. Fleming frequently derisively refers to. Future professional conservatives frequently appear on O'Reilly and other similar shows to complain that their leftist professors won't permit any dissent from the party line. It's been my experience that these smarmy whiners are purposely antagonistic and annoy not only the professor, but everyone in the class who is trying to learn something.
The undergraduate professors who were most instrumental in my intellectual development were radical leftists, but each of them permitted and encouraged dissent and rewarded students who showed an ability to develop persuasive arguments, whether or not they agreed with them. I was never penalized for being conservative; in fact, I likely benefited because my ideas probably seemed more original when 90% of the rest of the class was liberal.
Law schools, at least in my experience, do not discourage a more scholarly study of the law; however, law school is a professional school, and so the focus is on the practice of law, not legal theory. To be an effective practicing attorney, you must be aware of the most important cases in a particular field, thus the casebook. There are masters programs for those who want to study legal theory and individual elective courses at law school to satisfy a more scholarly pursuit. And, questioning professors in law school is actively encouraged (not discouraged as the author claims), probably too much to the detriment of the lecture.
Oliver has a point. In my experience it is not leftism but stinking mediocrity that is the curse of the professoriate. They are leftists because they are mediocre, lacking any vocation or real learning and know nothing but to cling to the fashion. A real and intelligent commitment to the Left is rare. Therefore, all the neocon criticism: Bloom, De Sousa, Horowitz, the NAS,etc., is ignorant and misleading. Besides those neocons critics of academe are nothing but Trotskyites upset because coloured Maoists have cut into their control of patronage.
The Left is also guilty of many sins of omission, as Roger McGrath's columns expose quite astutely. Furthermore, I had several leftist professors whom I respected, learned from and even liked, but there where times even in my favourite classes when it was clear (to me, not to everyone) what was their inclination and what kind of mentality a weak-minded person (the majority of students) would absorb philosophically (if not sociopolitically). Whatever else I might say of them, I know deep down that if the war broke out tomorrow, I would in all likelihood be on the opposite side of these professors. I have had fairly close friends who were Jewish, atheist, or even Muslim, but in all cases they were people who would likely fight beside me. I could never be close friends with or recommend someone I could imagine killing myself, my family or my comparissioners if the great war for civilisation exiged such from their side.
#12 Trotskyites are upset because coloured Maoists have cut into their control of patronage."
Dr. Wilson,
You are one of the few honest academics I know who survived the long push. I am always surprised to meet one such as yourself, who Kipling described as one who, "kept his head while everyone around him was losing theirs." Most of the old guard I admired suffered from depression,some were on the chemical nod, and still others had to regroup with the help of a much younger woman. Yet, with all these human imperfections, I loved them most because they were real men in a pool of quacking ducks. I wish I could have met you at last year's summer school, but maybe some other time. You are a venerable man in my estimation.
#11." but each of them permitted and encouraged dissent and rewarded students who showed an ability to develop persuasive arguments, whether or not they agreed with them." as long as these arguments are varieties of other leftist schools of thought! But there is no college at which the supply side of economics or the Laffer curve is accepted as the truth. If it is mentioned it is as an oddity. Furthermore, Austrian economics is nothing but a footnote, while to this day students are expected to write elegies in honor of Keynes, one way or another, before they can get a master's degree. Writing your thesis in the spirit of Von Mises or Hayek is the best way not to graduate. In biology, you will not graduate if you deny the evolution. In political science you will not graduate if your argument is that multiculturalism is wrong or that bombing of Yugoslavia was wrong, in english, if you try to show that Annie Proulx or Cormac McCarthy are basically illiterate or that they are not literature. The gentleman that we are discussing this week, Thomas Woods, is he being taken seriously at any university? On the other hand "People's hisotry of the US" is practically a required reading in our high schools.
My advice. Learn as much as you can (outside of approved academic channels) but pay for as little academic instruction as you can get away with while still being able to earn the living you want once you get to the real world. When you end up in a humanities class with a leftie, write the garbage they expect and get your good grade. After graduating you can come back and give them the middle finger if you want, but it probably won't be worth your time. After you make some money don't donate back to the alma-mater, if they forced or tricked you into taking more than one or two of those PC English / History classes.
I will agree with Professor Wilson that intellectual mediocrity is trully an appropriate description for much of today's professoriate, but I will add that the amount of immorality, or pure evil, that is present on campus is even more disturbing - including within the student body. People are concerned with what transpires in the classroom? One should have a glimpse of what transpires in the dormitories, frat houses, and sororities and they'd disabuse themselves of any optimistic notions that a student uprising will stem the leftist tide. Frankly, the leftists at the podium are downright pious and civilized geniuses compared to the barbarians that occupy their classrooms.
Alas, Eagle, you have a point. It would be far more effective to awaken parents to the moral degradation of the dormitories rather than the intellectual degradation of the classroom.
A good measure of the student body problem could be fixed by having college degrees no longer mandatory for just about every job that pays more than a nickel. I don't know how to pull that off, but there were plenty of people in college when I was there that had no need to be there, with many of them dropping out anyway. Many trades, like business ones and even engineering, can be learned via apprenticeship. Any school that is needed can be pursued when it is needed. But then, I suppose the businesses would rather have you pay for your own training.
@17 and 18: Whenever I talkies about how much I don't miss university years, the first thing I cite is "the drinking, the smoking, the drugs, the sex, the keg parties, the hookas on weeknights outside for no apparent reason, the vomiting over balconies and in showers, the coming to class of students in pajamas," etc. However, I would not say the professors comport themselves in a more "civilised" manner; it's just that after a certain age, hangovers become physically intolerable and in spite of the example of Beauvoir and Sartre, most people still lack the means to risk not marrying and instead ruin their social images on perpetual orgies. So long as we did our assignments, though, they fully approved of and even encouraged our bizarre "experimentation," and THAT was disturbing.
That said, student populations have a long history of irking the locals. In the past, however, kseveral mitigating factors have kept it from getting too out of hand and spilling over. First, historically, the university was a religious institution administered by the official Church and closely watched by the clergy. Second, either universities lacked campuses (Sorbonne) or had high standards of conduct and outdoor dress codes on campuses. Finally--and this is key--women and men remained strictly segregated. Until recently it would have been unthinkable to educate the two in the same classroom. The leftist academics, by prescribing the leveling of society, were directly responsible for destroying these mitigating factors, and their intellectual and spiritual descendants do not deserve to escape one ounce of accountability for allowing this tired game to continue.
In defense of the young people, it must be said that when they get to college they are already the victims of 12 years of "education" that they cannot help but regard with cynical disgust if they have any character and sense at all. Also, of course, they come from a society that has already exposed them to and tolerated moral degradation steadily during their formative years.
Education that is inadequate to get you into the A list of colleges. You have to go to SAT cram schools for 3 years in order to get close to the vocabulary and analytical skills required for admission +a slick politically correct essay and a track record of participation in liberal activism. The level of hipocrisy in the process is astounding.
Rob Oliver:
Your experience is similar to my son's at the University of Chicago. He had submitted a paper in the Political Science Department the gravaman of which was a free market reply to some question---he was reading economics. His professor, a Marxist, wrote on his paper (if I can paraphrase)"this is a very,very smart paper. But, of course, your are completely wrong!" He gave my son an "A" on the paper.
A culture that replaces the teachings of Christ with those of the mythological MLK? That replaces the limited Republic of Jefferson with that of the mythological Lincoln? That replaces self reliance and responsibility with fantasy world egalitarianism? We live in a culture that is not only unrealistic but self-destructive. Our educational centers stand as proof of this.
I try to teach my high school students (I teach theology) to identify intelligent arguments with real evidence in support. Then I try to teach them why they will encounter almost none of these in college. Being a contrarian is a given...just make sure you have fairly identified what is in front of you. "TV Liberals," "Sissy Conservatives" and "Too Dumb to Knows" are three categories I offer in addition to real people who are accidentally there to learn. May the Lord watch over them as my kids (75% of whom do not need to be there to study their future vocation)walk the awkward designs of university campuses.
Which is of greater concern to those of us who observe current events in modern America, the external threat from "weapons of mass destruction" or, the internal threat from "weapons of self- destruction" ? Your choice may be an indication as to what kind of conservative you are.
A part of the problem with the modern university that has not been touched upon here (rather surprisingly) is the fact that universities are often completely out-of-touch with their physical and cultural roots in the community. A survey of the faculties of many prominent southern universities will reveal that few, if any, are native southerners and even fewer of those are graduates of southern institutions of higher learning. I hate to invoke the use of an archaic term, but one has the distinct feeling that professors from New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, etc., teaching in southern schools are "carpetbaggers." This is to say nothing of the Indians and Arabs teaching what masquerades as American or European History courses in our southern schools. Such people have no sense of southern values, culture, or history and are, as such, incapable of passing on what we, as southerners, hold most dear. Is it any wonder, then, that our children grow up despising their own heritage? Would anyone doubt that Jewish children educated by members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood would grow up to be self-hating Jews? This seems like such a common-sense observation, yet on the few occasions that I have dared allude to this sad state of affairs on the increasingly unholy ground of our universities, I have been quickly dismissed as a fringe-group neo-confederate, emerging, however briefly, from the fever-swamps of the political right to rear my unwashed head.
I agree heartily with the majority of the points made in previous comments, but again I must point out that southern university deans and presidents who hire northerners or foreigners over southern scholars are doing just as much to harm our schools and our students as are the utter failures that we call high schools and the mediocre leftists who continue to preach Maoist drivel in university classrooms.
Become what you pretend to be.
#27. It is ultimately not the university presidents who are responsible but the businessmen and legislators who fall for their bushwa and hire them.
Once upon a time The University was a uni-verse. Now it is a plural verse with every Tom, Dick and Harry turning inward because the center that once held it all together and turned both student and teacher toward a third thing has been lost. I do not dare suggest in these troubled times that it might have lost its "religious" purpose but it certainly has lost its wonder and mystery as a place where old men were at leisure to pursue the truth and dream dreams while young men were inspired. Thirty or fourty years ago I was blessed to enjoy a few professors like that who insisted on teaching more undergraduate students than graduate students, who loved their work, their subjects and for the most part, their students. Towards the end of their careers they were sentenced to what they called "death by administration." In other words, get trendy or get out. Since their purpose, as they saw it, was to stay clear of trends and focus on lasting things that needed passed on from generation to generation, they slugged it out to the bitter end. And like those young men at the trial of Socrates,(both saints and sinners) I know their students will never forget them, ever satisfy the debt of gratitude they owe them or ever see the likes of them again --- unless of course they read Chronicles or have met folks like Tom Fleming,Clyde Wilson, Peter Stanlis, and "those types."
May we approach this subject from the point of view of history? Before WWII, less than 10% of high school graduates (of whom there were also not that many) went to "college." It had always been the progressive faith that "education" was the key to democratic citizenship, but that became possible only after WWII validated the New Deal (the "Greatest Generation," of which my father was a member, can also be called the "Generation that Learned to Trust the Government") and passed the wildly popular series of laws collectively called the "GI Bill." In the 1950s the Cold War called forth the also popular National Defense Education Act, and the universities after 1953 began to sell out to the government in every way they could grasp a dollar. The universities, always more progressive than not, with ranks bulked up by a great number of mostly left-wing European emigres, closed ranks against the wonderfully timed "threat" of the McCarthy hordes. In the 1960s the STATES, with Pat Brown's California and New York's Nelson Rockefeller, took off on an orgy of "education" spending. Normal schools became "state universities" that eventually grew to 20 and 30 thousand students. New state "universities" jumped out of the ground like weeds. Up until about 1968 there were ten or twelve jobs in these "universities" (I had eleven offers in 1967, without a Ph.D) for every graduate student coming out of the newly created diploma mills. For the first time in American History there were more jobs than applicants. By the mid-1970s high school students could attend a bewildering variety of institutions of "higher" learning that could dumb down almost anything to accommodate them.
Why should anyone on this site be surprised at the situation we find ourselves in?
John Willson has said very well what I was thinking.
Bill Schulz is also right. The institutions of 'higher learning' in the South are colonial in function, if not originally in intent. Also, it's not just the South that has been colonised this time around. I'll bet the same thing can be said of those in New England or the Midwest at least to an extent. We are all colonised.