Dear Friends,
I’m sharing another piece on the current campus madness. At the partner site
, writes (ironically enough) also about a liberal arts education.Best,
Sam
THE END OF LIBERAL EDUCATION?
You already know about what happened at Harvard, right? A coalition of more than thirty student groups signed a letter, written on October 7, saying, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
When Harvard’s current president Claudine Gay declined to denounce or distance Harvard from the letter, Harvard’s former president Lawrence Summers took to Twitter to encourage her to do so. Prominent donors pulled funds from Harvard; a Congressman alumnus accused Harvard of “moral cowardice”; a former governor withdrew from a planned fellowship. And then a truck showed up in Harvard Square with a billboard flashing the names of student leaders from the signatory organizations under the heading “Harvard’s Leading Anti-Semites.”
For a certain kind of liberal, the Harvard incident was the last straw, marking the final rupture between student woke progressivism and mainstream liberalism. In a New York Times op-ed Ezekiel Emanuel (that’s the doctor Emanuel, as opposed to the agent Emanuel or the Chief of Staff Emanuel) wrote, “We have clearly failed to educate [our students]. We have failed to give them the ethical foundation and moral compass to recognize the basics of humanity.”
This split has been a long time coming and now, it seems, it’s finally here. Over the past decade of Woke Revolution, institutional leaders basically decided to pretend that it wasn’t happening — that “cancellation” didn’t exist, that the particularly dumb things students were saying were just growing pains, that the whole woke revolution could be tamed by good humor and patience on the part of university administrators and by the 80-hour work work once all the social justice warriors graduated school and begrudgingly accepted their McKinsey jobs.
But clearly, for Emanuel (who represents the liberal establishment if anyone does) and for The New York Times (which, surprisingly, was willing to run the piece), the Harvard incident — along with a slew of incidents like it, at Stanford, NYU, and all across the country — meant that they could no longer trust ‘liberal arts schools’ to hold to liberal values.
There’s been copious analysis on how we’ve gotten to this pass — how wokeism metastasized, how it became unassailable orthodoxy at ostensibly liberal schools. Various intellectuals — Susan Neiman, Yascha Mounk, John McWhorter, Jordan Peterson, Camille Paglia — have all put together different pieces of the puzzle, the intellectual bank shot that starts with liberal compassion, an abiding interest in equality and above all in the experiences of history’s victims; ricochets off Foucault and his dictum that all political relations are reducible to their underlying power dynamics; combines with Edward Said and an intense interest in decolonization; picks up extra momentum from Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Cranshaw’s idea of gradations of victimhood based on innate categories of identity (with color of skin providing the most readily available cheat sheet); gets a perplexing spin from Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler’s deconstructionism; and then really picks up speed in the 2010s when social media seems to offer accessible tools for calling out injustices and inverting power hierarchies.
In this piece, I’d like to just talk about how all this looked from the vantage-point of the 2000s, when I was in school and (in retrospect) some of the storm clouds were gathering but, for the most part, hadn’t been named yet.
The really essential point — as Jordan Peterson notes in one of his talks — isn’t any of the theory so much as the financial model of universities. Schools were getting steadily more expensive without, as Peterson puts it, adding any additional quality. The rising cost of tuition played out in a few different ways. The most crucial was that it utterly squeezed the middle class out of the top liberal arts schools. Legacy students, children of the “Professional Managerial Class,” students of wealthy backgrounds who were able to game the system were still admitted and paid sticker-price. The middle class was out — and more or less expected to attend state schools. And schools assuaged their consciences by providing financial aid packages that emphasized “disadvantaged backgrounds,” which very often tended to be assessed on the basis of race. This arrangement worked to everybody’s satisfaction (at the time, I thought it was a wise and far-sighted policy). Schools assured their financial health, were — by most benchmarks — wonderfully diverse, and still provided a ladder for upward mobility.
But there were a number of cheats built into the system. One was that students had favored a kind of cosmetic racial diversity over actual socioeconomic diversity. To figure out what was going on, you had to really dive into the numbers, and what became apparent was that the student bodies at elite schools were overwhelmingly coming from the wealthiest zip codes in the U.S. — in other words, that the students purportedly yielding “diversity” tended themselves to be from wealthy backgrounds.
But the schools had in some way committed themselves to (in spite of everything) a narrative of themselves as radical organizations, organizations that were through a series of modest, achievable reforms (ever-greater diversity, the spirit of open inquiry, the proliferation of progressive-sounding and usually very-long-named new departments) working assiduously towards a more just i.e. liberal future. That mindset dovetailed nicely with universities’ ongoing institutional myth that they had driven the ‘60s — certainly, many of the professors were eager to preserve the dimming memory of that time; and, if the 2000s were politically quiet on college campuses, there was a certain alertness to any possible way to advance the spirit of the ‘60s.
Opportunities were fleeting. It’s sort of unbelievable all the things that we didn’t get upset about when I was in college — there weren’t mass protests about Iraq, we didn’t pay much attention to things like the persecution of Falun Gong, I remember coming across a small “lie-down” organized in support of Palestinian Liberation and being struck that nobody even slowed to figure out what was going on — but there was a flicker towards the end of college with the revelation that date rapes were much more prevalent than anyone had imagined.
I never figured out if that was really true or not (Rolling Stone almost drove themselves out of business by reporting breathlessly on a terrible rape that had never taken place), but, certainly, everyone I was around was disposed to believe it — it was like a proto-MeToo moment, an opportunity to be on the side of justice and progress, to believe women, and to hold the powers-that-be (the school and its low-key rape policy) to account.
What changed from there was, of course, the internet. When I was in school, the internet was this demon force to be batted away — in the 2000s, it manifested in really trollish invasions, a list of the “ugliest girls” in my high school, a gossip site in college largely dedicated to slut-shaming — but in the 2010s students more and more felt that the internet was a weapon at their disposal and which they could wield in the case of social justice.
This tendency was accompanied by what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff called “the coddling of the American mind” — an emphasis on “safe spaces,” on students’ “nurture,” which in practice meant inuring them from any possible outside criticism even as they expressed radical views of their own. That hyper-sensitivity made its appearance in the new-in-the-world concepts of “micro-aggressions” and “trigger warnings,” with any uncomfortable perspective immediately deemed a threat to students’ emotional well-being if not physical safety. “It is not about creating an intellectual space, it is not, it is about creating a home,” said a student during Yale’s Halloween Costume incident.
The Harvard petition had all the ingredients of the familiar brew. As a New Yorker piece documented it, the students who wrote the petition felt that, by the iron laws of social justice and progressivism, they were called upon to act — and they sought refuge in the internet, in the cozy online sensation of moral clarity. “It was originally so long,” one of the petition’s author’s recalled. “But then we were, like, ‘Cut the stats. Cut the numbers. It has to be punchy.’”
Once the petition hit the internet and boomeranged (America, it turned out, had a very different core understanding of the massacre than the Harvard students did), the mechanism of ultra-sensitivity kicked in. The students not only kept their names secret, but — to the obvious incredulity of The New York Times’ reporter — “asked that even the smallest details of their personal lives — freshman? senior? — not be published.”
To outside observers, even those trying to be sympathetic, it was that double-standard that was most galling. “You can’t express your views and then say, ‘Those who criticize me are chilling my speech,’” Erwin Chemerinsky, Berkeley’s law dean, told The New York Times. The hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, in a fighting mood, said, “One should be prepared to stand up and be personally accountable for his or her views.”
But that wasn’t the way the schools saw it. Harvard’s career center issued guidance for handling the news media, saying, “Demand anonymity — use language about ‘extreme threat to security.’” And when the students were “doxxed” — by the aggressive conservative organization Accuracy in Media — that became the story.
And all of the familiar tropes about safe spaces and the protection of young minds were back in play. “People’s lives are being ruined, people’s careers are being ruined, people’s fellowships are being ruined,” said one student. “It’s me that’s being targeted. It’s my brown, Muslim face up on that truck,” said another. It seemed to be forgotten that the petition was, after all, a public statements that the students had voluntarily signed off on — and that anonymity and open letters don’t really go together.
The question becomes how real the rupture is between the adult professional managerial class and the elite schools which are its primary pipeline. My guess is not very. Elite universities have so monopolized the credentialing process for the PMC that the adults are stuck with their graduates no matter the actual content of their education, no matter how irretrievably woke the campuses are.
The result of all this is a tricky and much-misunderstood class war. The elite schools are built around credentialing students for the professional managerial class. The actual content of the education seems to get completely swapped out every couple of generations or so — at the moment there’s a heavy focus on social justice, identity politics, “deconstruction,” and with a strong campus identity dedicated towards a mythology of political radicalism. Meanwhile, the middle classes (and graduates of public high schools, etc) feel blindsided by this arrangement — feel that the elite schools have lost all contact with common sense at the same time that their graduates continue to be rewarded with plush jobs.
So, Emanuel (and Bill Ackman, etc) are obviously a bit carried away by their apocalyptic states of mind. Most of the “radicalized” students will in a few years be working away for the investment banks and consulting firms, same as it ever was. (That dynamic has already played out in the immediate aftermath of the Harvard petition, with many of the signatories backing away as fast as possible — “they dropped like flies,” one of the petition’s authors wryly said.) But that’s not exactly a consolation. The class war is real. And, between the rising tuition costs and the self-aggrandizing on-campus politics, the elite schools have more or less completely lost touch with the rest of American life. Ezekiel Emanuel will probably get over his despair. Bill Ackman will probably forget about his threat not to hire Harvard grads. But the crisis of the elite universities is obvious. Probably time — if they want to justify the tuition costs — to revamp the education everybody’s getting.
It’s struck me that the campus politics are a diversion from the real issue, which is the preservation of Israel as a secure Jewish homeland
I have no policy prescriptions as to how to best achieve that
But I do know that October 7th was a watershed event and I do know that Israeli citizens need support from the diaspora
And I’d respect the machers like Ackman and Rowan a lot more if they pivoted with their checkbooks to support Israeli citizens in need rather than close them in a vain and churlish effort to punish administrators and students
Thé action that’s important is not in Cambridge or West Philly
I went to the relatively-rowdier Berkeley of the late 90's and cozy confines of Rice in the mid 00's, which were such disparate experiences that I didn't think much about the woke revolution or the emergence of safe spaces...colleges are all a bit weird in their own unique ways. At least until John McWhorter started to sounding the alarm in 2020.
Even then, I didn't realize the rot until the recent cowardly open letter incident. If you write one, have the balls to fucking own it. And if you realize you're wrong, retract it. This anonymous open letter business really bothers me. If nothing else, you'd think that college would teach you words matter.
The university reactions to October has convinced me that liberals need to make a break with leftists (communism curiousness is no longer an youthful folly as it was a few weeks ago). So thanks for this essay discussing the befuddling (to outsiders) causes of the campus dysfunction.