THERE THEY GO AGAIN.

It is a truth universally accepted that the election of a populist president provokes panic among the poobahs of higher education.  "[F]or many years, professors understood the social contract obligated them to teach the controversies, to be careful about interjecting their own biases into class, to respect the discipline's discourse practices in writing up their thoughts. Thus, for example, could Hayek and Keynes work together to edit Economica."

That was a few months into the first Trump presidency.  This year, he hadn't even been elected, and Wesleyan president Michael Roth was sounding the alarm.

Although the first colleges on our shores were founded in colonies controlled by a monarchy in Britain, the impressive growth of universities that combined research, teaching and education of the whole student happened here as the country became more democratic. Slavery was the great stain on the nation, and the war fought to abolish this vile institution ended with promises that Black people, too, should enjoy opportunities for education, including at colleges.

The exclusion of women from institutions of higher learning began breaking down at the end of the 19th century, and, as the right to vote was finally enshrined in the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, women’s colleges were up and running and public universities were enrolling women.

It took time, far too much time, but educational institutions eventually recognized that white supremacy, patriarchy and the parochialisms that went with them obstructed learning because they prohibited certain subjects from investigation and excluded certain people from participating in research and teaching. In the colonial era and shortly after independence, colleges aimed at training clergy, but over time they saw their role as providing the country with an educated citizenry.

He couldn't even get through the opening paragraphs without invoking the Intersectional Catechism, could he? Dear reader, how many times do I have to tell you that the senior administrators of the tony colleges and universities are paid lackeys without character or knowledge?

But he has only begun to beclown himself.

By the late 19th century, the research university was coming into its own, which meant fostering specialized investigation into areas that professional academics had decided were worth exploring. The professors valued their academic freedom because it allowed them to explore topics and problems that those outside the campus walls might find disturbing.

Academic freedom also allowed universities to create teaching environments free of official censorship or the soft despotism of pandering to commercial popularity. The classroom was a space for professors to share their professional expertise with students who could in turn explore ideas and methodologies without fear of orthodoxies imposed from the outside. In recent years, of course, teachers have been accused of imposing their own narrow views on those who study with them. They have been accused of abandoning their professional role and substituting their own personal opinions for scholarly investigation.

Colleges depend on the professionalism of their faculty to adjudicate claims of bias in the classroom. In the best of times, teachers debate with one another about how and what they should teach, and the more advanced the students, the more likely it is that they will have their own views on what should happen in the classroom. In most subject areas (and most notably in STEM and related fields), the issue of indoctrination rarely comes up. The classroom is focused on exploring demanding methodologies and complex content.

Faculty who properly understand their role as stewards of the curriculum will properly "adjudicate claims of bias."  Unfortunately, too many of them have abdicated their role to "bias response teams" whose priors are so tight you can't thread a needle through them.  In place of pandering to commercial popularity comes pandering to the professional protest communities, and converting the universities from places that explore topics to places that take an adversarial stance toward anything that might have a whiff of oppression to them.  The rot has been building for a long time.

That's what makes Mr Roth's closing argument beyond pathetic.

The attacks on higher education, on democracy, on the rule of law, threaten to sweep away freedoms that have been hard-won over the last 100 years. Education is a process through which people develop their capacities for exploration, collaboration and creative work. They learn to treat new ideas with curiosity and respect, even as they are also taught to critically evaluate these ideas. They learn skills that will be valued in the workforce and habits of mind and spirit that will help them flourish throughout their lives. They learn to think for themselves so that they can be engaged citizens of a democracy—not the cowering subjects of a dictator.

During periods of cultural and economic change, great pressure is often brought to bear on education because at such times people find it hard to agree on what is meaningful, let alone admirable. Ours is one such period. But we can agree that fearmongering and prejudice are wrong and that we should strive together to find ways to “cultivate individuality in such ways as to enhance the individual’s social sympathy,” as John Dewey advised.

In the United States, education and democracy can continue to protect and nurture one another. In the coming days, we must reject the cultivated ignorance that is used to fan the flames of hatred. Instead, we must defend the freedom to learn together in our schools, colleges and universities so that as a nation we can continue our democratic experiment—knowing we have a long way to go, but striving toward a more perfect union.

It takes a heart of stone not to laugh at "cultivated ignorance" from a leader in an academic enterprise that "decenters" hard-won wisdom of millennia; that makes students cowering subjects of Student Affairs deanlets; that cultivates ignorance and calls it access.

And that, dear reader, is why you get more Trump.