TAKING STOCK OF THE ROT IN HIGHER EDUCATION.

Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball has been paying attention for a long time.

More and more, it seems, academia (like other aspects of elite cultural life) has reneged on its compact with society. One of the great ironies that attends the triumph of political correctness is that in department after department of academic life, what began as a demand for emancipation recoiled, turned rancid, and developed into new forms of tyranny and control.

Well, yes, and he's been doing yeoman service calling attention.

I have been calling attention for years, and don't mind at all when people with bigger platforms than mine recognize that the first step in correcting failure is to admit failure.  The refreshingly solid Republican victories in national election might be the sort of evidence that would encourage academicians to revise their priors.  Let's start with Michael Clune, professor of English at Case Western, with "We Asked for It" in the house organ for business as usual.

Yes, I have reservations about the populist economic illiteracy out of the Trump presidency, but we would likely be seeing the same thing with the Jarrett regency continuing to blunder, with business as usual in higher education and open borders to boot.  "If the second Trump presidency can bring to pass what observers as varied as Allan Bloom or Charles 'Prof Scam' Sykes and Martin Anderson long ago called attention to, all the better."

Let the thing be pressed, encourages Mr Kimball.

In some ways, the diagnostic stage is the most difficult because it is the hardest to sustain. One corollary of society’s natural obedience to the unenforceable is the tendency to assume that those institutions in which we have invested great trust are inherently trustworthy. The common assumption is, “Academic institutions are expensive, socially respected bodies whose imprimatur is a powerful door-opener and tool of accreditation; ergo, they must be doing a good job.”

Some such sentiment is the prevailing one, so when some radical comes along to remove the scab, the shock is great—and unwelcome. One of the chief tasks for critics of what has happened to academic life in this country is to show the extent to which the anti-Semitic, anti-male, anti-white, anti-American, and transfiliac radicals in the Ivy League and elsewhere are not exceptions but the predictable result of institutions that have gradually abandoned their commitment to education for the sake of radical posturing. The prime difficulty of facing the aspirant diagnostician is not the elusiveness of symptoms. They are florid and nearly ubiquitous. On the contrary, the problem is finding and sustaining the patience required to set forth chapter and verse repeatedly and in language that effectively conveys the depredations on view.

If real change is going to come to academic culture, criticism must be ceaseless, pointed, and deep. It is not enough to expose the students and professors shouting “Death to Israel” at places like Columbia University. The academic culture that breeds and rewards such figures—and their name is legion—must be exposed for what it is: a thoroughly politicized rejection of the principles that inform liberal learning.

In one sense, the diagnosis of the calamity that has befallen academic culture is inseparable from the task of treatment. Which is to say that the job of criticism is never finished. Basic questions, the answers to which one could once have assumed were taken for granted, must be asked anew.

To whom is the faculty accountable? To the extent that it holds itself accountable to its pedagogic duties, it is accountable to itself. To the extent that it repudiates those duties, it is accountable to the society in which it functions and from which it enjoys its freedoms, privileges, and perquisites.

The rot, though, has been developing for a long time.  Benjamin Kerstein explains.

Many view this professoriate regime and its ethos of protester-terrorism as relatively new, emerging in the 2010s with the rise of “woke” ideology and its accompanying frenzies. While liberal bias in academia has existed for a long time, the shift toward leftist totalitarianism is considered a recent development.

This is, one regrets to say, untrue. The dictatorship of the professoriate and its totalitarian regime are of long standing. Over the decades, the regime has penetrated deeply into the institutions it conquered and colonized to such an extent that, if they are to be saved, American academia and American intellectual life as a whole must be completely remade or dismantled to smash the regime.

Put simply, the professoriate regime is the 1960s New Left.

Although the current academic left's elders are the self-same hippies of the 1960s, they drew their intellectual strength from an even older cohort of the discontented, and Mr Kerstein quotes Theodore H. White from The Making of the President 1968 at length on the discourse practice.

A glossary might start, for example, thus:

Democracy is a phony word to be sneered at unless carefully modified by such phrases as democracy of the streets, democracy of direct action or participatory democracy. Otherwise, democracy is a trick played on the people by the establishment.

Those are all synonyms for "mob action we approve of."  "Our Democracy," meaning Democrats getting their way, came much later.  And Mr White surely had the Frankfurt School types diagnosed.

The glossary becomes operational when it moves on to its action words. Action opens by insistence on dialogue. A dialogue is begun (usually by a self-appointed delegation meeting with an official) when demands (non-negotiable demands) are presented and communications channels opened. The best ambiance for communications is something called creative tension, which is designed to reveal buried hates and unspoken prejudice. The rhythm of dialogue, creative tension and communications reaches its climax in what is called confrontation, a riot condition. In confrontation, force (styled by the provokers of confrontation as non-violent force) is arrayed against the force of the establishment (usually styled police brutality); and as shoving, pushing, cursing and obscenity rise, bloodshed frequently follows, imposed by the pigs (a term which scarcely endears demonstrators to the police), and the cruelty of authority is exposed.

In this new rhetoric, normal contradictions of thought vanish. Thus, the old virtues of tolerance and free speech becomes repressive tolerance, a sinister effort by the establishment to smother the truth by indulgence; this, apparently, justifies the denial of free speech to those who disagree.

None of the current pass is new, notes Mr Kersten.

America has been grappling with this movement for decades. The country failed to address it effectively then, and many American institutions are failing to do so now. Despite the movement’s numerous crimes and transgressions, it has not been effectively marginalized and has, consequently, institutionalized itself in positions of significant power and influence over American life.

Perhaps, Mr Kimball suggests, the patience of the Normals is exhausted.

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 candidness and courage, moral virtues that are in short supply wherever political correctness reigns triumphant. The bottom line is that those who want to retake the university must devote themselves to cultivating those virtues and perhaps even more to cultivating the virtue of patience, capitalizing wherever possible on whatever local opportunities present themselves.

Or, perhaps, to continue the punishment past the end of the Trump presidency.