Despite denials from the left, US higher education has been captured by leftist faculty, students, and administrators. This is not a figment of anyone’s imagination, as for most of this century colleges and universities have changed dramatically.
Anyone who has been to college in the past half-century would attest to what then was called the “liberalism” of most of their professors, and, in the post-World War II era, the probability that one’s professor was a registered Democrat has been high. Yet, this is not what we mean by the “radicalizing” of American higher education, for even those professors that classified themselves as “liberals” and faithfully supported the Democratic Party would not have considered themselves to be radicals.
However, there also were demands for academic integrity 50 years ago, and certainly most of my professors at the University of Tennessee (1971-75) would have given at least a good effort to place their academic role above politics. In fact, I cannot recall being subjected to any politicized curricula—and I was a journalism major during the Watergate crisis, which practically invited politics into the classroom.
This does not mean that professors didn’t have political opinions or that the university itself was free of politics. I’m sure that most of my professors were Democrats but I don’t remember any of them attempting to influence my own political views (which, at best, were a mishmash of a lot of nonsense). There were, however, the effects of the cultural revolution that had begun before I went to college were already taking hold on the language, such as calling freshmen “freshpersons” and chairman a “chairperson.” For most of us, these things were eye-rolling but not really harmful. Furthermore, if some of us insisted on using the term “freshman,” there was no attempt to impose a campus-wide shaming campaign.
Today, the situation is very different. Higher education has been thoroughly politicized to a point where even if things were to turn around today, it would take an entire generation before things could be where they were even 30 years ago. There are no academic areas left in higher education that have not been corrupted by leftist thought.
Alleged Racism in Mathematics
Take mathematics, for example. Those of us who have slogged through a couple levels of calculus and higher-level statistics have found no racial, sexual, or otherwise connotations in taking derivatives or feeding a spreadsheet to run statistical regressions. Yet, according to our leading minds in academe, math is racist. To be sure, the critics have concentrated upon the history of mathematics—or, to be more specific, who was involved in the development and teaching of math—but nonetheless, the fact that racial minorities often score lower on standardized math tests means that the way the discipline is taught suffers from racism.
Thanks to the leftist bias in colleges, school districts like Seattle have declared that math itself perpetuates racism:
Seattle’s new proposed math curriculum will take US public school math instruction where no one has gone before.
Students will be taught how “Western Math” is used as a tool of power and oppression, and that it disenfranchises people and communities of color. They will be taught that “Western Math” limits economic opportunities for people of color. They will be taught that mathematics knowledge has been withheld from people of color.
The Left Declares that Science, Too, Is Racist
If math is racist, then so is science. Granted, the term “scientific” was co-opted by progressives who used it to promote eugenics, which really was pseudo-science. However, although eugenics was the preferred view of science by progressives, the anti-racist movement still holds onto progressivism, its adherents apparently not appreciating the irony behind their ideological views.
But rejecting eugenics and related pseudo-sciences is not behind the latest push to declare science itself as racism. Instead, because much of modern science was developed in Europe and the United States, then science as we know it is “colonialist” and, therefore, racist, according to the journal Nature, which declared in an editorial:
We recognize that Nature is one of the white institutions that is responsible for bias in research and scholarship. The enterprise of science has been — and remains — complicit in systemic racism, and it must strive harder to correct those injustices and amplify marginalized voices.
Understand that there is nothing wrong with trying to expand scientific knowledge and find ways to better present its truths to audiences that include racial minorities, as well as encourage more people from racial minorities to seek science careers, but that is not what the editors at Nature were advocating. Instead, they were claiming that scientific knowledge itself is tainted with racism because of the racial backgrounds of many people involved in scientific fields, making the results of their research unacceptably corrupt. Likewise, the Smithsonian declared that simple concepts like being on time, working hard, and looking to the future are racist, along with the development of “linear thinking” and “cause-and-effect” which are foundational in scientific method also are racist.
How Did It Come to This?
Only someone locked up in the uber-abstract world of academe would claim that engaging in cause-and-effect thinking is racist and should be condemned, or that a person’s sex is something randomly “assigned at birth.” As one who was involved in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case, I saw firsthand the madness that came from members of the Duke faculty that insisted that there was no objective truth, only “social constructs” that were dependent upon race and politics, with one professor, Karla Holloway, implying that it really didn’t matter if the accused players raped anyone or not, since they should be guilty, anyway.
The academic world is full of this nonsense, of obtuse language, twisting facts, and denying reality itself, and, as we saw in the Duke case, the more “elite” the institution, the more that nonsense is treated as truth. But how did higher education, which was supposed to be an institution in search of truth, become the place where such things are demoted to the position of a “social construct”?
To find that answer, we look back to the 1930s when Italian communist Antonio Gramsci realized that Western institutions (and especially Christianity) would not permit the kind of violent revolution that installed communism in the Soviet Union:
Gramsci believed that the conditions in Russia in 1917 that made revolution possible would not materialize in more advanced capitalist countries in the West. The strategy must be different and must include a mass democratic movement, an ideological struggle.
His advocacy of a war of position instead of a war of movement was not a rebuke of revolution itself, just a differing tactic – a tactic that required the infiltration of influential organizations that make up civil society. Gramsci likened these organizations to the “trenches” in which the war of position would need to be fought.
This war, however, would not be fought with guns but by infiltrating Western institutions, which the German radical student Rudi Dutschke described as the “long march” through these institutions, or what Gramsci called a “war of position”:
Gramsci spoke of organizations including churches, charities, the media, schools, universities and “economic corporate” power as organizations that needed to be invaded by socialist thinkers.
The new dictatorship of the proletariat in the West, according to Gramsci, could only arise out of an active consensus of the working masses—led by those critical civil society organizations generating an ideological hegemony.
As Gramsci described it, hegemony means “cultural, moral and ideological” leadership over allied and subordinate groups. The intellectuals, once ensconced, should attain leadership roles over these groups’ members by consent. They would achieve direction over the movement by persuasion rather than domination or coercion.
In higher education, we know the rest of the story. By 1970, some universities had established programs in “women’s studies,” and then the rest of the identity studies followed. These programs were different from traditional academic programs like English, history, or economics, for they existed to create a leftist narrative regarding people and society. Thus, they created a pathway for radicals to become part of college faculties without having to engage in graduate studies that contained academic rigor. Indeed, most of the 88 professors at Duke University who had signed an inflammatory, guilt-implying statement published in the Duke Chronicle were employed in the identity studies departments, while others were in liberal arts. Only two were in math, one in sciences, and none in the law school.
I looked at the publishing records of many of the signees who were tenured, and most of them had very weak academic credentials which had they been in departments like economics, would never have gained them tenure. However, because people in these “study” areas believe that what in the past was called “academic excellence” is now another form of white supremacy (read the Smithsonian chart), they have no problem with turning their classes into propaganda sessions and their students into screaming activists.
One would think that college administrators and others on the faculty would see through these things, but any kind of opposition—quiet or otherwise—to these “studies” has quickly been shouted down, and no professor wants to be publicly labeled racist or sexist or homophobic. The reason is that during the period from the early 1970s to the present, the liberal arts and humanities became politicized, first with the Vietnam War and the Richard Nixon presidency, and later with the rise of Ronald Reagan in the White House.
As English, history, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines became increasingly politicized, the development enabled the activist-oriented identity studies departments to become increasingly influential on campus. It was here that higher education became an unholy mixture of what I call scholars and schemers.
For many of us who taught in higher education and also published research papers in academic journals, we took the three “legs” of our duties seriously—teaching, research, and service. Teaching and research are self-explanatory, while service involves things like advising, serving on department, college, and university-wide committees. For example, I chaired the university’s Promotion and Tenure Subcommittee for three years and was able to convince the administrative and faculty leadership to change our qualifications for tenure.
The schemers, on the other hand, are more likely to eschew quality publications and use their positions on committees to push through measures related to “sexist language” or something related to one’s “preferred pronouns.” Even before the covid epidemic and subsequent lockdowns, the schemers were especially active, demanding that every course syllabus contain their versions of social justice, with each professor expected to bring “anti-racism” into their classrooms. Their student acolytes followed suit with similar demands.
For example, at my former employer, the English department ordered professors not to count off grammatical errors by black students because, in the minds of the department’s leaders, that would be racist. It was not that they were trying to make assignments easier for black students, but rather they were claiming that racism itself was built into the structure of the English language, so to promote English grammar would be the same as promoting bigotry.
Why didn’t the scholars just say no? Some of them did, and found themselves on the receiving end of social justice mobbing via social media. During the Duke Lacrosse madness, Duke faculty that did speak out against the rush to judgment became targets of vengeful activist faculty members, who attempted to intimidate anyone who might disagree with them.
In the world of scholars and schemers, it is hard for the former to fight back against the latter. First, and most important, these two groups have very different viewpoints of their jobs as faculty members. Scholars believe their job is to introduce students to bodies of knowledge and to pursue research that reflects their areas of expertise.
Schemers, on the other hand, see their job as turning students into social justice activists by propagandizing them. Anyone who might object is immediately labeled a racist or worse, and there is always an army of angry social media ready to pounce on the dissenter. The social justice warriors, after all, are saving the world by fighting racism and opposing capitalism. Anyone who opposes them by definition has bad motives.
In the end, the scholars continue their work, albeit by keeping their heads down and trying not to be noticed. Gramsci’s conquest of higher education is nearly complete and soon enough, scholars will be a tiny minority in American colleges and universities and in time will likely disappear altogether.
