NY Times columnist Pamela Paul participated in a weekend conference focused on open debate at Stanford last month. Her last column was about one topic that was discussed at the conference: DEI hiring statements. Today, Paul is back with another column based on the same conference. This time around the topic is university position statements, i.e. those partisan statements put out at the behest of progressive students which align the university with a specific view of a hot-button issue in the news. For instance, a lot of universities and even some city councils have put out statements in the last few months supporting the Palestinians and calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Paul argues these position statements are doing far more harm than good, fundamentally undermining the bargain American taxpayers have had with universities for many decades.
“Academic freedom allows us to choose which areas of knowledge we seek and pursue them,” said Anna Grzymala-Busse, a professor of international studies at Stanford. “Politically, what society expects of us is to train citizens and provide economic mobility, and that has been the bedrock of political and economic support for universities. But if universities are not fulfilling these missions, and are seen as prioritizing other missions instead, that political bargain becomes very fragile.”
In fact there’s plenty of evidence that historic bargain has already been broken. The more universities become synonymous with woke activism, the less conservatives are interested in paying the tab.
The number of Republicans expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in universities plummeted to 19 percent last year, from 56 percent in 2015, according to Gallup polls, apparently due largely to a belief that universities were too liberal and were pushing a political agenda, a 2017 poll found. But it could get much worse.
Last week a professor of sociology and public policy named Steven Brint wrote an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education essentially warning his colleagues that if Trump wins reelection this year, there is going to be a major backlash to what they’ve been doing on campus.
Consider Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist behind Republican attacks on critical race theory and anti-racism programs (and now a board member at New College of Florida). He sees universities as having succumbed to “race and sex narcissism” and as having turned their backs on the “pursuit of truth.” He dismisses the idea that universities can reform themselves: Administrators are too “weak,” he argues, and are thus prone to “emotional or social manipulation” by faculty activists. For Rufo, the way forward is to use state power to bring about what he sees as the necessary changes. Triumphant at the resignation of Claudine Gay as Harvard University’s president, he wasted no time in announcing a “plagiarism hunting” fund aimed at exposing “the rot in the Ivy League.” But that’s just the beginning of what Rufo has in mind.
In a panel discussion last May at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Rufo laid out his agenda: (1) mobilization of the Department of Justice to investigate elite universities for admissions procedures that violate the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action; (2) penalties for universities where the department finds free expression to be curtailed by social-justice priorities; (3) the closing of certain departments, particularly ethnic and gender studies, where “ideological capture” is, he believes, most widespread; (4) new hiring procedures that emphasize the importance of a “multiplicity of perspectives”; and (5) termination of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices. His ideal for undergraduate education is a “classically liberal” curriculum, focused on great works.
Rufo has also made clear that new accountability mechanisms will be required to achieve these ends. The locus of authority will be the agencies of government, including not only the Departments of Education and Justice (purged of people sympathetic to the social concerns of universities, of course), but also reformed regional accreditors whose criteria for re-accreditation would reflect the new priorities. Universities are highly dependent on the federal government for research and financial-aid funding. The threat of defunding is therefore a powerful instrument in the hands of those like Rufo who have big-stick sanctions in mind.
All of this fits with a general sense that many conservatives have of being fed up with colleges and universities acting as sock puppets for their most extreme undergraduates and faculty. Far-left progressives have repeated provoked culture war battles with the right so it was inevitable the right would eventually push back. (Naturally, the activists and the media frame this as higher education under attack when in most cases the cultural warfare has been starting on the left.) Indeed, the point that the university has become, for many students, just a place to escalate your left-wing activism career was made during the Stanford conference.
“I was reading applications for my graduate program,” said Jennifer Burns, a history professor at Stanford. “The person would describe their political activism and then say, ‘And now I will continue that work through my Ph.D.’ They see academia as a natural progression.” But, she cautioned, the social justice mentality isn’t conducive to the university’s work.
“We have to keep stressing to students that there’s something to being open-ended in our work — we don’t always know where we want to go,” Burns said.
There’s an obvious political realignment aspect to all of this as well. The Democratic Party is losing its hold on minority voters even as it gains more white, college educated voters. As the Democratic Party becomes the party of woke college kids (even more than it was in the past) and the Republican Party shifts toward more blue-collar workers it makes sense that this fight would eventually become part of the partisan divide between the two parties and maybe even a national campaign issue at some point.
There’s a pretty obvious fix for the university position statements. Stop making them. As I pointed out here last month, even Harvard seems to have belatedly come this conclusion.
Interim Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 is expected to announce a working group that will consider a policy of institutional neutrality, a move that comes just months after the University became embroiled in controversy over its response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
A formal stance of neutrality, in which Harvard would refrain from making political statements as an institution, would be a marked shift from the University’s current approach to politics. It would also, in theory, help the University avoid the pressure it’s faced in the past to take political positions on contentious issues — such as the Israel-Palestine conflict…
“If the University just got out of the business of commenting on controversies and current events, they’d save themselves a whole lot of trouble,” said Psychology professor and CAFH co-president Steven A. Pinker, who proposed adopting institutional neutrality in a Boston Globe op-ed published four days after Gay’s congressional testimony.
Steven Pinker is right but I think it’s probably too little too late to avoid the backlash that is coming. Still, Harvard and others schools can finally learn the first rule of holes: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Finally, I can’t wrap this up without highlight a few of the very sensible comments responding to Paul’s column.
Our lovely town of Amherst, MA has been similarly roiled by pressure for the town council to issue what is essentially an anti-Israel statement on the war in the Middle East. The town councilors were not elected for their foreign policy expertise. We have potholes to fix,schools to fund, and affordable housing to build. I agree with this article’s quotation about how issuing such public positions has only down sides and no up sides for our college town, as well as for colleges and universities.
Another reader points out how selective these partisan statements are.
MSU in Michigan is a prime example of losing the plot, of universities issuing foreign policy statements. The Faculty Senate will be considering an Israel-bashing resolution. That same senate has said nothing about China’s campaigns against Tibet and Chinese Muslims. Money is clearly the issue, since MSU has deep ties with Chinese institutions and has actively recruited Chinese students who pay a higher tuition rate than in-state students or even out-of-state students.
From a professor in Massachusetts:
I agree wholeheartedly with this article. I am a professor at a large research university, and for several years, I have been telling anyone who will listen that if universities don’t rein in their own politicization, the world will do it for them, and it will be very unpleasant. Many beliefs and values that are held by a large percentage of the American population are effectively verboten on campus, and many beliefs that appear to be mandatory on campus would be quite shocking to a large percentage of the American population. I do not think that this level of disconnect has historical precedent, and I don’t think it can continue. The only question is how it ends. Will universities realize that it is not in their longer term interests to maintain the current ideological purity, and find ways to encourage genuine diversity of thought and expression? I am not optimistic, frankly. Many of my colleagues are so deep in our bubble that they don’t know there’s an outside.
The university partisans won’t leave the bubble on their own, but the bubble can be burst whether they like it or not.
Read the full article here
