BETWEEN the 19th century and the1950s, the American university was graduallytransformed from an institution intendedto transmit knowledge into an institutiondesigned to serve technocracy. The religiouspremises fell away, the classical curriculumswere displaced by specialized majors, thehumanities ceded pride of place to technicaldisciplines, and the professor’s role becamemore and more about research rather thaninstruction.
Over this period the university systembecame increasingly rich and powerful, acenter of scientific progress and economicdevelopment. But it slowly lost the traditionalsense of community, mission, and moralpurpose. The ghost of an older humanismstill haunted its libraries and classrooms, butstudents seeking wisdom and character couldbe forgiven for feeling like a distraction fromthe university’s real business.
At which point the student radicalism ofthe 1960s entered the picture. The radicalsmoved quickly to dismantle the vestigesof moral conservatism on campus — thein loco parentis rules that still governedundergraduate life, for instance. But their realmission was actually a kind of remoralization,a renewal of the university as a place ofalmost-religious purpose, where studentswould be educated about certain great truthsand then sent forth to live them out.
It was just that these truths were moderninstead of ancient: The truths of the antiwarand civil rights movements, and later offeminism and environmentalism and LBGTQactivism and a long list of social justice causes.
With time, the university ceded just enoughground to co-opt and tame these radicals. Itadopted their buzzwords as a kind of postreligiousmoral vocabulary; it granted themthe liberal arts as an ideological fiefdom (butnot the sciences or the business school!); itused their vision of sexual liberation as aselling point for applicants looking for a JohnBelushi-esque good time.
The result, by the time I arrived at collegelate in the 1990s, was a campus landscapewhere left-wing pieties dominated officialdiscourse, but the university’s deeper spiritremained technocratic, careerist and basicallyamoral. And many students seemed contentwith that settlement.
This was the heyday of what my colleagueDavid Brooks dubbed “the organizationkid,” a vaguely liberal but not at all radicalspecimen to whom both traditional humanismand left-wing politics seemed entirely lackingin appeal.
Now, though, radicalism is back, and thesettlement that kept the careerist peace oncampus seems to be cracking up all over. Atsmall liberal-arts colleges, big state schoolsand Ivies alike, protesters are defenestratingpresidents and deans, occupying quads, anddemanding wholesale social and academicchange.
It probably goes without saying that I havelittle sympathy for the goals of these newactivists. In the academy they have in mind,ideas I cherish would probably be banned ashate speech and a past I treasure buried under“trigger warnings.”But the activists’ many critics, conservativeand liberal, need a clearer sense of what thesestudents are reacting against.
The protesters at Yale and Missouri and alonger list of schools stand accused of beingspoiled, silly, self-dramatizing — and manyof them are. But they’re also dealing with auniversity system that’s genuinely corrupt,and that’s long relied on rote appeals to theactivists’ own left-wing pieties to cloak itsutter lack of higher purpose.
And within this system, the contemporarycollege student is actually a strange blend ofthe pampered and the exploited.
This is true of the college football recruitwho’s a god on campus but also an unpaidcog in a lucrative football franchise that has apublic college vestigially attached.
It’s true of the liberal arts student who’ssaddled with absurd debts to pay for aneducation that doesn’t even try to pass alongany version of Matthew Arnold’s “ best whichhas been thought and said,” and often justinduces mental breakdowns in the pursuit ofworldly success.
It’s true of the working class or minoritystudent who’s expected to lend a patina ofdiversity to a campus organized to delivergood times to rich kids whose parents pay fullfreight. And then it’s true of the rich girl whodiscovers the same university that promisedher a carefree Rumspringa (justified on highfeminist principle, of course) doesn’t want tohear a word about what happened to her at thatfrat party over the weekend.
The protesters may be obnoxious enemiesof free debate, in other words, but they aren’twrong to smell the rot around them. Andthey’re vindicated every time they push andan administrator caves: It’s proof that theyhave a monopoly on moral spine, and that anysmall-l liberal alternative is simply hollow.
Or as the great Walter Sobchak might haveput it: “Say what you want about the tenetsof political correctness, Dude, at least it’s anethos.”Which might turn out to be the only epitaphfor the modern university anybody needs towrite.
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ROSS DOUTHAT>
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