The Wall Street Journal recently posted a letter responding to a story about Virginia Tech’s so-called Bias and Intervention and Response Team.
The letter rightly notes that BIRT's speech policing is not only opposed to free inquiry but also precludes students from the vital social education once expected from higher learning. "If someone has an opinion different from yours," noted the writer, "it isn’t necessarily wrong or bad; it’s different. This is where discussion and debate should enter the picture, not a police action or a report to the dean of students." Bias, he notes, isn’t substantively different from opinions.
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Since World War II, colleges and universities have become more uniformly liberal in their intellectual and pedagogical commitments. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because historically, liberalism has been a sociopolitical tradition that values individual civil and economic rights. Even excessive forms of liberalism that shade toward political progressivism, such as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, don’t seek to destroy open debate. Programs like BIRT are not problematic because they’re liberal — but because they’re illiberal.
Modern colleges and universities have replaced their commitment to liberalism with visions of intellectual and social life that annihilate the liberal tradition as developed in Western societies three centuries ago. Outright leftism largely overtook colleges and universities in the 1960s, and inquiry at those institutions has suffered ever since.
Some conservatives are quick to point out the partisan gulf in higher education. About 1 in every 10 academics claim to be Republicans, with only a slightly larger percentage defining themselves as some sort of conservative. But this is not new: Most academics in the United States since the end of the 19th century have been liberals of some sort. Americans increasingly came to expect this. They even twice elected Woodrow Wilson, liberal academic and former president of Princeton University, to the presidency.
Mainstream liberalism was common in secondary education throughout the first half of the 20th century and average citizens didn’t take much notice. The occasional Marxist or socialist was bound to draw some attention. Despite the occasional grumblings of disgruntled Republican businessmen, however, college liberalism before the 1960s was hardly a revolutionary force. New Deal expositor Arthur Schlesinger might have wanted the government to make what he thought was a better America, but he still presumed the essential nobility of the nation.
Sometime in the 1960s, the old liberalism of the academy began to give way to an ideology that claimed the liberal mantle but was actually devoted to overthrowing the political and social order of the West. Some of this new generation were communists; some were nihilists; some were antiracists; many were bored children of gentrified Americans; all were convinced that the United States and, indeed, the Western world was so benighted that nothing but a complete revolution in human life would expiate historic sins committed against marginalized groups. Liberalism was no longer liberal enough.
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For the past half-century, college life in the U.S. has become less free for students and professors. Faculty and staff have become more socially sectarian. Authentic debate has been stultified. Requirements to recite the new educational litany created by post-liberals have been enacted. Even the sort of good-natured libertinism that characterized college life in the 20th century is increasingly anathematized. Not every college has acceded to programmatic and iconoclastic leftism, but it is enough of a force that a relatively liberal institution like Princeton is debating removing a campus statue of John Witherspoon — one of its intellectual titans who helped reconcile religion with liberal values.
Liberalism stokes debate and goodwill on campus. It socializes students from a variety of socioeconomic standpoints to accept as imperative a commitment to free inquiry as the chief method of determining the truth from a variety of different beliefs. And liberalism necessitates a belief in objective truth. The fight on campuses isn’t between conservatives and liberals. It’s between liberals and left-leaning post-liberals. Conservatives should hope the former will be victorious.
Miles Smith IV is an assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College.
