one more round on politics and the university

Re: this 2022 piece from Tim Burke — an outstanding historian and cultural critic whom I’ve been reading for a long time, and both like and respect — I think, first: Is it ever possible to issue warnings about unwelcome right-wing governmental influence without invoking the Nazis? I’d like to see a different historical comparison, just for once. (I think what Christopher Rufo wants is something a little more like the Communist Party’s takeover of Chinese universities.) But Tim has in later posts used other analogies, so I shouldn’t complain.

Anyway, I’m responding to this older post because it seems to me to sum up some ideas, assumptions, and perspectives that I’ve been having to deal with all my career. Tim writes,

This kind of turn can begin anywhere, anytime — like right this moment, here and now — wearing the mask of pragmatism and accommodation: let’s not make waves, let’s not use words or make speeches that draw attention, let’s make friendly connections to state legislators, let’s rename that program, let’s quietly defund that one center. Let’s not grant tenure to that person. Let’s encourage that professor to retire. Let’s look for a leader who is acceptable to interests that really hate the university and its values. Let’s take the money for an independent institute that pushes far-right economic philosophy. Let’s take away some governance from faculty, because they tend to provoke our enemies too much. Let’s compromise. Let’s be realistic.

Change the word “right” in that paragraph to “left” and you have a reasonably accurate account of what happened when leftist academics began their “long march through the institutions” of academe — especially in the humanities and social sciences. (Things are a little more complicated elsewhere, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll be using “the academy” loosely, to mean primarily the humanities and social sciences and to a varying extent the other disciplines.)

The leftward drift of the academy has been going on for a long time, but it clearly accelerated when the students shaped by the campus activism of the Sixties became professors. Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals is an alarmist screed but the title, at least, has some merit — a fellow professor of English once told me that if the phrase hadn’t been co-opted by Kimball he’d have been glad to own it, and several others around the table nodded agreement. When committed leftists gained a majority in departmental and institutional committees, then they made a point of not granting tenure to that person — the person whose politics might have been slightly to the right of Elizabeth Warren’s — and encouraging the professor to retire who thought that English majors should be required to take a course on Shakespeare, or that maybe the History department should offer some courses in military history. They renamed programs and defunded centers. One of the chief proposals of Ibram X. Kendi was to diminish faculty governance and give the power instead to administration-created “antiracism task forces.” And so on.

When Tim tells professors to ask if “the university president who yesterday argued for more attention to the diverse expressions of religious faith within the classroom argue[s] tomorrow for more attention to the case for carrying guns or the case for restrictions on abortion,” he’s assuming that the American university should be a place in which everyone thinks that the Second Amendment (as interpreted by SCOTUS at least) is a terrible thing and that no stance on abortion is conceivable other than abortion-on-demand. After all, for his whole professional life, and mine, that’s been the case: if you had different views on those topics, you certainly kept them to yourself.

The point of Tim’s post, I think, is to say that the political status quo in the academy is what should be, world without end, and any change to it must be resisted. Thus his conclusion:

That is what we now must do. Watch for those who will come forward with the aim of making us easier to deliver on a platter to some future monstrosity, and block their path whenever they step forward. Start building the foundations for a maze, a moat, a fortress, a barricade, for becoming as hard to seize as possible. Time for the ivory tower to take on new meaning.

But here’s the thing: It seems to me that Tim wants is an academy in which people like me — people who are profoundly and passionately anti-MAGA but not doctrinaire leftists1 — are unemployable. Because that’s exactly what the status quo is and long has been. This is an old topic with me, but: I have had a wonderful career, but I have had it only because in this country there are a handful of religious colleges and universities, which (among other things) are more politically diverse than their secular counterparts. No matter how much I publish or where I publish it, my open religious beliefs and social-conservatism-on-some-issues make me persona non grata at almost every university in the country. If the entire American university system had been what Tim wants it to be, I’d have been forced to find a different career.

So even though the prospect of a MAGA march through the academic institutions fills me with absolute disgust, I also think that maybe, just maybe, if academics with Tim’s politics had been somewhat more tolerant of academics like me, it needn’t have come to this. Tim himself has said some really nice things about my work in the past, but I do wonder, if he and I happened to be in the same discipline, he could support the idea of having me as a colleague. (But of course, even if he could, I’d lose the departmental vote.)

Tim tells us: “Ask that your institution write a mission statement, a values declaration, a promise for the future that no matter what happens, your institution stands for democracy, for freedom, for rights, for openness, for truth.” But I don’t think that the humanities departments in American colleges and universities have recently stood for any of those things: they have instead stood for a distinctively Left interpretation of some of those things. (“Openness” certainly never meant openness to me, or any number of other Christian and/or conservative scholars I could name.) A university whose direction is set by Christopher Rufo certainly won’t be concerned with democracy, freedom, rights, openness, and truth — but then neither would be a university whose direction is set by Ibram X. Kendi. And if the choice were between Rufo and Kendi, then we’d all lose — all academics, and all Americans.

So I’m hoping that won’t be the choice — that, or anything like it. I hope that MAGA attempts to conscript and/or control universities fail utterly. But I also hope that strategies to keep universities ideologically unanimous fail. I’d love to see the clash between these two intolerant visions lead to some kind of compromise, some toleration (however uneasy) of diverse political views. Sometimes bad people wear what Tim calls “the mask of pragmatism and accommodation,” but pragmatism and accommodation are genuine options also, in a politically diverse environment, and typically not evil ones. But sometimes I feel that I’m the only academic who thinks so.

1    I continue to be unable to offer a brief description of my politics. Maybe “Christian anarcho-subsidiarist”?