I Still Blame the Communists

I Still Blame the Communists

 

What explains the years of rage on campuses?

 

By Joseph Bottum

 

Weekly Standard

 

Jun 15, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 38

 

 

 

Maybe American higher education was never all that serious about, you know, the education portion of its name. After more than a decade of teaching in the Ivy League, the philosopher George Santayana dubbed Harvard and Yale the nation’s toy Athens and toy Sparta. He actually meant it as a compliment—as much a compliment, anyway, as he could muster. Santayana resigned his Harvard professorship in 1912 and moved to Europe.

 

But something especially odd does seem to be happening on American campuses these days. I confess to a little schadenfreude about the widely reported situation of Laura Kipnis, the Northwestern University professor whose feminist essay in praise of faculty-student dating prompted her school to investigate her for violations of the antidiscrimination provisions of Title IX. Kipnis is a widely published controversialist, and over the years she fanned the feminist flames that have now tried to burn her. The revolution, as the old story goes, devours its children.

 

Still, from symbolic mattresses and op-eds against Ovid at Columbia, to students interrogated about their Jewishness at UCLA and Stanford, to the stories of lawsuits filed by the undergraduates accused by their colleges of rape, to the reports of the Boston University teacher who used her Twitter account for anti-white-male messages, to the creation of “safe spaces” lest a public lecture trigger a bad memory in someone, to . . . on and on it seems to go, each fresh day bringing some fresh account of militant outrage at American colleges. “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” Santayana once warned us. Certainly only the dead have seen the end of campus upset.

 

It wasn’t always thus. I’m not thinking of some supposedly idyllic moment in the 1840s, or the 1910s, or the 1950s. I mean that 20 years ago, in the mid-1990s, at least a small sense of relief was felt by a number of people. Back in 1987, Allan Bloom had out-Santayana’d Santayana with his bestselling lament, The Closing of the American Mind. In the early 1990s Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza added widely read books on the radicalism of college faculty—even as the collapse of Soviet communism from 1989 to 1991 deflated the hopes of the Marxist professors they wrote about. 

 

It all seemed to add up to a slow but real generational retreat from an academic world still dominated by its proud memories of 1960s student protests. I remember the Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon explaining, around 1996, that she suspected the peak of political correctness had passed—since schools like Harvard and Princeton would feel embarrassed if they didn’t have one person on the faculty they could point to as a conservative. Not more than one, perhaps, but nonetheless, it seemed to mark a change that she imagined would soon filter from the Ivy League out into the rest of America’s schools. The poet Dana Gioia proposed something similar around that time, after he’d been approached by a major foundation for names of conservative authors it might support in order to blunt the charge of its being merely a subsidiary of liberalism.

 

But by the time of the protests against the invasion of Iraq, any sense of institutional movement toward the middle was entirely gone. I gave a college reading on a poetry panel in those days, only to be asked, as the first question from the audience, how I could pretend to be interested in literature when I worked among people who supported the Iraq war. In street protests and marches on campuses—in the re-revolt of the intelligentsia—those years of 2002 and 2003 saw the left roar back to full recreation of what it imagined the 1960s had been like. The rightness of one’s politics was again the measure of the rightness of one’s mind.

 

In the 12 years since, the politicizing of education has only grown, increasing its intensity with every victory won. No American faculty is embarrassed by its lack of nonleftist viewpoints; some are outraged by the presence of the few conservatives who remain. And conservative has proved a rolling term, where present dogma discovers oppressive heresy in what were the conventional liberal positions of only a few years before.

 

It’s possible to ascribe the situation to the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012. The guidelines for Title IX issued by the Obama administration have shifted power to the outraged, and everyone seems to know it. Laura Kipnis herself has written of the “collective terror” of faculty members who realize that a single student accusation of “triggering” can destroy their careers. But to blame Washington’s current crop of civil rights administrators is to put effect before cause. The activists-turned-bureaucrats could write their paradigm-changing “Dear Colleague” letters, without any gesture toward the middle, because they felt their views had finally triumphed, both politically and culturally. 

In the same way, the president’s election and reelection may have caused the turn from outrage about foreign affairs to outrage about campus culture, since President Obama has been mostly exempt from left-leaning protests of his foreign policy. All the riled-up campus energy had to go somewhere, and the current generation of radicalized students discovered a channel down which it could flow: If we can’t protest war anymore, we’ll protest rape and racism. But again that gets the chronology backward. An angry radicalism was already present at American colleges, looking for its occasions and in no mood to accept any compromise.

 

The reaction to Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, leading to his impeachment in 1998, may have been the first hint of a new choosing of sides, followed by an abiding anger over the outcome of Bush v. Gore in 2000. But the fate of the Democrats is not quite the same thing as the fate of radicalism, and to find the real springs of what is now washing over the nation’s schools, you have to go back, I think, to the fall of the Iron Curtain, 26 years ago.

Soviet communism provided a horizon for the hard left. An income stream and genuine prestige, too, but most of all a claim of the economic rightness of pure socialism, however imperfectly present in Russia. And the collapse of the USSR set everyone back on their heels for a moment. Marxism no longer seemed inevitable. Communism no longer appeared possible. Socialism no longer looked true. The fresh air of compromise in the middle 1990s, however thin it was and however quickly it would blow away, came from the sense that radicalism no longer had an eschaton—no longer had a model or a goal toward which to aim.

 

By the mid-2000s, however, radicalism had more or less accepted the failure of its economic programs, turning instead entirely to culture. The move begun in the 1960s was completed 40 years later: The Marxism of money became the Marxism of manners. The absence of an endgame didn’t hinder all-day permanent outrage. It set outrage free. No one feels responsible for the academic world being created by our current campus fervors, because no one intends any particular creation. Destruction is its own end, now. Change, as they demand—with a shrug when asked, Change to what?

 

Probably the most-quoted line from George Santayana is his quip about how “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But I’ve always preferred another observation. “When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement,” he wrote, “and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.”

 

Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.