THE SOCIETAL TRANSFORMATION THAT progressives hope to engineer begins in our universities and schools. No institution has been more instrumental in laying the groundwork for this transformation, and training its agents, than the American university. For nearly half a century, leftists have been working to turn liberal arts colleges into indoctrination and recruitment centers for left-wing causes. And they have succeeded. A 2016 article in the Washington Post reports,
Millennials are the only age group in America in which a majority views socialism favorably. A national Reason-Rupe survey found that 53 percent of Americans under 30 have a favorable view of socialism compared with less than a third of those over 30. Moreover, Gallup has found that an astounding 69 percent of millennials say they’d be willing to vote for a “socialist” candidate for president—among their parents’ generation, only a third would do so. Indeed, national polls and exit polls reveal about 70 to 80 percent of young Democrats are casting their ballots for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a “democratic socialist.”1
The change in the academic curriculum began in 1969 with the introduction of new fields that were the direct result of political pressures and lacked any tradition of scholarly standards. For example, the first Black Studies departments—later renamed African American Studies—were created as the result of a strike that shut down San Francisco State University and the occupation of the Cornell administration building by black militants carrying loaded shotguns. The Cornell militants demanded the creation of a Black Studies field and department, along with the right to appoint its professors and determine its curriculum. These demands were granted by a cowardly liberal administration, setting a trend throughout the university system and shaping the orientation of the field ever since.
“Ethnic” studies departments for Chicanos, Asians, gays, and lesbians quickly followed and became integral to the curriculum. The new fields celebrated their subjects and decried their allegedly systemic oppression by America and its white majority. Indeed, so rigidly did they follow the left-wing script that students refer to them generally as “Oppression Studies.” Some schools, like Brandeis, have even created departments of “Social Justice,” where left-wing professors instruct students in the evils of the American system and the virtues of the progressive worldview. The exception to the basic pattern (though not its oppression model) is the field of “Whiteness Studies,” whose “scholarship” is dedicated to the examination of “white skin privilege” and “white supremacy” and the injustices committed by whites against “people of color.”2
Because women are a majority in the academy and virtually every academic faculty in the liberal arts has one or several feminist professors, Women’s Studies has had the greatest influence on the curriculum. In keeping with the principles of the new academic world, the Women’s Studies curriculum is not governed by the principles of disinterested scholarly inquiry but rather by a political mission: to teach students to be radical feminists—to teach them that a patriarchy oppresses them. The preamble to the constitution adopted by the Women’s Studies Association makes this agenda clear: “Women’s Studies owes its existence to the movement for the liberation of women; the feminist movement exists because women are oppressed. Women’s studies, diverse as its components are, has at its best shared a vision of a world free not only from sexism but also from racism, class-bias, ageism, heterosexual bias—from all the ideologies and institutions that have consciously or unconsciously oppressed and exploited some for the advantage of others.”3 This is a political program, not the description of a scholarly inquiry.
The linking of alleged oppressions—racism, sexism, ageism—now has an academic name, intersectionality, which sums up the ideological agenda of these academic activists. It was coined in 1989 by racial extremist Kimberle Williams Crenshaw. According to Wikipedia, “It is the study of overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination. The theory suggests that—and seeks to examine how—various biological, social and cultural categories such as gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, religion, caste, age, nationality and other sectarian axes of identity interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels. . . . This framework can be used to understand how systemic injustice and social inequality occur on a multidimensional basis.”4
Obviously, an approach that assumes at the outset not only that there is the oppression of these groups individually but that all these oppressions are interrelated is not a scholarly or even academic approach to the subject but an ideological script with political consequences. Because of the all-encompassing mandate of fields like Black Studies and Women’s Studies, the courses they offer have expansive subjects that take in large swathes of a student’s education and are taught by ideologues rather than scholars. For example, courses on “global feminism” focus on the evils of the international capitalist economic system but are taught by professors whose academic credentials are not in economics or even sociology or political science but in comparative literature, education, and Women’s Studies.5 To say that our universities now engage in systematic miseducation and indoctrination would be an understatement. All that matters from an academic point of view, as currently practiced, is that the analysis conforms to the progressive orthodoxy. The University of California, Santa Cruz, for example, features a seminar on “how to make a revolution”—hardly a scholarly inquiry—and then explains that the revolution is to be “antiracist” and “anticapitalist.”6 And this is a public university supported by taxpayers.
These ideological programs have spread their tentacles throughout the contemporary university, so they encompass not only academic courses but “centers” and “institutes” to carry on the work and propaganda of the left. The University of California, Berkeley, hosts a Center for Race and Gender, for example, which includes an “Islamophobia Studies” program, although Islam is neither a race nor a gender. Evidently the leftist administrators of the center felt that Islamophobia—a term invented by the Muslim Brotherhood—was a problem and decided to give it support. The Islamophobia Studies program publishes the Islamophobia Studies Journal and an annual Islamophobia “report,” which targets critics of Islamic terrorism as Islamophobes in an effort to discredit their work.7 Like everything else at the University of California, these “studies” are funded by California taxpayers, who imagine they are supporting scholarly inquiries and research.
The transformation of the academic curriculum into an indoctrination program for the political left has been made possible by the steady purge of Republicans from academic faculties over the last 50 years. The Klein study of 7,243 professors in economics, law, psychology, history, and journalism/communication at the 40 top-rated universities found that 66 of 170 departments surveyed had no Republican faculty members at all. Zero.8 This development violates the fundamental precepts of academic scholarship and academic freedom, which were designed to maintain a skeptical attitude toward ideological certainties and look askance at attempts to indoctrinate students. The classic statement on the subject is the “Declaration of the Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” published in 1915 by the American Association of University Professors, which clearly states: “It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects. The faculty member is expected to train students to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials, which they need if they are to think intelligently. Hence, in giving instruction upon controversial matters the faculty member is expected to be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without supercession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.”9
In other words, the function of an education in a democratic society is to teach students how to think, not to tell them what to think, as authoritarian systems do. If one wants to understand the leftward shift of the Democratic Party and the leftward drift in the culture at large, one need look no further than the political subversion of our universities.
It is what Republicans and conservatives have allowed to happen by ceding America’s schools to the left. How many battles have Republicans lost because of this miseducation of America’s youth at the hands of ideologues posing as professors? Any effort to stop the left’s plan for a societal transformation must begin with measures to restore universities to the institutions they once were—to see to it that liberal arts faculties adhere to the same nonideological standards as the sciences and that faculties once again feature diverse political perspectives that reflect the diversity of society at large. Unless Republicans are prepared to do this, the hill they must climb to reach future electorates will grow steeper and steeper, and the progressives’ plan to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” will proceed apace.10
In fact, the means to accomplish a reform of the universities is ready to hand. The left has already created a vast diversity apparatus at virtually all accredited institutions of higher education. The diversity offices at these universities have budgets running into the millions and operate in accord with a mission statement similar to this one at Yale:
This office was established with the premise that expanding diversity within the university enhances the educational experience and furthers the understanding of the entire scholarly community. An atmosphere of civility and mutual respect towards difference is indispensable to the educational process and enables the free interchange of ideas that is the basis of scholarship. These differences may be immutable or changeable, cultural, ethnic, religious, intellectual, ideological, or political. Each of these qualities is integral to the identity we form as individuals, and all are essential to creating a vibrant university community composed of individuals with unique perspectives and backgrounds. The university must commit itself to a policy of inclusion, respect for difference, and fairness, and guarantee the same rights and freedoms to all its members to ensure the fullest degree of intellectual freedom.11
The italicized words affirming the value of intellectual, ideological, and political diversity do not appear in the Yale diversity statement or in the diversity statement of any other school. If they did, and if universities were prepared to pursue this kind of diversity—essential to an institution of higher learning and crucial to the health of a democracy—if they were prepared to recruit the underrepresented political, ideological, and intellectual elements of the community that supports them, the current problem would begin to correct itself. But there is no will to do this, obviously, or the problem would not have reached its present appalling state.
Therefore, Republicans should make it their business to persuade university administrators to see the wisdom of having the institutions that shape America’s future generations be less adversarial toward the community that supports them and more reflective of the diversity that characterizes them. Eighty-five percent of American college students attend public universities that are supported by taxpayers and funded by state governments. As of 2014, Republicans controlled 68 out of 98 partisan state legislative chambers—the highest number in the history of the party. In other words, Republicans control the purse strings that can be used to restrain the progressive juggernaut. Why should half the country fund institutions that regard them as racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and xenophobes—in a word, “deplorables”? Republicans should use their leverage to represent the half of the population that academic ideologues have put into the basket of deplorables and restore intellectual diversity to institutions that have become one-party states. Republicans should use their leverage to restore academic standards and democratic values to the most important institutions shaping America’s future.
A call from the chair of an appropriations or education committee asking university presidents in his or her state to put the italicized words intellectual, ideological, or political into their diversity missions is the way to begin the process. Republicans should ask for the university presidents’ commitments to correct the gross underrepresentation of their party on his faculties. Professors should not be hired because they are Republicans, but they should not be excluded—as they are now—because they are Republicans. Universities should find a way to recruit scholars who happen to be Republicans until there is a reasonable balance, one that would reassure the public that the current discrimination against Republicans is ended. Universities should conduct inquiries as to how this state of affairs has come to pass and introduce procedural changes to make sure that there is no such political bias against Republicans and conservatives in the future.
The appropriations or education chairs of state legislatures should ask university presidents to set goals for hiring underrepresented faculty and to conduct an annual review on their progress. They should ask university presidents to task their offices of diversity with seeing that underrepresented textbooks by conservative authors are no longer excluded from required reading lists, from which they are now almost entirely absent. Offices of diversity should also be tasked with seeing that there is appropriate balance in the speakers who are invited to campus, in the often substantial fees they are offered, and in the university resources that are generally provided to faculty and students to put on public affairs events.
There will be no progress on this front unless Republican legislatures are prepared to go to the wall to see that these recommendations are acted upon and to do so with the same vigor and commitment that Democrats would if the roles were reversed. Democrats will attack these proposals with the same vicious slanders they use to attack all Republican proposals that threaten their progressive agendas. They will say these Republican proposals are an attack on academic freedom, for example. In fact, it is the progressive left that has destroyed the academic freedom and intellectual diversity that once reigned on college campuses. Republicans cannot afford to cave in to these attacks and continue to allow the left to use the trillion-dollar structures of the university system as a political base to destroy the society that created them.
The problem of America’s schools is at the heart of the destructive changes to American society and culture over the last few decades, and it does not stop with higher education. The problem in our K–12 schools is not much better, and since its students are younger, it is in many cases worse. Here is a typical testimony from a student, now in college:
At my high school, I cannot recall hearing a conservative opinion expressed by a teacher, despite the fact that I lived in a conservative swath of north San Diego county. My teachers were almost entirely Democrats, and were vocal about their beliefs. I was told by my Chemistry teacher that a single-payer healthcare was the only “fair” system. I had a World History teacher tell us that the natural and best way for society to progress was to turn to communism. Not Cuban Communism, or Soviet Communism, but “true Communism,” because the Soviets just didn’t implement it correctly, we were taught. I even had an English teacher who forced us to spend three months analyzing writing through a Marxist lens, because apparently we “have spent our whole lives hearing about capitalism.”12
Behind this deplorable state of affairs lie the education schools at our universities, which have redefined their mission, and hence the mission of the teachers they train, as pursuing “social justice.” An entire series of texts designed for teacher instruction and published by the Columbia Teachers College is devoted to “teaching social justice” in mathematics and other unlikely subjects.13 Its editor is Obama collaborator and unrepentant terrorist William Ayers.
In this area too, Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to protect the integrity of our democratic institutions and have provided the left with another taxpayer-supported avenue to shape the minds of American youth. This can be more easily remedied than the situation in higher education, provided Republicans have the will to do so. Superintendents of school districts should draw up a Hatch Act for teachers to prevent them from insinuating political agendas into the classroom. Teachers can teach controversial issues but should be barred from taking sides on such matters or extruding partisan politics into the classroom. Teachers who do so should risk suspension and the possible loss of their teaching licenses.
But it is all in the will. Do Republicans have the will to fight these battles and win them?