The Long March Through the Institutions
During the chaos of the Chinese Civil War, the communist revolutionary Mao Zedong found himself besieged. The Nationalists had routed and encircled his army. His men were panicked, bloodied, and undersupplied. In October 1934, after deliberations, the Communists, who then chose Mao as their leader, initiated one of the most desperate and audacious maneuvers in military history: a five-thousand-mile strategic retreat that would become known as the “Long March of the Red Army.”
Over the course of the yearlong retreat, Mao’s ranks were devastated. His men died of starvation, cold, disease, and violence, and defeat seemed imminent. But after securing his defenses in the mountain stronghold of Yan’an and patiently rebuilding his forces, Mao launched a counterattack against the Nationalists, chased his enemies into the sea, and declared the Communist Party the sole and legitimate ruler of the People’s Republic of China—a stunning reversal of fortune.
Marcuse believed the New Left was in a similar position. The FBI had hunted down and dismantled the revolutionary organizations. Nixon had won decisively in the court of public opinion. And the counterculture had succumbed to hedonism, guru worship, and despair. But Marcuse, like Mao, was relentless. He believed the left-wing radicals could engage in a strategic retreat to the universities and, rebuilding their forces, turn defeat into victory.
During the early 1970s, as the radical movement was disintegrating, Marcuse turned to the young activists in his political orbit, especially the German student leader Rudi Dutschke, who had helped spread the campus revolts across Europe and, after the failure of the terror campaigns, had proposed a new strategy of the “long march through the established institutions”—a direct allusion to Mao’s military campaign.
In 1971, as the prospects of the revolution continued to narrow, Marcuse put his hopes in Dutschke’s new concept, which meant entering the established institutions and changing them from within. “Let me tell you this,” he wrote to Dutschke, “that I regard your notion of the ‘long march through the institutions’ as the only effective way, now more than ever.”1 Both men thought that the terror campaigns were a dead end and that participation in the democratic process was futile. They believed that the New Left needed to return to its origins: abandoning the radical path and, instead, rebuilding its power in the universities and turning the students into “potential cadres” who, over time, could move their “revolution in values” from university to society—and, for the time being, spread their influence outside the confines of electoral politics.2
Marcuse outlined his theory in his final political book, Counterrevolution and Revolt. The long march did not have the allure of the total rupture, but it provided a way to keep the revolution alive and to shift the focus from the war of cataclysm to the war of values. He encouraged the student radicals to put down their arms and burrow themselves in the universities, schools, media, and social services, capturing the means of knowledge production in order to subvert them—or, in Marcuse’s words, “working against the established institutions while working in them.” He believed that the Left’s primary objective was to gain control of the “great chains of information and indoctrination,”3 through which it could begin the “vast task of political education, dispelling the false and mutilated consciousness of the people so that they themselves experience their condition, and its abolition, as vital need, and apprehend the ways and means of their liberation.”4
Marcuse encouraged the young radicals to create a series of “counter-institutions” that could serve as a new apparatus for social change. He thought that the New Left, using the university as its starting point, should regroup around “the organization of radical caucuses, counter-meetings, counter-associations, in short, the development of what have been called counter-institutions such as radio, television, press, workshops, anything and everything that promises to break the information monopoly of the establishment.”5 Through these new bases of support, Marcuse believed, the young radicals could launch their “cultural revolution” and usher in “a transformation of values which strikes at the entirety of the established culture, material as well as intellectual.”6 Race politics, women’s liberation, radical environmentalism, the Great Refusal—all could be harnessed for the process of disintegration.
Marcuse implored the students to do this work slowly, patiently, and methodically. It would take time, but they would eventually be able to take the theoretical knowledge they developed in the universities and spread it by “contagion” through society,7 undermining traditional culture and shattering the existing hierarchy of values. “The outcome depends, to a great extent, on the ability of the young generation not to drop out and not to accommodate,” he wrote, “but to learn how to regroup after defeat, how to develop, with the new sensibility a new rationality, to sustain the long process of education—the indispensable prerequisite for the transition to large-scale political action.”
They might not see the transvaluation of values in the near term, but their slow and steady work to dissolve the foundations of the West could create the possibility of utopia beyond their own lifetimes. “For the next revolution will be the concern of generations, and ‘the final crisis of capitalism’ may take all but a century.”8
* * *
The radicals heeded Marcuse’s advice. After graduation, many of the left-wing students cleaned up, put on solid-colored ties, and went to work in the institutions. Their united front had been defeated, but the dialectic carried on.
Even the Weathermen, who had retreated to a network of safe houses and hiding places, devised a plan to reestablish their credibility with the activist Left and resurface in a leadership role. In 1974, the remaining members of the group, led by Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones, published a new manifesto called Prairie Fire—an allusion to the Mao Zedong aphorism “a single spark can start a prairie fire”—and distributed it to radical organizations, coffeehouses, and college-town bookstores.
Gone was the language of the counterculture. They no longer spoke in the blunt language of “kill a pig or blow up a building.”9 Instead, they spoke in a high-minded intellectual tone and railed against the great “isms”: capitalism, racism, sexism, imperialism, colonialism. They tacitly acknowledged their mistake in believing their bombing campaign would bring about the revolution and proposed a new theory of revolution, which would open a new “dialectic among those in the mass and clandestine movements”10 and use the “weapon of theory” to awaken the masses and build the political consciousness required for revolution.11
The general line of Prairie Fire, which was radical at the time, now reads as something quite familiar: the United States was founded on racism, sexism, slavery, and genocide; the ruling class then set about with “the institutionalizing of white supremacy,”12 which was “maintained and perpetuated over the generations by the schools, the unemployment cycle, the drug trade, immigration laws, birth control, the army, the prisons”;13 and, as a result, the current system was full of rot, enriching the elites while oppressing racial minorities and appeasing poor whites with “white-skin privilege.”14
The solution, for the Weathermen, was to rebuild Marcuse’s two-part proletariat and engage in an inside-outside game of marching through the institutions while exerting pressure through targeted violence. Dohrn, Ayers, and Jones put special emphasis on radicalizing the education system. They understood that public schools, which facilitated the transmission of values, could be co-opted by white, college-educated activists. They called on “radical teachers” to form an “anti-racist white movement”15 and enter working-class and minority schools in order to “radicalize other teachers, organize the parents, teach and encourage [the] students.”16 Meanwhile, the Weathermen suggested, the black radicals emerging from the prisons could “[stir] the imagination and [raise] the vision of victory”17 through riots, disruptions, sabotage, and prison revolts.
“Revolutionary action generates revolutionary consciousness,” they said. “Growing consciousness develops revolutionary action.”18
The Weathermen printed forty thousand copies of Prairie Fire and surreptitiously organized a national conference that was to augur their rightful return as the vanguard of the activist Left.19 They assembled the entire spectrum of radicals on the University of Illinois campus in Chicago and planned for a unity summit. But the conference, despite the high-minded rhetoric about “cultural identity,” “anti-racism,” and “white privilege,” turned into a farce. The black radicals feuded with the white radicals. The women denounced the men. The vegetarians revolted against the cafeteria chicken. Accusations of racism ricocheted across the floor.
Later that year, the Weathermen splintered for the last time. Dohrn, subjecting herself to punishing criticism/self-criticism sessions, finally broke. “I am making this tape to acknowledge, repudiate, and denounce the counter-revolutionary politics and direction of the Weather Underground Organization,” she said in a rambling audiotape confession. “We followed the classic path of white so-called revolutionaries who sold out the revolution.” She was guilty of “naked white supremacy, white superiority, and chauvinist arrogance”—and, with this final admission, the Weather Underground was done.20
After Dohrn’s confession, the Weathermen made their final pivot: they would slowly come out of hiding and reenter the bourgeois world. They were tired of living as fugitives, wanted to start families, and desired the simple comforts of a middle-class life. Beginning in 1977, the Weathermen gradually negotiated their surrender and came out of the shadows. To their surprise, only one Weatherman, Cathy Wilkerson, served any prison time—just eleven months—for the string of bombings. Ayers had charges against him dropped. Dohrn, Rudd, and others escaped with sentences of probation for various misdemeanors.21
Although the Weathermen’s final gambit with Prairie Fire and the Chicago conference was a failure, it established a deeper precedent. The way forward was not through the messy politics of revolutionary action, but through the manipulation of symbols and ideas. The language of Prairie Fire was not enough to revive the New Left, but over time it would become the entire vocabulary of American intellectual life: “institutionalized racism,” “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” “male supremacy,” “institutional sexism,” “cultural identity,” “anti-racism,” “anti-sexist men,” “monopoly capitalism,” “corporate greed,” “neocolonialism,” “Black liberation.” The rhythm of accusation and confession of the unity summit was not enough to reconstitute Marcuse’s new proletariat, but it would establish the basic rituals for left-wing institutions: emotional manipulation, confessions of privilege, elaborate displays of guilt, and moral submission to the new hierarchy.
Beginning in the late 1970s, the entire constellation of New Left radicals, from the graduate students of Herbert Marcuse to the urban guerrillas of the Weather Underground, shed the trappings of the counterculture and returned to the place where their activism had once begun: the university campus. They followed Marcuse’s counsel to move beyond the “pubertarian rebellion”22 of the radical movements and turn to the education system as their primary “counter-institution.” As the student radical turned Brown University professor Paul Buhle explained in his book Marxism in the United States: “To the question: ‘Where did all the sixties radicals go?,’ the most accurate answer would be: neither to religious cults nor yuppiedom, but to the classroom.”23
This transition was nearly invisible. The public considered the radical movement as good as dead. In 1981, the New York Times summarized the entire Weather Underground affair as a “classic tragedy” and portrayed the Weathermen as entitled, narcissistic, delusional, and irrelevant—out of step with the country, including the liberal establishment of the era. In the end, the Times concluded, the Weathermen had transformed themselves from “idealistic students” into “a chilling perversion of every purpose they had ever had: the children of the rich killing the less privileged in the name of revolution. It was clear that their rage had become psychosis, their struggle was with self-hatred, and the only revolution they would fight was the one taking place in their own minds.”24
Despite these public dismissals, however, the New Left was silently making inroads in academia. Over the years, Marcuse’s students and followers gained professorships at dozens of prestigious universities, including Harvard; Yale; Georgetown; Duke; University of California, Berkeley; University of Pennsylvania; University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Los Angeles; University of New Mexico; University of Texas; Bard College; Rutgers; University of San Francisco; and Loyola University Chicago.25
The Weathermen, in spite of their participation in political terror campaigns, found a welcome home in the academy, too. Dohrn, who had promised to “lead white kids into armed revolution,”26 became a professor at Northwestern. Ayers, who had laid bombs at the Pentagon and the US Capitol, became a professor at the University of Illinois. Even Kathy Boudin, who served a long prison sentence for her involvement in an armored car robbery that left one Brinks guard and two police officers dead, became a professor at Columbia. In total, approximately half of the most active Weathermen managed to secure positions in the education field, from prestigious appointments at Duke, Fordham, and Columbia to more modest sinecures in the public school systems of Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, where the old revolutionary cells had been most prominent.27
The rise of the New Left in academia is symbolic of a larger shift in American education. While the public was lulled to sleep by the resolution of the Cold War, the radicals in the West patiently executed their long march through the institutions, never abandoning their faith in the old dialectic. Over time, the radicals shifted the university as a whole, securing positions of influence, legitimizing their ideas in sympathetic journals, purging reactionaries from the faculty, and recruiting cohorts of graduate students who would transform the spirit of the revolutionary communiqués into a dense academic mass.
In retrospect, their ascension was inevitable. The radicals had learned bare-knuckled politics in student protests, guerrilla factions, and underground bomb factories. It was only a matter of time before they asserted dominance over faculty meetings and academic conferences. They were able to use their old tactics of manipulation—accusations of racism, evocations of guilt and privilege, rituals of criticism/self-criticism—to push out more conservative scholars and delegitimize traditional conceptions of knowledge. Their revolution might have failed in society, but it worked all too well in academia.
As critic Bruce Bawer has documented in The Victims’ Revolution, this new hybrid ideology, which combined the critical theory of society with the identity politics of the New Left, had a corrosive effect on department after department. “Once, the humanities had been concerned with the true, the good, and the beautiful; now they were preoccupied with an evil triumvirate of isms—colonialism, imperialism, capitalism—and with a three-headed monster of victimhood: class, race, and gender oppression,” Bawer lamented. “Once, the purpose of the humanities had been to introduce students to the glories of Western civilization, thought, and art—to enhance students’ respect, even reverence, for the cultural heritage of the West; now the humanities sought to unmask the West as a perpetrator of injustice around the globe.”28
The result is a curious contradiction. Over the course of the 1980s and ’90s, the country’s political center moved to the right—Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton presided over the end of global communism and the triumph of democratic capitalism—while academia continued to move to the left, undeterred by the ideological failures of “Marx, Mao, and Marcuse” and the long trail of death and destruction in Communist China, Africa, Latin America, and the Soviet Union.
Today, Marcuse and Dutschke’s long march through the universities has reached its conclusion. The American university is now a “counter-institution” driven by the ideology of the New Left and the critical theories. The empirical evidence is overwhelming. According to survey data, 24 percent of college professors in the social sciences self-identify as “radical,” 21 percent as “activist,” and 18 percent as “Marxist”; in the humanities, the numbers are 19 percent, 26 percent, and 5 percent, respectively.29 In another study of faculty partisan affiliation at forty leading universities, one researcher found even greater dominance, with the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty reaching 8:1 in political science, 17:1 in history, 44:1 in sociology, 48:1 in English, and 108:0 in race and gender studies.30
The consequence, scholars argue, is an “academic caste system”: the departments at the most prestigious universities administer hiring, funding, and placement of new professors on a majoritarian and consensus basis, which serves to further concentrate and reinforce ideological power. “Once the apex of the disciplinary pyramid becomes predominately left-leaning, it will sweep left-leaners into positions throughout the pyramid,” they write. As a result, the ratio between liberals and conservatives in the social sciences and humanities increased from 3.5:1 in 1970 to 10:1 in 2016—and promises to become even more concentrated in the future as the “one-party” system replaces older professors with younger ideological allies.31
Like their hero Mao Zedong, whose Long March began as a strategic retreat, Marcuse, Dutschke, Dohrn, and the student radicals turned the defeat of the New Left into an eventual coup. Marcuse’s “critical theory of society” spawned an enormous brood of new academic disciplines, which matured into hundreds of new departments, programs, and subfields: Critical Studies, Critical Identity Studies, Critical Race Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Black and Africana Studies, Women’s Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender Studies, and Race, Class, and Gender Studies.
The old radicalism has shed the need for its prefixes—“counter-sociology” has become sociology; “counter-psychology” has become psychology; “counter-education” has become education—and the new disciplines have cannibalized every traditional field in the humanities and social sciences.
The political culture of these programs is textbook critical theory and New Left activism. When Marcuse articulated the concept of “liberating tolerance,” he made the unapologetic argument for “intolerance against movements from the Right”32 and the direct suppression of conservative intellectuals.33 This is now the prevalent mood on campus, with conservative faculty, already vastly outnumbered, reporting hostility, fear, exclusion, and intimidation.34 When the Weathermen subjected themselves to “criticism/self-criticism” as they sought to resurface, they confessed to their complicity in “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” and “male privilege,”35 which had “betrayed [their] revolutionary principles.”36 This method of reconditioning is now second nature in the universities, where students participate in reeducation programs for “deconstructing whiteness”37 and twelve-step programs on “recovery from white conditioning.”38
The language, too, has been devoured by the critical ideologies. The vocabulary of subversion in Prairie Fire, dismissed at the time as fringe and marginal, has become the lingua franca of academia. A search of the scholarly journals yields 105,000 results for “white supremacy,” 61,000 for “white privilege,” 52,000 for “neocolonialism,” 35,000 for “monopoly capitalism,” 34,000 for “male privilege,” 29,000 for “male supremacy,” and 28,000 for “institutionalized racism.”39 There are now thousands of academics producing derivative scholarship that establishes dominance not through quality, but through volume. They promote their ideas in a circular fashion, agreeing with and promoting one another while insulating themselves from the very possibility of criticism.
The purpose of flooding the discourse with these concepts is not merely to shape public consciousness, but to precondition the population for left-wing political conclusions. Marcuse called this process “linguistic therapy,” which he described as “the effort to free words (and thereby concepts) from the all but total distortion of their meanings by the Establishment” and to initiate “the transfer of moral standards (and of their validation) from the Establishment to the revolt against it.”40
The process works like this: The public consciousness is primed with new language—for example, “male supremacy” or “institutionalized racism”—and then subconsciously filters all subsequent experience through these conceptual frames, whether or not they correspond with reality. The conclusion is loaded into the very language of the premise. Once the web is spun, it catches everything.
The result has been a sea change in the left-liberal consensus. During the 1970s, the New York Times mocked Marcuse as “an elder who isn’t an adult”41 and the Weathermen as spoiled children spreading “Big Lies about America.”42 When Bernardine Dohrn introduced Marcuse as “the man that the New York Times calls the ideological leader of the New Left” at the Guardian newspaper anniversary, the professor replied, “I’m not responsible for what the New York Times calls me,” drawing jeers and whistles from the crowd.43
Fifty years later, Marcuse and his disciples have had their revenge. The modern Left now thinks almost exclusively in the terms of the New Left. The fringe ideas of An Essay on Liberation and You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows are now dominant not only in academia, but in mass media. The New York Times has adopted the language of the New Left as its house style; the commentators of MSNBC engage in an endless reenactment of New Left activism.44 The critical theories proved to be irresistible: through persuasion or through force, they were able to attract followers, undermine certainties, suppress enemies, and establish a foothold in the knowledge-forming institutions.
Taken together—as idea, language, position—the new disciplines of the critical theories have disemboweled the old institutions and captured the “linguistic universe of the Establishment.”45 But for the activists and intellectuals who followed Marcuse’s vision, domination of the universities and the country’s political vocabulary was not enough. They did not want to merely seize the goods; they wanted to seize the machine that produced them. This would mean moving beyond the classroom and the op-ed page. It would mean taking authority over the institutions as a whole and learning how to replace the Establishment in deed as well as word.
It would, in short, require power.
* * *
The training ground for the New Left’s capture of institutional power was the university. They had achieved dominance over the discipline, but, as Marcuse had patiently explained, critical theory was a totalizing ideology. The cultural revolution would begin with a change in consciousness but must end with control over the means of production, which, in the advanced technological society, meant the production of knowledge and sensibility.
In order to initiate this shift, the New Left–inspired academics and activists worked to extend their power to the administration, which held the ultimate authority over the direction, hiring, training, and financing of the university. The process was simple. They took the basic building blocks of their academic program—a composite of critical theory, ethnic studies, racial quotas, civil rights compliance, and consciousness training—and formalized them in the bureaucracy. Over time, this regime of “liberating tolerance” came to be known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI. Even the choice of language was brilliant. From the beginning, it had the attributes of a moral bulldozer: to oppose “diversity” was bigotry; to oppose “inclusion” was racism; to oppose “equity” was domination.
The critical theorists had spent a generation teaching that the university establishment was vicious, oppressive, and one-dimensional. Then, as administrators, they promised to change it.
One of the key figures in this transition from critical theory to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” was Herbert Marcuse’s former teaching assistant and third wife, Erica Sherover-Marcuse, who was forty years his junior. Sherover-Marcuse was a deep student of Karl Marx—she wrote her doctoral thesis on Marx’s early philosophical works—and believed that the revolution would occur through the cultivation of “emancipatory consciousness.”46 Beginning in the 1970s, Sherover-Marcuse became a pioneer in leading “consciousness-raising”47 and “multicultural awareness” groups throughout California.48
In an interview with her then husband, Herbert, Sherover-Marcuse explained that these training programs could transform people’s subconscious attitudes and, over time, advance the cause of political liberation. “It seems to me that the difficulties the left had in the sixties and also in the thirties are precisely because there wasn’t in the Marxist tradition a theory of the development of subjectivity . . . it didn’t deal with how do you transform people’s consciousness? How do we actually transform our own consciousness?” she said. “I’m talking about a practice which would think about how people actually do get rid of unaware racism, unaware sexism, and unintentional classism.”49
Sherover-Marcuse designed a series of training programs that became the prototype for university DEI programs nationwide. In the 1980s, Sherover-Marcuse led workshops on “institutionalized racism,” “internalized oppression,” and “being an effective ally,” and invented the now-famous “privilege walk” exercise, in which participants sort themselves into an oppression hierarchy, then atone for their racial, sexual, and economic privilege.50 The basic premise of Sherover-Marcuse’s program was that racism is ubiquitous in every aspect of society and, consequently, that whites must eliminate the racist ideologies that have shaped their lives in order to prepare themselves for building the new society.
“The achievement of human liberation on a global scale will require far-reaching changes at the institutional level and at the level of group and individual interactions,” Sherover-Marcuse said. “These changes will involve transforming oppressive behavioral patterns and ‘unlearning’ oppressive attitudes and assumptions.”51
These programs were an immediate success. Sherover-Marcuse traveled throughout the world hosting these workshops and developing a new model for “diversity training” in universities, nonprofits, and corporations.52 In little more than a decade, she had developed the entire theoretical and linguistic framework for the DEI industry writ large. She had redefined the word “racism” to mean “a whole series of attitudes, assumptions, feelings and beliefs about people of color and their cultures which are a mixture of misinformation, fear and ignorance.” She had argued that “all white people have undergone some variety of systematic conditioning or ‘training’ to take on the ‘oppressor role’ in relation to people of color” and that “reverse racism” was impossible, because whites can never be the victims of the “systemic and institutionalized mistreatment experienced by people of color.” She also had popularized a number of slogans that have come to define DEI: “be a 100% ally”; “everyone’s oppression needs to be opposed unconditionally”; “do not expect ‘gratitude’ from people in the target group”;53 “colorblindness will not end racism.”54
This move from critical theory to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” was a stroke of genius. With one hand, the critical theorists invented subtle new oppressions; with the other, they administered the cure. Marcuse had once lamented the “language of total administration” that moved in “synonyms and tautologies” and made itself “immune against contradiction.”55 A few decades later, his disciples were wielding that technique in their favor. By combining the academic program of the critical theories with the bureaucratic program of diversity training, left-wing activists discovered the formula for expanding their power over the university as a whole. They designed their programs to appear neutral while, in reality, they exist to promote left-wing orthodoxy, suppress dissent through the punishment of supposed “bias” crimes, and harness the university to a campaign of social activism. They are, in short, political offices that carefully manage the cultural life of the universities and force all knowledge and scholarship through the filter of ideology.
These newly created DEI initiatives have led to an explosion in college administration. Between 1987 and 2012, colleges and universities added more than 500,000 administrators56 and, by 2015, the total number of administrators was rapidly approaching 1 million57—vastly outstripping the growth of both students and professors. The driving force behind the recent hiring binge, according to the Economist, is “diversity,” with colleges boosting spending to “promote the hiring of ethnic minorities and women, launch campaigns to promote dialogue, and write strategic plans on increasing equity and inclusion on campus.”58
Despite their outward appearance as neutral stewards of the university, this new cadre of campus administrators is even more left-leaning than the faculty. According to a recent survey, liberal administrators outnumber conservative administrators by a 12:1 ratio, with 71 percent of administrators identifying as “liberal” or “very liberal,” compared to 6 percent who identify as “conservative” or “very conservative.”59
These administrators serve as empire builders and enforcers of left-wing orthodoxy. At most public universities, the diversity bureaucracy has cemented itself as a dominant power center. The University of California, Berkeley’s Equity & Inclusion Division has 400 employees and an annual budget of $25 million.60 The University of Michigan’s DEI programs have 163 employees61 and an annual budget exceeding $14 million.62 The University of Virginia’s diversity programs have 94 diversity program employees and a multimillion-dollar budget.63 From this new position, administrators can control the ideology of the university from all angles—vertically, from within the bureaucratic hierarchy, and horizontally, within the departments. They can lead decisions about hiring, funding, and tenure, which invisibly shape the limits of inquiry and concentrate power. Thus, from the earliest stages, the institution is able to screen out the ideologically incompatible without publicly deviating from a commitment to “academic freedom.”
The state-affiliated University of Pittsburgh provides a good illustration of this process of bureaucratic conquest. In recent years, administrators at Pitt have created an elaborate web of programs, norms, incentives, and sub-institutions to consolidate power around diversity ideology. The university now boasts an Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, Racial Equity Consciousness Institute, Center for Race & Social Problems, Black Action Society, Black Experience Events, Black Lives in Focus, Black Senate, PittEd Justice Collective, Annual Social Justice Symposium, and a steady feeding of “diversity” forums, “white co-conspirators groups,” “white privilege” seminars, “racialized capitalism” lectures, “anti-racism” modules, “diversity and inclusion” certificates, and “racial equity consciousness” trainings.64
In 2020, Pitt administrators announced that the university would expand the diversity bureaucracy even further, implementing racial quotas for admissions, establishing racially segregated “affinity” spaces for minorities, providing “anti-racism” training for all university employees,65 and requiring all first-year students to attend a mandatory course on “anti-black racism,” which presents critical theory and the ideology of “anti-racism” as catechesis, rather than contested debate.66
Hiring and promotion, too, are designed to create political filters and reinforce diversity ideology. Pitt’s Department of Political Science, for example, recently posted a job listing for an assistant professor of “Structural Racism, Oppression, and Black Political Experiences” as part of the School of Arts and Sciences’ “cluster in Race, Representation, and Anti-Black and Systemic Racism.”67 The listing, which encourages “applications from scholars working on problems of racial oppression and racialized inequalities and hierarchies,” serves to pre-filter dissenting scholars. Existing faculty, too, must submit to a regular examination of their loyalties: candidates for leadership positions in academic departments must submit “diversity statements” that acknowledge “the challenges of navigating power and privilege,” confess “one’s own role in the systematic way in which people are oppressed,” and commit to incorporating diversity ideology into their “teaching materials and methods.”68 At the end of the academic production line, output conforms to the input: tenured faculty bolt together an interchangeable mass of papers and books on “tacit racism,”69 “social justice mathematics,”70 “queer enchantment,” and “confronting settler colonialism in higher education,”71 adding new weight, without new insight, to the diversity corpus.
Some faculty have spoken out against the corrosive effects of these programs. At Pitt, professor of pharmaceutical sciences Michael Vanyukov, who was born and raised in the Soviet Union, denounced Pitt’s diversity programming as “neo-Marxian agitprop” that is “no different than [what] Soviet propaganda taught about the West and capitalism.”72 At the University of California, Davis, mathematics professor Abigail Thompson issued a statement comparing mandatory diversity statements to the anticommunist loyalty oaths of the 1950s.73 At the University of Michigan, economist Mark Perry has raised the alarm about the diversity bureaucracy’s relentless expansion, which begins in the central administration, then “starts to decentralize down to all of the different schools and colleges and programs” until “even the library at the University of Michigan has a diversity officer.”
The intention, Perry says, is to create an “intellectual echo chamber” that institutionalizes a “Marxist political ideology” through a pretextual focus on “race,” “equity,” and “diversity.” The outcome is a commissar-style bureaucracy. Diversity officers monitor academic departments, diversity statements enforce loyalties, and, in Perry’s words, the resultant “culture of fear” prevents most faculty from expressing opposition.74
Such protests, however, have proven ineffectual. Through department politics, faculty deck-stacking, and bureaucratic capture, administrators of the great public universities have managed to elevate the critical theories and quietly suppress most internal opposition. The University of California, which Marcuse had once criticized as a “pillar of the establishment,”75 has now transformed into a system of one-party progressive rule.76 The diversity bureaucracy is the ruler of university life and, among faculty, liberals often outnumber conservatives by 20:1.77 Moreover, this new status quo is now so deeply woven into public expectations that it functions one-dimensionally, transmitting and maintaining the ideology of the critical theories without significant opposition.
When a conservative professor is suppressed for expressing a controversial opinion or suspended for refusing to reduce grading standards for black students, it hardly makes a blip.78 There are no protests in the university plaza; no administrator’s office is occupied. Administrators feel no pressure to reply beyond releasing a generic public relations statement affirming their commitment to “the marketplace of ideas,”79 concealing the real nature of the political reality under the same “pseudo-neutrality” that had incensed Marcuse during his time.80
Observing the universities as a whole, the conclusion is inescapable: the critical theory of society has achieved its intellectual revolution. Metaphysics, tradition, religion, literature, history—all have been critiqued, categorized, disassembled, and displaced by the new ideology of liberation. The critical theorists and their allies in the bureaucracy have turned the university into what Marcuse called the “initial revolutionary institution,” which, Marcuse believed, could serve as a template for “collective ownership” and finally make possible “the creation of a reality in accordance with the new sensitivity and the new consciousness.”81
Marcuse’s dream of “liberating tolerance” has been achieved. The universities have enacted the “the systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions” and “rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions.”82 The DEI departments, using the techniques of Erica Sherover-Marcuse, probe, test, and police students and staff for “oppressive attitudes” and the subliminal crimes of “unconscious bias,” “internalized racism,” and “microinequities.”83
The practice of “liberating tolerance” has frozen the universities in an endless loop of 1968. Professors and students imagine themselves heroes of the counterculture, “decolonizing” and “disrupting” enemy ideologies, but their work has become mimicry, not genuine creativity. The New Left’s language of subversion, which was authentically transgressive at its point of origin, has created its own “conformist and corrupted universe of political language.”84 It has hardened into the new “armor of the Establishment,” defending the left-wing orthodoxy of the new elite85 while exempting itself from the “radical criticism” of its own concepts, language, and power.86
The result is a total reversal. In 1967, Marcuse told the young revolutionaries at the Dialectic of Liberation conference: “We must confront indoctrination in servitude with indoctrination in freedom.” He argued that the long march through the universities was just the beginning. “Education today is more than discussion, more than teaching and learning and writing,” he said. “Unless and until it goes beyond the classroom, until and unless it goes beyond the college, the school, the university, it will remain powerless.”87 The revolution demanded that it extend itself through society as a whole and establish sovereignty over every institution of the past. “We must meet this society on its own ground,” he said. “Total mobilization.”88
The capture of the universities, more than anything, represents a model for the future. The critical theorists and DEI administrators believed they could manufacture the new set of values in the academic departments and perpetuate them through the bureaucracy. They understood that critical theory could no longer remain a pure negation. After its conquest over the disciplines and then over the administration of the university, it inherited, for the first time, the responsibility of governing. Once their critical theory turned into the governing principle of the university—sanitized as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and concretized in the sprawling bureaucracy—it was only a matter of time before it sought to extend itself beyond the campus gates.
As Rudi Dutschke once explained, the revolution had begun in the universities out of necessity but would require the activists to reshape every domain of human life. “Our historically correct limitation of our action to the university should not be made into a fetish,” he said. “A revolutionary dialectic of the correct transitions must regard the ‘long march through the institutions’ as a practical and critical action in all social spheres. It must set as its goal the subversive-critical deepening of the contradictions, a process which has been made possible in all institutions that participate in the organization of day-to-day life.”89
The revolution, in other words, would not succeed until it captured everything.