A reader called my attention to a new quarterly online magazine called Sapir. It’s edited by the NYT writer Bret Stephens, it’s free, and it has a number of intriguing articles (check out this interview with Daniel Diermeier, our former provost and now chancellor of Vanderbilt University). It also offers a free one-year hard-copy subscription here.
The magazine appears to deal largely but not exclusively with matters Jewish (Stephens’s background). Among the secular pieces is a fine new article by Stephens himself that you can access by clicking on the title below. It’s about the demise of liberalism in American universities, including a defense of what Stephens considers true liberalism and a list of obstacles to university reform. It’s short and well worth reading.
Stephens defines true liberalism this way:
By liberalism I do not mean the word in the usual ideological or political sense. I mean it as the habit of open-mindedness, a passion for truth, a disdain for dogma, an aloofness from politics, a fondness for skeptics and gadflies and iconoclasts, a belief in the importance of evidence, logic, and reason, a love of argument rooted in intelligent difference. Above all, a curious, probing, independent spirit. These were the virtues that great universities were supposed to prize, cultivate, and pass along to the students who went through them. It was the experience I had as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago 30-plus years ago, and that older readers probably recall of their own college experience in earlier decades.
And how it’s disappeared from universities:
Except in a few surviving corners, that kind of university is fading, if not altogether gone. In its place is the model of the university as an agent of social change and ostensible betterment. It is the university that encourages students to dwell heavily on their experience of victimization, or their legacy as victimizers, rather than as accountable individuals responsible for their own fate. It is the university that carefully arranges the racial and ethnic composition of its student body in the hopes of shaping a different kind of future elite. It is the university that tries to stamp out ideas or inquiries it considers socially dangerous or morally pernicious, irrespective of considerations of truth. It is the university that ceaselessly valorizes identity, not least when it comes to who does, or doesn’t, get to make certain arguments. It is the university that substitutes the classics of philosophy and literature with mandatory reading lists that skew heavily to the contemporary ideological left. It is the university that makes official statements on some current events (but not on others), or tips its hand by prominently affiliating itself with political activism in scholarly garb. It is the university that attempts to rewrite the English language in search of more “inclusive” vocabulary. It is the university that silently selects an ideologically homogeneous faculty, administration, and graduate-student body. It is the university that finds opportunistic ways to penalize or get rid of professors whose views it dislikes. It is the university that has allowed entire fields of inquiry — gender studies, ethnic studies, critical studies, Middle Eastern studies — to become thoroughly dogmatic and politicized.
A charitable term for this kind of institution might be the relevant university — relevant in the sense of playing a direct role in shaping public and political life.
He calls the new kind of universities the “relevant university” in that their raison d’être is to improve society. But in so doing, they put Social Justice above merit and excellence, a point that we made in our joint paper “In defense of merit iu science” published in The Journal of Controversial Ideas. The demotion of merit in favor of ideology—something that Scientific American excelled at (see the previous paper)—has a very palpable downside: the lost of public confidence in institutions:
In fact, there are many less political and more productive ways in which universities can credibly establish their relevance to the world around them: by serving as centers for impartial expertise, making pathbreaking discoveries, and educating students with vital skills, not just academically but also with the skills of good citizenship and leadership.
But the latter kind of relevance does not emerge from a deliberate quest for relevance — that is, for being in tune with contemporary fads or beliefs. It emerges from a quest for excellence. And excellence is cultivated, in large part, by a conscious turning away from trying to be relevant, focusing instead on pursuing knowledge for its own sake; upholding high and consistent standards; protecting the integrity of a process irrespective of the result; maintaining a powerful indifference both to the weight of tradition and the pressure exerted by contemporary beliefs. In short, excellence is achieved by dedicating oneself to the ideals and practices of the kind of liberalism that gives free rein to what the educator Abraham Flexner, in the 1930s, called “the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit.”
What does excellence achieve, beyond being a good in itself? Public trust. Ordinary people do not need to have a good understanding of, say, virology to trust that universities are doing a good job of it, especially if advances in the field lead to medicines in the cabinet. Nor does the public need to know the exact formulas by which universities choose their freshman class, so long as they have reason to believe that Yale, Harvard, Princeton and their peers admit only the most brilliant and promising.
But trust is squandered when the public learns that at least some virologists have used their academic authority to make deceitful claims about the likely origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trust evaporates when the public learns how the admissions process was being gamed for the sake of achieving race-conscious outcomes that disregard considerations of academic merit, to the striking disadvantage of certain groups. And trust is destroyed when the country sees students from elite universities behaving like Maoist cadres — seizing university property, disrupting campus life, and chanting thought-terminating slogans such as “From the river to the sea.” What those protests have mainly achieved, other than to demoralize or terrify Jewish students, is to advertise the moral bankruptcy and intellectual collapse of our “relevant” universities. Illiberalism always ends up finding its way to antisemitism.
I agree with nearly everything Stephens says, even though he calls himself a political conservative. But he can espouse conservatism in politics all he wants (and he does so judiciously, having voted for Harris) so long as he holds out for classical liberalism as the framework for universities.
At the end of his piece, Stephens lists the obstacles impeding a return to liberal universities, obstacles that include illiberal faculty, a “deeply entrenched DEI bureaucracuy”, a “selective adherence to free expression” (this is what brought down Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill after the House hearings), students taught to identify themselves as victims, and so on.
You may not hear anything new from this piece, but once in a while it helps to have your inchoate ideas clarified by a clear thinker and writer like Stephens, and then buttressed if, like me, your clearer ideas seem correct.
Actually all the articles in this issue of Sapir look interesting — see the contents at https://sapirjournal.org/issues/university/. There doesn’t seem to be any paywall on any of it.
I agree. I’ve teed up several for today’s reading.
Stephens : “… And trust is destroyed when the country sees students from elite universities behaving like Maoist cadres …”
Thank you, Mr. Stephens.
I never paid serious attention to Mao’s China until I think PCC(E) put up photos of the ritual public humiliation, and also a Bill Maher editorialogue (?) showing unmistakable similarity to The Four Olds campaign.
Perhaps simply pointing this out will help – I nebulously thought people “just couldn’t possibly do that” anymore, because we “just know” it’s “bad”.
The 1954 TV version of 1984 was repeated on BBC4 last weekend.
There’s a scene where Winston Smith goes to help his neighbours and finds their children screaming at them and threatening to denounce them.
Yup, it’s the cultural revolution 20 years before it happened.
I agree, this is Maoist rather than traditional Marxist.
For an illustration of how struggle sessions operated, read or watch the opening chapter of The Three Body Problem. It’s a very moving scene showing how students attacked, both physically and mentally, those who taught Western science in China during the cultural revolution.
While Stephens identifies as a conservative, it seems his views are much more centrist. Good article by him. This is one of the things I really appreciate about this site – exposure to outlets and information that I might normally not see.
I saw that excerpt.
Another movie with some “Maoism” in it – which went right over my head at the time – is a few moments in The Red Violin.
A great movie in its own right! I should see it again to see how it (or I) aged.
If you’re interested in history and insanity there’s no better place to start than Maoist China. And the parallels (pointed out recently by people who survived that madness… who are older now) to our own woke culture are amazing. The Khmer Rouge and North Koreans both said… “Hold my beer” and did even better. I’m a lifelong student of Middle East, communist East Asian, Stalinist and dictatorial madness.
For a brief amuse busch (sp.?) just google or youtube Cultural Revolution.
It’ll leave you amazed Bryan.
best regards,
D.A.
NYC
+1, and brief note :
Robert J. Lifton
Very important writing.
It’s a good piece. It does reinforce my own positions, rather than challenge me to question them. But that’s OK once in a while. What has taken place on university campuses over the past few years saddens me. At least Stephens thinks that things can get better.
What an eloquent concise essay explaining the most rational way of accepting our reality as is.
There are lots of us conservatives out there that would call ourselves liberal in the European context, which means classical liberals.
Yes it is soothing to to have your head “organized” by reason and clarity. Being reminded of the bottom line. Being not an academic but in the university of life all those qualities still hold.
Stephens doesn’t discuss it, but there is an underlying tension between the views expressed and his vote for Harris. If the university isn’t the proper venue for social activism, then surely the political process is, right? But the Democratic Party has become the political vehicle for many of the ILLIBERAL values that Stephens decries in this essay. Solving that will require more than shifts in political tactics, and the problem would have remained no matter whom the party nominated for president.
Regarding Stephens’ vote for Vice President Harris while decrying the illiberalism in academe. Stephens is married to a strong, vocal Democrat and works for The NY Times. Like David Brooks and Joe Scarborough, hanging out with elite progressives, coupled with the candidacy of the Orange Man, has seemed to help these formerly conservative writers to pivot to become more acceptable in their social and professional lives. It’s a very human response to the discomfort of trying to defend philosophical positions that are unpopular with your peers and may be untenable if supported or twisted by a leader you can’t respect.
Suzi, like Bret I believe in what he’s talking about and have for years. He (and I) voted for Kamala because a vote for Trump is impossible on a psychological (Trump’s psychology) basis.
With Trump there’s very little ideology. Just the aggrandizement of Trump. Even bad policies, even “Momala’s” woke policies are the lesser of two horrible evils.
D.A.
NYC
my column: https://themoderatevoice.com/author/david-anderson/
Thank you David. I agree that Trump was an impossible vote. He is now an armored tank that can rampage through the world because Congress has abrogated its responsibility to write clear laws with clear boundaries so has given the executive branch too much power to create its own laws in the way it interprets executive power. But so too was Vice President Harris an impossible choice if one truly believes in enlightenment values. So while I can understand a choice to pass on Trump, I can’t understand a conservative voting for a progressive prosecutor from San Francisco. There are many better choices than either of them, so why not choose one? If he lives in NY or Connecticut, Harris would win his state’s electoral college vote anyway. Thanks again for sharing your thoughtful perspective.
In blue states, there is no political oversight of the woke doings on public universities. University admins can do as they please, even though nobody authorized taxpayer-funded educational and research institutions be turned into political institutions.
Trumpism too is a vehicle for illiberal values, so the choice came down to “Which is the lesser evil?”
I still have to shake my head in disbelief or maybe disgust when the paper, “In Defense of Merit in Science” has to appear in “The Journal of Controversial Ideas”. We surely seem to be on the defensive.
👍🏼
Yes. The journal is new and Peter Singer’s late life accomplishment.
It is excellent.
D.A.
NYC
https://themoderatevoice.com/author/david-anderson/
This too shall pass? A half century ago, as an undergrad during the protracted agonies of ‘Nam and CoIntelPro, the cry at my university was for academic activities to be “relevant”. I recall thinking, “Relevant to what?” (but was too conformist to say it out loud). We had many teach-ins, protests, confrontations, and lots of mass slogan chanting. When the agonies eventually abated so did the urgency for “relevance” and the GPCR-lite activities.
Even with today’s greater degree of entrenched institutional rot (grievance studies departments, DEI bureaucracies, etc.), I expect that when/if today’s level of social agony experience abates then so will a lot of the academic disfunction. We shall see (or at least many of you will; by then I’ll likely be well past my use-by date).
Careful what you ask for. I do concur with Mr. Stephen but, in fact, a large Republican apparatus is engaged in exactly the opposite of what he is articulating. Both he and David Brooks both omit that from their criticisms of academe. Florida is probably the most publicized example where a college curriculum has effectively been completely recast to omit tough questions by conservative activists. Primacy of Western Civilization, check, primacy of white Anglo-Saxons, check, primacy…well you get it. Tough questions? No. It is hagiography masquerading as intellectual discourse.
I am not an apologist for Nicole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 project. But, to use Bret Stephens own words, she is both a gadfly and iconoclast. Her critics were many (including Stephens) and many professional historians countered factual points. But the culture warriors on the right were not interested in intellectual discourse, they want “critical race theory” banned. To me, that is really the game. Brooks, Stephens et al now get to use Republican political victories to reform Universities in a politically acceptable manner to teach politically acceptable material. Has nothing to do with restoring “liberal” intellectual discourse.
To use a less, perhaps, controversial example, consider the works of the historians Alan Taylor Jones and Thomas Boorstein. ATJ has written a trilogy of books describing the discovery, founding and creation of America. Boorstein wrote a trilogy focusing on the colonial experience and ending with the Democratic experiment. I found both sets of books thoroughly immersive. There are significant areas of overlap. But the trilogies have very different tones. Read them back to back and you may arrive at a choice: which better frames the current discussions about the American Experience? What does “Make America Great Again” actually mean? My answer is that one of these trilogies would be embraced by Chris Rufo and put on the curricula at the New College. The other would not.