had more university students than England and attracted many from other countries. In other parts of Europe, professors could still be fired for deviations from orthodoxy, but all in all the university became a leading center for contending opinions, for experimentation, and for the synthesis of disciplines.24 It was a place for pushing the frontiers of knowledge and for passing down the accumulated wisdom of the past.
Half a century ago, Pitirim Sorokin observed something different appearing in the academic world: “a frantic eagerness to know ‘more and more about less and less.’”25 University professors today seem determined to narrow the field of inquiry, specializing in obscure topics of little interest to anyone outside the university, or even to many inside. The vast majority of academic articles—so crucial for getting tenure—are rarely cited, especially in the social sciences and humanities.26 Academic life has grown sterile and irrelevant to most people, even as an academic degree has become more important than ever for an individual’s prospects.27
Repressing Tolerance
Once seen as champions of free thought and inquiry, universities have been reverting to something more like a medieval model in which heretical ideas come under assault. Today the attack is likely to come from inside, rather than from an external oversight body like the Catholic Church. Even so, the zeal for enforcing ideological orthodoxy is reminiscent of the pattern in states such as the Soviet Union,28 or Nazi Germany, where universities served as a “stronghold” of the regime.29
The current mission in universities, and even in lower schools, is “to promote” a particular set of beliefs rather than “to teach,” notes Austin Williams.30 Instead of celebrating a diversity of opinion, academia seems to have adopted the notion of “repressive tolerance” developed by the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who said that tolerance for different views—that is, views he disapproved of—was really a form of oppression. Although himself an exile from Nazi repression, Marcuse insisted that liberal societies were hardly less oppressive than the Nazi or Soviet systems and no more deserving of support. He asserted that the concept of “liberty” was employed as a “powerful instrument of domination.”31
Marcuse would likely be pleased that today’s universities are achieving levels of unanimity that one might have found in a medieval school of theology or in a Soviet university. In 1990, according to survey data by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, 42 percent of professors identified as “liberal” or “far-left.” By 2014, that number had jumped to 60 percent.32 A few years later, a study of fifty-one top-rated colleges found that the proportion of liberals to conservatives was generally at least 8 to 1, and often as high as 70 to 1. At elite liberal arts schools like Wellesley, Swarthmore, and Williams, the proportion reaches 120 to 1.33 The skew is particularly acute in fields that most affect public policy and opinion. Well under 10 percent of faculty at leading law schools, such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and Berkeley—schools that graduate many of the nation’s leaders—describe themselves as conservative.34
In other countries too, academia is far to the left of the general population. Roughly half of British voters lean to the right, while less than 12 percent of academics do.35 Similar ratios are common across Europe and in Canada.36
This political skewing has the effect of transforming much of academia into something resembling an ideological reeducation camp. For example, prominent schools of journalism, including Columbia’s, have moved away from teaching the fundamentals of reporting, to openly advancing a leftist “social justice” agenda.37 Even some progressives, like the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, recognize that “students are less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another, if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy.”38
Yet there seems to be little desire among university administrators to counter the slide ever deeper into ideological conformism. Instead, many are promoting it. One college president in Canada, for example, justified efforts to tamp down on “free speech” by saying it was intended to encourage “better speech” and to protect “the humanity of students, faculty and staff.”39 As many as twenty campuses in the United States ask professors to sign a pledge to support the official campus doctrines concerning “diversity” of a superficial kind, which does not mean diversity of opinion. These pledges eerily reprise the “loyalty” pledges that were common during the darkest days of the Cold War.40
As a result, universities appear to be nurturing a generation of activists who more resemble Bible-thumping preachers than open-minded intellectuals. The new university-minted activists tend to look for “moral purity” on issues surrounding the doctrine of “intersectionality,” said James Lindsay, an atheist philosopher. “They especially tend to demonize heretics or blasphemers or anyone who goes too far outside that dogmatic structure of belief and threatens it. Those people are often excommunicated.”41 According to recent studies of cognitive behavior, the products of today’s universities are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues, confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity, and to be intolerant of other views. For example, the Atlantic found less tolerance for differing opinions in the Boston area, and other places with a high proportion of university graduates, than in less-educated regions.42
An Age of “Mass Amnesia”
Universities can get away with obscurantism and enforced ideological conformism because of their enormous power over labor markets. They are no longer primarily about learning, as Jane Jacobs noted, but about providing the credential needed for a high-paying job.43 One recent study of American college students found that more than one-third “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” in four years of college.44 Employers report that recent graduates are short on critical thinking skills.45
Equally worrying is that students in the West are not acquiring familiarity with their own cultural heritage. Universities no longer take the care they once did to transmit the genius of the past—with its often inconvenient lessons—to the next generation. We are in danger of “mass amnesia,” being cut off from knowledge of our own cultural history, writes Jacobs.46
In the early Middle Ages, much of the thought and writing from the classical era was lost through neglect, as literacy plummeted and the attention of clerics turned first to theological matters—although what was preserved from the classical past is thanks to the diligent labors of the monks who copied and recopied manuscripts.47 Most peasants and even many nobles, being illiterate, lacked firsthand knowledge not just of classical works but even of the Bible. Today’s young people are not so illiterate but are often ignorant of the past.
It’s ironic that while we enjoy easier access to information than ever before, we are falling behind in real knowledge. We are replacing books with blogs, and essays with tweets. Book reading outside of school or work has declined markedly among the young in particular. A survey done in 2014 found slightly over half of American children saying they liked to read books “for fun,” down from 60 percent in 2010.48 This is not just an American trend. A landmark study by University College London tracked 11,000 children born in 2000 up to age fourteen and found that only one in ten ever did any reading in their space time as teenagers.49
Unfortunately, the universities too often are not picking up the slack by offering a curriculum rich in classic literature and history. University policies on curriculum largely ignore writers such as Homer, Confucius, Shakespeare, Milton, Tocqueville, or the founding fathers.50 Some books are scorned for having been written by dead white males, who as a group are linked to such horrors as slavery, the subjugation of women, and mass poverty. At many U.S. colleges, books written before 1990 are considered “inaccessible” to students.51
A decay in the teaching of history and civics may help explain why millennials, despite their higher rates of university education, are far more likely than previous generations to be dismissive of basic constitutional and civil rights. They are also far more likely than their elders to accept limits on