The Decline of Higher Education | City Journal
If we fast forward to the present, one feature of what s happening on the campuses looks similar: that crucial analytical function is still getting stifled whenever it offends an equally shallow local moralism. But there s a startling difference: the actors have changed places. It s now the professors who do what the small-minded small-town worthies used to do, shutting down analysis whenever it offends them, which is often.
In fact, they do it on a vastly larger scale. Those old AAUP cases were aberrations affecting a tiny minority of campuses, and the infractions were soon corrected. But today, the suppression of debate and analysis happens almost everywhere, and the perpetrators both professors and administrators represent a controlling majority of the campuses.
The scope of what now gets quashed is also far more extensive. In the sixties, all that was persecuted was some occasional countercultural flamboyance. But at present, virtually any serious discussion of social and political matters risks being silenced, because to be serious it would have to include left-of-center and right-of center-opinion, and the campuses don t want that. So, we ve gone from the campus as the only place where discussion must have no limits, to the campus as the only place where free discussion isn t possible.
Even that isn t the worst of it. The way that issues are pursued has also changed radically. On contentious subjects such as the actual effects of welfare, or of racial preferences, the old academic way of proceeding was empirical investigation. It looked at real world results to determine whether welfare increased or reduced poverty, and whether preferences helped or hurt minority students. Now contrast that methodology with one that doesn t investigate but instead takes for granted that both preferences and welfare are natural and desirable, and consequently assumes that the only people who could oppose them are the greedy and racist rich who don t want to give up their money or their privilege. Call this the smears instead of investigation approach.
As Niall Ferguson has pointed out, this situation isn’t really recoverable. We or rather you for you young persons out there, will have to build new institutions. Daunting task, but there are remarkable new tools for this building. It could be largely accomplished in 20 or 30 years.