Radicalism Reborn – Christopher F. Rufo
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, radicals in the West patiently executed their long march through the academy.
Over time, they secured positions of influence there, 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 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.
With conservatives (read Liberals) representing a mere one out of 25 members of universities in the US, and fewer than that if administrators are included, it’s hard to see universities as anything but a lost cause. I don’t see how we get to a better place without a general collapse first. But I tend to be a pessimist, so YMMV.