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Higher EducationQuick Links:
The New Anti-Americanism of the Academic
Left "The question we should explore is not who we should bomb or where we should bomb, but why we were targeted. When we have the answer to why, then we will have the ability to prevent terrorist attacks tomorrow." Rania Masri, speaking at "Understanding the Attack: an Alternate View," held at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, September 17, 2001 At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, on September 17, while smoke still rose from the rubble that was the World Trade Center, a teach-in was held titled "Understanding the Attack on America: an Alternate View." The event’s sponsors were groups typical of those found on many campuses: the Progressive Faculty Network; Carolina Seminar on Bridging the Divide; Academics, Activists and the Struggle for Social Justice. Also on board were the office of Student Affairs and the University Center for International Studies. In its content and tone, the event sadly typifies the response of the campus left nationwide. It is hardly news that America’s college campuses are filled with intellectual nihilists, cultural relativists, and mediocre activists of every stripe. For decades, academics have denied the existence of truth (except for their own pieties), questioned the possibility of communication (in writings designed to advance their careers), and attacked the intellectual moorings of Western culture (from their lucrative posts in Western institutions). Recently, signs were hopeful that their power was weakening, although no succession was yet discernible. A public always suspicious of egg-head culture tuned out the universities in favor of popular writers, public intellectuals, and cable TV. Yet our nation’s day of death, September 11, has given the academic left new reason to live. Enraged that a people could so unite behind their president and flag, left-wing professors, students, and vagrant activists are holding rallies, teach-ins, demonstrations, and vigils to protest America’s will to defend herself against the war the terrorists have brought to our shores. Much of the language and affectation smack of the Vietnam-era, when white collar students condemned the world forged by their formerly blue collar parents from the ruins of depression and war. One is reminded of the pro-Viet Cong propaganda of the ‘60s, of photos of Jane Fonda posing in an anti-aircraft cannon used to kill U.S. servicemen, and of the knee-jerk tendency to blame America for all the world’s ills. Disingenuous charges of moral equivalency, mass rallies attended by self-righteous youth, and sympathy with the enemy again give meaning to the lives of thousands. The charges at the Carolina event are not only intellectually vacuous; they are anti-American in the extreme. Catherine Lutz, a UNC professor of anthropology, said that the "international police" should be sent in to pick up bin Laden, and that these forces should "pick up Henry Kissinger and Augusto Pinochet on the way home." Furthermore, she restated the tired left-wing claim that the U.S. began the Cold War and that killing thousands of innocents in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania was something we brought on ourselves. "The parallel to [September 11] is not Pearl Harbor. It is February, 1947, when a new war was declared." William Blum, an "investigative journalist" and founder of the Washington Free Press, a far-left ultra-green rag, remarked glibly on the President’s promise to go after nations that harbor terrorists: "[T]here are few if any nations in the world that have harbored more terrorists than the United States." He added that terrorism against America would not stop "as long as we are intervening in civil wars that are none of our business besides serving the interests of U.S. corporations." The moral equivalency, comfortable cowardice, and convoluted logic of these statements are drawn not only old left cant, but from the new left’s expanded arsenal of ideas. For radical thought has in fact changed over the past 30 years. Today’s protestors draw upon decades of corrosive academic theory: deconstruction; critical legal studies; pseudo-disciplines based on victimology – the unholy trio of race, class, and gender; and the New Age religion of environmentalism. Indeed, William Blum’s Washington Free Press is filled with the writings of radical greens, for whom human life is little more than contamination of planet earth. Add to this the throngs of professional thugs posing as anti-global trade protestors who periodically loot and pillage cities, and the degree of change since Woodstock becomes clearer. We’re faced today by a fusionist left eager to overlook internal differences to form a unified front. Public response to this new fusion of malcontents is reassuringly negative; opinion polls place President Bush’s approval rating at around 90 percent, and most Americans demand a military response to the terrorist bombings. Even the elite media presented a unified, pro-American face in the first week after the bombings, perhaps more from sheer shock than from a genuine sense of patriotism. But that visage has fractured with each passing day, so that as September draws to a close America’s intellectual elite appear less resolute in their dedication to principle. Overcoming the toxic seepage of academic opinion into the mainstream will require a significant counteroffensive that takes its strength from the patriotism and self-sacrifice so evident among our citizens over the past few weeks. The struggle before us will be long and at times frustratingly obscure. Let us take this opportunity to ensure that the deaths of innocents will not be compromised by the fatuousness of the professors. Candace de Russy and Winfield Myers UPROOTING THE MULTICULTURAL LIE AFTER SEPTEMBER 11 (A presentation at the Tenth General Conference of the National Association of Scholars by SUNY Trustee Candace de Russy, June 2002, Washington, D.C.) Fittingly, those who most forcefully denounced ideological multiculturalism after September 11 were military experts. They, perhaps more than others, are alert to what threatens the security of this nation. William S. Lind, a military strategist and co-author of America Can Win: The Case for Military Reform, called multiculturalism – the doctrine "that all cultures are equally good and beneficent, except Western culture, which is violent and oppressive" – "a lie." Multiculturalism, he added, undermines "with constant criticism and psychological manipulation…all the beliefs…of Western society until Western culture…[is] destroyed…The West is assailed not only from without by Islam, but from within as well…Multiculturalism is, quite simply [he asserted] cultural treason." Victor Davis Hanson, the military historian who has done so much to illuminate the story of Western warfare, described multiculturalists as "the great deceivers." "…Wherever people," he said," give allegiance to skin color, religion, language and tribe first, and the common culture second, corpses pile up…Bilingual education,…reparations, separate graduation ceremonies and ethnic dorms…lead not to promised utopias, but to Kosovo, Kandahar and Mogadishu…There are valuable and enriching diversities – of…literature, music…and art – that are quite different from the murderous…diversities, such as the rejection of nationhood…and [the] shared political and intellectual traditions of the West…." In wartime, I would add, the incessant multicultural attack on our national identity and sense of common culture gravely undermines the strong public support without which our military cannot prevail. Some strategists say that such support is especially critical – even decisive – in the event of long and elusive warfare, such as now, in our War on Terror. At such a time, we cannot afford to be silent in face of – in a word, tolerate – indoctrination in multiculturalism. But even in peacetime we must ask whether we can co-exist with it. The strange new war that has been thrust upon us dramatically demonstrates the risk of such co-existence. After decade upon decade of multicultural brainwashing, just how resilient is our common will to victory? Now, to be sure, most Americans do not yet grasp the pernicious effect on national security of what I will henceforth call the multicultural lie. Nevertheless, in the main, they do not subscribe to it. This was evident after September 11 in the stunning contrast between the patriotic reactions of most citizens and the anti-American diatribes and sniveling of the academic left. SUNY campuses were no exception to this pattern. On the one hand, a SUNY-Potsdam professor called the U.S. a "John Wayne" culture, and WHRW, a radio station at SUNY-Binghamton, aired a militant program promoting Islam to black listeners and castigating Christians. Students at SUNY-Oneonta protested "the scourge of racism toward Muslim…communities in the United States." On a more therapeutic note, one SUNY president, when asked how she would advise students after the Attacks, replied that she would tell them "to hug a friend." .On the other hand, after the Twin Towers collapsed, large numbers of students at SUNY-Albany gathered for a "Unity Walk," to show their support for the country. At SUNY-Binghamton, students erected a new flagpole and raised an American flag. In addition, a multitude of representatives of SUNY campuses – for example, from the College of Environmental Science and Forestry – participated in interfaith services to commemorate the lives lost in the Attacks. Most Americans, similarly, still retain a strong sense of common culture and are instinctively wary of the multicultural lie. Nonetheless, they still tend to regard it as an exotic nuisance, rather than as a clear and present danger. For this reason they have not yet mobilized against the academic left and other multicultural elites which disseminate the lie. Thus, even after September 11, the multicultural stranglehold on the nation remains intact. As the cultural critic Keith Windschuttle observes: "[Multiculturalism]…is formidable…in the number of intellectual fields it encompasses…[and] in the number of…public institutions it has successfully captured…Since the demise of Marxism, it has emerged as the major ideological successor." This unfortunately remains the case at many SUNY institutions. In response to my campaign to reform the curriculum, one high-placed official acknowledged that "entire disciplines have been lost to multicultural ideology." He then concluded flatly that "the humanities and social sciences have to be written off." Given such craven leadership, it is not surprising, for instance, that multicultural ideologues at SUNY-Stony Brook, with the backing of the University president, have thumbed their noses at authority and continue to thwart the SUNY Board’s core curriculum policy. Specifically, Stony Brook has for two years refused to comply with the Trustees’ requirement that undergraduates take a 3-credit course in American history. More broadly, multicultural entrenchment can be demonstrated by the Luntz survey of faculty opinion conducted this spring at Ivy League institutions. Combined with a similar 1983 poll by the Carnegie Foundation, the Luntz survey shows a continuation of the long-term trend of liberal political bias in higher education faculty. There is also the flood of new, post-September 11 multicultural courses with titles such as "Understanding the Taliban," "America as Hyperpower," and "Women’s Participation in Political Violence." And let us not forget the insidious indoctrination by teacher education schools of an entire generation of American elementary and high school teachers. Throughout SUNY’s 16 education programs, "critical and cultural perspectives" – that is, multicultural courses with a focus on race, gender and class – are as ubiquitous as ever. One recent graduate course at SUNY-Potsdam consisted in having future teachers "deconstruct" ten films in order to explore the themes of "the powerless student," "gender inequality," and "depictions of race." Consider too, as author Martin Kramer reveals, that our teachers and children are being force-fed the most anti-American scholarship in the academy on Islam and the Middle East. What, then, can be done to uproot the multicultural lie – all the more plainly threatening in light of September 11? What can we do to mobilize our fellow citizens against this lie? First, as the NAS has done, more faculty and administrators must denounce it publicly. Professor Barry Shain recently spoke out against the laxity of group identity studies at Colgate. Last month I criticized low standards within black studies at SUNY – after which I was branded a "racist" and "fascist," but was then invited to defend myself on The O’Reilly Factor. Media attention to both incidents helped to shed light on how group identity studies divide us and erode academic standards. Secondly, higher education leaders must be taken to task, publicly when necessary. Too often these officials defer, not to the common good, but to group-interest politics. On some campuses, for instance, university administrators permit campus activists to deny the rights of traditional religious believers. Stern letters, and other actions, by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have induced many university leaders to put a stop to such injustice. Recently I publicly criticized yet another campus lesbian frolic, a "sex toy party" at SUNY-Binghamton in celebration of "Masturbation Awareness Month." In an effort to absolve itself of any responsibility for the event, the campus administration informed participating students of New York State law regarding obscenity, and of their obligation to obey it. I responded that the leadership was telling students that they can do anything they wish short of criminal acts, and that, if the university’s president so values freedom of speech, she should have used her own such freedom to join in my criticism. Such rebukes illuminate how administrations pander to multiculturalists and encourage governing boards to consider more carefully whom they hire to run campuses. Third, to more effectively expose the multicultural lie, we need more "hard" and systematic data. We need more surveys of civic illiteracy, like the one conducted by the American Council on Trustees and Alumni – which surely contributed to the adding of an American history requirement at George Mason University and elsewhere. And, as I have been advocating at SUNY, we need a change in university policies regarding transparency, such as the posting of reading lists and other more detailed course information on campus web sites. We need public reporting on admissions scores, grades awarded, results of student-learning assessments, and faculty and administration performance. Some English and Canadian universities, and American business schools, already use these approaches. We also need more transparency regarding political bias and intolerance on campuses. Imagine if there were more systematic exposure of courses such as the one at Berkeley titled "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance." In an especially crass display of political bigotry, the professor teaching the course "encouraged [conservative thinkers] to seek other sections." Then, in response to a groundswell of protest, the chancellor of Berkeley took a stand against professors who "stray into indoctrination." Transparency and public exposure, in short, stiffen spines. Fourth, we should support, not only the creation of alternative curricula within existing higher education institutions – Gertrude Himmelfarb’s "oases" – but also the creation of new "alternative" higher education structures. I agree with those, such as Herb London, who believe in the potential of "cyber ed" – electronic education – to provide more open and less expensive higher education. Fifth, we should take a leaf from the British government and form a movement to declare assimilation as official American policy. In February, Britain’s Home Office abandoned its unfettered championing of multiculturalism. Instead, it is now recommending that minorities speed the process of integration by adopting British "norms of acceptability," and that newcomers embrace British laws and institutions. This official response was triggered by a series of riots in cities with substantial immigrant populations. It was also a response to September 11, after which the country found it had been a breeding ground for young Islamic radicals linked to terror groups. We should urge our President and Congress to make the acquisition of a common sense of nationhood an urgent priority. These are some of the ways in which we can uproot the multicultural lie, and uproot it we must. We must now wage a war, in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s words, "like none other this nation has faced." Victory depends in no small measure on uprooting multiculturalism, a threat from within like none other we have had to face. IN DEFENSE OF ACTIVIST In preparing my remarks today, I considered wearing a blouse with the letter "A" emblazoned on the front. Not a scarlet "A," for I’m happily married, thank you, but a big gold "A" to stand for "activist." I am indeed one of the activist trustees who have been under fire, and, as a matter of fact, "activist" is one of the kinder epithets recently applied. Beset by all this criticism, I keep thinking of one of the last utterances of Machiavelli. As he lay on his deathbed, this great pragmatist was surrounded by priests urging him to renounce Satan. Machiavelli responded, "This is not the time for me to make new enemies." In light especially of the recent dispute at SUNY-New Paltz -- not to mention with Gordon Davies sitting over there, I need no new enemies, so I hope you will not interpret what I say this morning as combative. I am an activist because I see problems arising, grave problems that threaten the very life and function of American higher education. These problems will not just vanish when some mythical pendulum swings back, nor can these problems be papered over with glossy campus marketing brochures or the bland assurances of public relations officers. Now, what are these problems facing us? The first, and most fundamental, is the dissolution of the undergraduate curriculum. On the campuses of the State University of New York, students can avoid taking courses in many of the traditional core subjects -- mathematics, science, English composition, and so forth. Looking beyond New York State, the National Association of Scholars discovered that only two percent of America's top fifty universities required any course in history. Let me underscore that: at ninety-eight percent of our nation's best universities, students can go through four years without taking a history course. And students are free from any requirement to study literature at all of the top fifty universities. You here know well what has taken the place of required courses in fundamentals. Brown University, for example, offers a semester in "The Films of Clint Eastwood." Dartmouth offers "Women in Pop Music and Music Video" and another course called "The Lyrics of Bob Dylan." Our colleges have also been adding on gender courses driven by feminist ideology, such as the University of Pennsylvania's "Lies I Use to Prove My Masculinity." Enter most recently a raft of courses in the trendy area of "Queer Studies." UCLA has a course called "Chicana Lesbian Literature," and Oberlin has another listed as "Queer Acts." In the course description for "Queer Acts," the instructor notes, "Drag will be encouraged, but not required." There have also been wave upon wave of multicultural courses. Now, here I would like to follow Robert Hughes in making a distinction between authentic multiculturalism and separatist multiculturalism. The former has broadened the canon to include distinguished non-Western works, and distinguished works by women and minorities. The latter -- separatist multiculturalism -- has distorted and invented history to support an anti-Western bias. Robert Bork has described the content of these separatist courses as a series of lies: "The lie that European-American culture is uniquely oppressive; the lie that culture has been formed to preserve the dominance of heterosexual white males; and the lie that other cultures are equal to the culture of the West ... [This kind of] multiculturalism is barbarism, and it is bringing us to a barbarous epoch." Another problem is right at the gate of the academy: the dumbing-down of entry standards. The academy is taking in so many students not prepared for college-level work that remedial education now exists at eighty-one percent of our colleges. And here's what the federal government found out recently in a survey of high-school seniors: one-third of the students thought Columbus reached the New World after 1750; a third couldn't identify Abraham Lincoln; and eighty percent were incapable of writing a simple one-page letter of application. And listen to what they are teaching in the public schools of Northridge, California: crocheting, baseball card collecting, and jigsaw puzzles. I have a suggestion, and although it will earn me labels that go beyond "activist," I offer it sincerely: When students with these weaknesses, with these courses on their transcripts, approach the gate to the academy, the gate should be kept shut. This act of tough love will wake up parents, high school superintendents and teachers' unions. Until the university exerts such leadership, it will be swamped with students who cannot do the work, and who then feel devalued and embittered when they fail. Those students will continue to require watered down courses and watered down grades, and the vicious cycle of intellectual and, eventually, material poverty will drag us all down. Our institutions will find themselves following the path of the once stellar City University of New York, whose trustees once adopted a foolish open admissions policy. Auspiciously, a new wave of activist trustees has just voted to restore entry standards at CUNY. I've spoken of two serious problems facing us: the dissolution of the curriculum and declining entry standards. These, and other problems, are eroding public support for the academy. According to a Harris poll, the number of Americans who have confidence in higher education has declined sharply since 1966: from sixty-one percent to twenty-five percent. Now, that seveny-five percent who are losing confidence in us are not merely reacting to tales of preposterous courses and bizarre campus events -- although those factors do create suspicion. People are losing faith in us because the young people who leave our colleges and universities simply know, and can do, less and less. As you know, the Carnegie Report, recently produced by the Boyer Commission, describes in unusually blunt terms the deficiencies of undergraduate education. This report sounds the same warning as "A Nation at Risk," a seminal federal study on the failures of K-12 education. And this study is not alone in pointing out shortcomings. The National Center for Educational Statistics reveals that verbal scores on the Graduate Record Exam have declined steadily since 1965. A well-publicized Roper Poll in 1996 found that only eight percent of college seniors knew the source of the quotation "Of the people, by the people, for the people." And, in a study from 1993, the National Center for Educational Statistics revealed that half of college graduates could not interpret a simple bus schedule. This is, of course, alienating the business sector: corporations can teach college graduates to read and write better, but they can't do much for those who get lost on a bus! Public impatience becomes even more understandable when you realize that, as our academic "product" is declining, we are charging more and more for it. From 1980 to 1993, while the Consumer Price Index rose by seventy-five percent, tuition at four-year public colleges soared by two-hundred-and-eleven percent! We can hardly expect people to tolerate this. So, what must we, the academic leadership, do? First, we must reinstate true college-level entry standards and a more robust curriculum. Content-, not just skills-based, standards must be strengthened at all levels, but especially within general education, where stricter core requirements are urgently needed. Yes, we must provide young people with the specialized vocational and professional education they need to prosper economically. But they are not beasts of burden. All of our undergraduates, in particular poor and minority students, also need a rich core of liberal learning. This core will provide them greater flexibility in the workplace, but it is also essential to their lives as citizens. This country cannot long endure, as Walter Lippman warned us more than half a century ago, if our young men and women are deprived of the "creative principle" of their own civilization, if they are left prey to irrational ideologies and resentments. Raising academic standards will in the long run increase freshman enrollment, as administrators at SUNY-Geneseo have discovered. There, as the bar for admission has been raised, and as a humanities core has been required, applications also have increased. We also must establish rigorous exit standards at different levels, for example, by administering comprehensive examinations to determine the achievement of aspiring graduates. Will these exams be popular with students? Of course not. However, they will inspire student discipline, and will certify the colleges that impose them as serious institutions whose diplomas are more than certificates of time served. I do acknowledge that requiring students to take a core of broad, survey-type courses in the basic disciplines plus a battery of exit examinations will bring changes. Such changes will be costly, and some faculty may have less time to devote to their preferred specialties. But the interests of our students come first. We now spend countless millions on everything from duplicating the work of high schools to constructing sports palaces. We need to re-order our priorities. Our undergraduates deserve to be taught by full-time faculty in classes of reasonable size, and faculty deserve higher rewards for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Now, to achieve these ends, we must correct what amounts in many institutions to capricious governance, governance by shifting coalitions of vested campus interests - governance, as it were, by "multiple veto." True shared governance, a system of true checks and balances, needs to be restored. Many faculties need - very much, in my view - to enunciate and to carry out their traditional compact with the public. In exchange for the privileges of academic freedom and secure employment, faculty members must show themselves to be true stewards of high academic standards. In addition to guarding the integrity of their own disciplines, faculty members need to stand watch over general and interdisciplinary education. Next, our presidents must better ensure that institutional policies are implemented, and governing boards must more conscientiously fulfill the obligations they have sworn an oath to uphold. Trustees should neither behave, nor be treated as, public-relations mannequins and political pawns. Trustees do not necessarily act in the best interest of their institutions by reflexively seeking more and more subsidies for them, without regard for academic and fiscal outcomes. You may well ask what specific measures trustees should take to increase institutional accountability. Trustees can, first, re-focus campuses on their basic purposes through mission review, and they can sharpen admission standards and phase out remedial education. As for the curriculum, trustees cannot interfere with specific course content nor with scholarly conclusions; however, they can set broad academic parameters, such as defining which "frameworks" of basic knowledge -- basic "learning areas" -- are required at the undergraduate level. Trustees can also trim the wild growth of campus bureaucracies and take a more direct hand in the selection and review of chancellors and presidents. All these reforms will ensure that public funds are more wisely allocated. In all these matters good activist trustees will not flinch from calling for support from leaders such as you gathered here. Faculty senates, accrediting bodies, leadership associations such as the AGB and ACTA -- your bold voices need to be raised. Finally, I am aware that many of my suggestions raise objections. It will be said, for instance, that trustees who seriously tackle the reforms of which I speak are "meddlesome" or that they are trying to "micromanage" their institutions. To this I can only suggest that a golden "A" is only a fleeting sign of unpopularity, and trust that future generations will honor our efforts. I take courage from the words of Enoch Powell, spoken in 1968. Although he was referring to political leaders, Powell could well have been addressing us here today. "People are disposed," he said, "to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles ... At all events, the discussion of future grave, but, with effort now, avoidable evils is probably the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it, deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after." And so I invite you to join the legion of the golden A. It may bring you some passing unpopularity, but twenty-first-century Americans will not be cursing you for allowing the destruction of the academy. Candace de Russy, Ph.D. Trustee, State University of New York GovernanceON HOLDING THE BARBARIANS AT BAY An address, St. Lawrence University, fall 1999 Candace de Russy, Ph.D.,
Trustee, My friends, one of the zanier characterizations of what ails contemporary civilization comes to us from one of Europe’s leading post-modernists, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. I quote: "Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary culture. [O]ne listens to reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong … . Artists, gallery owners, critics and public wallow together in ‘anything goes,’ and the epoch is one of slackening." Although I rarely have much in common with postmodernists such as Lyotard, the cultural slackening he perceives is undeniable. Certainly it has struck us dramatically in higher education, where lax academic standards, and our students’ shocking ignorance of subjects ranging from simple history to mathematics, are all too evident. Indeed the primary purpose of the university - to educate - has been compromised. Often against the will of a long line of distinguished faculty members, college has devolved into a social service agency, a center for remediation, a wing of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an entertainment and sports complex – or what Carol Iannone, in a recent issue of Commentary, called "youth resorts." At the same time it has degenerated from an honorable institution with a fundamental purpose – the pursuit of truth - into a cluster of warring factions and special-interest groups grubbing at the trough for public dollars. Even before the advent of multiculturalism, the essential unifying purpose of the university had begun to be eroded. In this sense, the erosion in the university is part of a larger cultural blight, a more general deterioration of our institutions, which I can only touch on here. All of this is a part of our loss of national identity and purpose. But American culture, like all cultures, is ruled by ideas. Our nation is based on the formative ideas of Western civilization, most notably the self-evident truth of human equality. Western civilization has rested since the Middle Ages on a set of ideas pertaining to the value of learning and reason, of respect for the law and for one’s country and heritage, of the sanctity of Scripture, of respect for the values of honesty and trust and loyalty and courage – and on a willingness in many glorious instances to sacrifice one’s life and one’s fortune for these ideals. These ruling ideas of the West have of late degenerated, and this precisely in the universities, which for long served as their principal defenders. This degeneration is perhaps still within bounds. Yet it amply manifests itself in the sorts of campus absurdities which have been reported in the press, and in books such as Profscam and Illiberal Liberals. The corrosion is most obvious in humanities departments, but it is spreading, slowly, throughout other faculties, including our schools of law. It is even beginning to make itself felt on the fringes of medicine and science. Our university culture today is plagued by a deep, insidious problem: what thoughtful observers have for years regarded as a wave of barbarism. The Sixties "me" generation imagined that it could reinvent American culture from scratch, that it could flout all existing cultural norms without consequences, such as replacing the family with love-ins without damage to children and collectivizing uniquely productive free markets without damage to prosperity and individual liberty. These would-be revolutionaries are now the "tenured radicals" who control how culture and civilization are to be transmitted to future generations. Even as they reap the benefits of democracy and capitalism, they denounce them as imperialistic, oppressive, alienating, racist, sexist, and homophobic. The results of this long countercultural crusade are now all around us, in our academic life and other cultural institutions. Though not necessarily a majority on each campus, the politicized voices of campus radicals certainly speak the loudest and exert strong controls over what their colleagues dare to teach. And we live in a culture that grows increasingly divisive, adversarial, angry, prurient - in a word, barbaric. On our campuses and in our culture, it has become increasingly difficult to engage in the kind of reasoned discourse required to sustain a democracy since we no longer share a common language and a common forum for such discourse. In the arts, the barbarian aspires simply to jolt our sensibilities. Think of the depraved works subsidized at taxpayers’ expense by the National Endowment for the Arts, works of a sort now often on display at major museums and galleries. These works seem to qualify as art only because they are shocking – akin to restroom graffiti, but translated now into the public realm. As for much of pop culture, I will dwell only in passing on the likes of the so-called "gross-out comedies," movies such as "American Pie" and "South Park." As editor John Podhoretz noted in his article titled "Horror Shows," so repulsive are most of their gags and imagery that they cannot be described in civilized company. One particularly chilling example of today’s barbarism is the video the two Littleton, Colorado terrorists made for a politics and economics class, anticipating the savagery they would inflict on their classmates. When asked if anyone had been upset by such a violent video, one student responded that all the videos were full of violence or of sex, so theirs wasn’t exceptional. With such racy fare counting as schoolwork, why should young teens bother studying, for example, The Federalist or Friedrich Hayek or Greek or differential calculus? Literally and originally, of course, the term "barbarian" meant simply: foreign-sounding, and therefore incoherent. Today, we are more familiar with a usage of the term as meaning: uncivilized, brutish. Aristotle went to the heart of the matter in Book I of his Politics, the single most important work for us to re-visit, as we battle contemporary barbarism. The problem of civilization, Aristotle explains, is to transcend the brutishness toward which human nature is inclined. Men need character, and when they lack character, they can misuse the tools of civilization in the most vicious ways. Consider the Nazis, or the enslaved scientists in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel, First Circle. Human beings, we should remember, are always in danger of becoming thugs. Civilization is the ongoing struggle, within whole cultures, to refine human nature. Within cultures, the family needs to be protected from this constant threat of barbarism. The family, with its bonds of intimacy, is, obviously, the natural unit for providing the principal necessities of life as well as its most satisfying joys. But the family cannot do its work by itself, a problem that Aristotle also anticipated at the end of his treatise on how to live a good life, the Nicomachean Ethics. Here he showed how political community, the larger community of civilized humans, further refines human nature. It accomplishes this by establishing the right laws and practices so the family can protect and sustain itself. Accordingly, the good society will educate men, women, and children in the ways of freedom to become good citizens and human beings. Aristotle called such education the liberal arts, the arts of living as free citizens and participating in the political community. Certainly Western civilization has always fallen short of Aristotle’s lofty standards. Nonetheless, our greatest statesmen have always shared Aristotle’s appreciation of the endless need to battle against barbarism on behalf of civilization. Alexander Hamilton believed that permitting the Founding to fail would be the same as abandoning the world to barbarism - as he put it, to the rule of "accident and force" in human affairs, as opposed to "reflection and choice." According to Abraham Lincoln, the American purpose is to lead men beyond the old, pre-Christian distinction between Greek and barbarian, to lead all men to - and I quote - "the highest functions of civilization," a civilization grounded in universal morality and justice. Let me cite de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which is both a critique and an appreciation of democracy. Tocqueville notes that barbarism can rise in our enlightened midst even as the human mind progresses in so many areas, such as the sciences, or the emancipation of women. Democratic equality, as Tocqueville wrote, has both its blessings and its miseries. Equality may become a form of resentment, a degradation of the great, or it may offer opportunity, the chance for the humble to become mighty. Finally, in our own century, the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset identified barbarism’s essential character. He wrote: "Civilization is, before all, the will to live in common. Barbarism is the tendency to disassociation. Accordingly, all barbarous epochs have been times of human scattering, of the pullulation of tiny groups, separate from and hostile to one another." And how do we hold the barbarians at bay? As Yeats told us, in perhaps the most quoted poem in our day, what is required is a "center that holds," a moral center of gravity that defies the tendency toward scattering and the war of all against all. Such a center of gravity and a restored sense of common purpose is required above all by our universities, where barbarism too often reigns on several levels. First, there is the rejection of the authority of the sources I have touched on – a rejection of the Western canon. The study of these classics, and I mean study, not just chatty mention of them, is in fact frowned upon in many quarters. When these philosophers and statesmen are assigned, they are at the same time mocked and dismissed: Aristotle, alleged defender of slavery and female bondage; Lincoln, racist; Tocqueville, aristocrat; and so on. These great masters were, of course, in various ways affected by the mores of their time, and, when reading them, their strengths and weaknesses should be separated out. But this should not serve as grounds for underestimating their intelligence and for not reading them at all. These masters speak to intelligent men and women of all times. Secondly, there is the prevalence on our campuses of intellectual nihilism - the philosophy based on denial of the existence of any basis for objective knowledge or truth. Many on our campuses have wittingly or unwittingly embraced the topsy-turvy views of the philosopher Nietzsche, who holds that our human concerns with truth, reason, science, values, democracy, and trust are a mere sham, a superficial mask disguising sheer struggles for power. For those of this persuasion, the important thing is not: which are the best arguments?, but rather: who is the most powerful? The hero becomes not the careful reasoner, or the skeptical Socrates, but rather the powerful, arrogant brute, red in tooth and claw. These notions have plagued the twentieth century: they were fashionable among the followers of Lenin, Hitler and Mao, and they are fashionable now in the humanities departments of many of our universities, notably among the disciples of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (while – mind you - the French themselves have in more recent years had the good sense to abandon them). The problems with nihilism are clear: If power reigns supreme, and arguments and reason don’t count, then it is precisely the poorest and the weakest in society who are left defenseless. Consider the destructive effects of one variety of Nietzschean thought popular on our campuses: the school of deconstruction. This school of literary analysis regards the meaning of a text (whether the Constitution or a comic strip) as residing exclusively in each separate reader’s mind. In this view, words mean only what each of us wants them to mean; there is no objective, universal knowledge, no stable meanings of terms, but rather only a great sea of separate impressions, flowing and merging into each other. Deconstruction thus serves, by subverting the very idea of a common language and a common system of concepts, to destroy the very foundation of Western civilization, which is based on the inherent and enduring wisdom that is laid down in its great books, beginning with the Bible and the Greek classics. Third, there is the phenomenon of "multiculturalism." On this subject the Founding Fathers’ logic went as follows: If we protect liberty, men will be free to make different choices and to create different things, since men are different, even as they share a common nature. The Founders promoted diversity by protecting liberty; they did not honor diversity above all else, as contemporary multiculturalists do. Now we all agree that the curriculum should be broadened to include great non-Western works. We all agree that we must continue to expand higher-education opportunities for qualified students from poorer families, including of course minority students. And we all agree that the promotion of mutual tolerance can make us better citizens. But the multiculturalism of which I speak is not about advancing opportunities; it is an only lightly veiled form of resurgent tribalism. It amounts to academic neo-segregation, with students separated into discrete, alienated groups based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Members of these groups are conveniently labeled as victims so as to intimidate those who dare to dissent from this new orthodoxy, and who, by virtue of their dissent, are labeled, ipso facto, oppressors. Once inducted into various tribal and gender groupings, students are offered courses that interpret the world through a narrow and warped ideological lens - courses with titles such as "Black Marxism" or "Ojibwa Women’s Lives and Literature." Courses such as these might deliver thoughtful analysis; however, within today’s politicized academy they serve more often to propagandize students, while depriving them of their common cultural birthright of reason and scholarship. Rarely do multiculturalists propose the serious study of the cultures of, say, China or Brazil or Nigeria. Nor do they care to reinstate the study of languages - for again, serious cross-cultural understanding is not their purpose. (Such understanding, you might say, stops where the irregular verbs begin.) Instead multiculturalists focus incessantly and sometimes inaccurately on those groups that have in fact been subjected to, or are held to have been subjected to, oppression by American and Western civilization: blacks, Hispanics, women, and so on. Hence the Nobel-Prize winning "autobiography," I, Rigoberta Menchu. Despite overwhelming evidence that the work was substantially falsified, it is still assigned as required reading, and we are assured this fraud nonetheless speaks the truth. The facts about Central American Indians, and about who subjugated whom, don’t matter, if the greater political ends are served. The most recent - and wackiest - spin-off of the multicultural curriculum is based on sexual practices. These sexual studies are not to be confused with other, more serious scholarship on sexuality of the sort that is grounded, for example, in biomedical or historical expertise. These new courses have been incubated mainly in women’s studies programs, now transmogrified into "gender studies" programs. They consist of a mixture of studies of the role played by members of sexual minorities in history or culture with propaganda on behalf of such minorities. Not the open-ended pursuit of truth is at issue here; rather, the aim is to show how the historical contributions of sexual minorities are to be understood exclusively in terms of their sexual minority status. A one-dimensional view is encouraged; scholarship is replaced by a strange concoction of narrow groupthink and special-interest advocacy. The so-called "queer studies" of which I speak are devolving from semester to semester into ever more exotic new varieties. We now have "body parts studies," "transgender studies," pornography studies, and sadomasochism studies. Some professors now even concern themselves with pedophile "art," and openly promote the practice of pedophilia. Devoting university time to such perversions has, in my view, weakened the prestige of the university by weakening the prestige of reason and argument for which it stands. If you think about it for a moment, you can see why the so-called "erotic minorities" fit so well into the tribal multicultural agenda. To say that all sexual practices are equally good mirrors the multicultural dogma that all societies are equal, no matter how brutal or backward or strange. For those who begin the slide down this particular slope, child molestation and - who knows what is next - perhaps bestiality, are all part of the wondrous human diversity whose celebration is required if one is to avoid the charge of being "prejudiced" or even - God forbid -"judgmental." Here again, Nietzsche’s topsy-turvy "transvaluation of all values" rears its ugly head. Contrast today’s pornography courses - which reduce human beings to their bodily parts - with the many classics that illuminate the heights of human attainment, such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. These are tales of men who fight and die for honor and of an adroit woman who defends her honor. Without a sense of shame, whether over cowardly behavior or infidelity to one’s husband, there can be no honor. And without a sense of shame and honor there can be no civilization. Can we say of Rigobertu Menchu or campus "pornologists" that they have shown a sense of shame or honor? That they and their defenders have not promoted barbarism? But not only do the multiculturalists degrade the curriculum. Behind the scenes they manifest a Nietzschean will to seize power on their own behalf. C. S. Lewis once said, "The higher are the pretensions of our rulers, the more meddlesome and impertinent their rule is likely to be - and the more the thing in whose name they rule will be defiled." I think of Lewis's insight when I hear about the latest machinations of our campus rulers. In the name of "openness," they practice thought control.
This aspect of campus barbarism, repression and the inversion of meanings, has been brilliantly exposed by my colleague here, Alan, in his book, The Shadow University. He tells about a student who laughed at the wrong time in a classroom at Sarah Lawrence College. The student was found guilty of "inappropriate laughter" and sentenced to view a videotape entitled "Homophobia." These brave new codes of conduct go to ridiculous lengths: The University of Maryland bans "holding or eating food provocatively." (Alan will no doubt regale you with more such edifying tales.) Now, I think, at this point, that we must seek, not just to understand the campus barbarism, but also to learn how to combat it. My suggestions, to you faculty here, are these: First and foremost, demand a great deal of your students’ minds. Do not permit them to be cheated of our common philosophical heritage. Help them to depart from the herd of passive minds embracing dreary skepticism and cynicism, and reflexive mouthing of multiculturalism and deconstruction. Guide them away from the popularized Nietzschean antimetaphysics which would substitute mere power for truth to a world of reason and of moral standards. Guide them back to - in a word - reality, the common reality of what makes life worth living, of truth and beauty, right and wrong – of civilization as a whole. Let me make so bold as to praise a way of thinking that has made sense to me, the great chain of being worked out throughout Western civilization. This is the road of philosophic realism initiated by Aristotle and pursued by Thomas Aquinas, the road that was taken by such twentieth-century thinkers as Etienne Gilson or G.K. Chesterton. Thinkers such as these were grounded in nature and they understood man’s place in nature and under God. Thus Martin Luther’s admonition: "On your feet before God, on your knees before men; on your knees before God, on your feet before men." And we must not forget that it is the realism of the scholastics which underlies not only the idea of the university but also all the institutions of reason and science which we enjoy in the West. They preserved the achievement of Aristotle, while opening it to the notion of a Creator. Their realism also laid the basis for modern science and the Enlightenment. Aquinas performed the same function for Christianity as Maimonides did for Judaism, and as Averroes did for Islam. Think of Raphel’s great painting in the Vatican, the "School of Athens." In this fantasy of great scholars gathered is a portrait of a turbaned Averroes – and this in a painting for a pope! This is the true multiculturalism, a cosmopolitanism of excellences, like a bejeweled crown. Our students can learn also from the great theologians, such as Augustine, Judah Halevi, and Al-Farabi, who took hope in an existence created by and bathed in God. Let us not be afraid to speak of our experience of the ultimate things and to teach the vital moral lessons, for good teachers address not only the mind but the soul and character of their students. Nor let us be afraid to stand up to the nonsense that has invaded the academy. Expose the silliness of silly courses and the ideological heavyhandedness of so much of what your colleagues teach. And encourage students to reject the militant campus tripe. Auspiciously, more of them are coming forward to do just that. To protest a conference in "lesbian pedagogy" at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, for instance, a group of students named Students Against Sexual Harassment called for a boycott and handed out leaflets, protesting the organizer’s recruitment efforts. You can support student activists seeking to eliminate compulsory student fees that bring a loaded political agenda to campus. Following the example of both faculty and students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, you can take the path of free speech by abolishing politically correct campus codes so that both free speech and civility can flourish. And there are other concrete ways in which brave faculty might assert leadership and call the campuses of our country back to their true mission. You can strive to tighten the processes of peer review. You can try to prevent the worst aspects of your radical colleagues’ influence over departmental governance, despite the sometimes hateful politics with which you may have to contend. Finally, you can also join me in my campaign to see that all syllabi are posted on university websites, so students, faculty, alumni and citizens can know what our institutions are offering and how it is taught. Let the floodlights shine upon both the sense and nonsense within the academy, so all the sooner it may regain its former integrity. It is also the duty of presidents and trustees to fulfill their leadership role in reasserting the purpose of the university. Presidents are not just fund-raisers and certainly not mere glad-handers, placed upon earth to find the path of least resistance within a hive of competing constituencies. They too have responsibility for academic oversight, which must sometimes mean taking the high road of respect for common sense and for academic standards, even at the price of offending powerful interest groups. As for governing boards, governors must in the first place more conscientiously select trustees who are knowledgeable about the academy and who have the will to hold it to account for providing liberal education. Trustees are not mere cheerleaders or lobbyists for their institutions, as important as those functions may be. They must above all more conscientiously exercise their responsibility for appointing and reviewing presidents. And when faculty members fail to ensure the academic integrity of their colleges – their foremost prerogative – it falls to governing boards to intervene. As no doubt you here are aware, the SUNY Board of Trustees has been moving in this direction by, among other actions, mandating a systemwide core curriculum. We are currently exploring a range of other critical academic issues, such as the rigor of curricular requirements at our colleges for teachers’ education. Moreover, all of us involved in campus governance must not allow those who abuse the words "academic freedom" to deter us from our duty. I need hardly remind you that academic freedom does not mean the license to stage a coup d’etat against the republic of letters. Nor is it the license to conduct oneself in any way at all on a college campus. Academic freedom is, as Brad Wilson of the National Association of Scholars reminds us, a historic compact between faculty members and the public, obliging the faculty to pursue the truth. Thus, a liberal education is not an indoctrination into political liberalism or "alternative life styles" - of whatever kind. Liberal education means cultivation in the art of living as a free person, free in mind and worthy of the burdens of a democratic citizen. Such a person is free for the highest type of life, and not free from responsibility. The good news, to my mind, is that the forces of civilization grow stronger on our campuses, thanks also to the intensifying vigilance of alumni and donors. It is the mission of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni to see that the eyes of these important players on our campuses are opened. And, finally, we should not underestimate the potential power of various new forms of delivering higher education to spur competition, thereby opening up new pathways for choosing liberal education. I am referring to the emerging "electronic university," the new for-profit educational institutions, and the recently proposed "charter colleges" - colleges designed to be largely free of government regulations. The good news, at long last, is that the heritage of Western civilization will be carried forward, away from the reach of the barbarians and on to posterity. The enemies of our heritage will not go away, to be sure. They will take other forms and attack with different weapons. In one era, they took on the form of oppressive monarchs or of an oppressive clergy; in our own day, they are an oppressive p.c. police. But, I assure you, the friends of barbarism are on the losing side. G. K. Chesterton described the vain and brazen quest of the nihilists, in only a slightly different context: "They may continue to war with [this heritage]; they will watch for it to stumble; they will watch for it to err; but [if we do our work] they will no longer watch for it to end. Insensibly, even unconsciously, they will in their own silent anticipations forget to watch ¼ . They will learn to look first for the coming of the comet or the freezing of the star." The Western tradition of reason and truth has survived for more than 2,000 years. We defenders of this tradition may take heart in this, as we hearken to protect it. The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 22, 2002 By CANDACE DE RUSSYHalf a century ago, William F. Buckley
chronicled the rise of unbelief among the faculty members of the
department of religion at Yale University. In case after case documented
in God and Man at Yale, the professor who
openly expressed his doubts about orthodoxy invoked the rights of the
dissenter. Atheism and agnosticism flew under the flag of academic
freedom. Those students and alumni who questioned whether unbelief should
be taught in a department of religion were decried as suppressionists and
censors inhibiting the free flow of ideas. 'Revolting Behavior': the Irresponsible Exercise of Academic Freedom The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 6, 1998 By CANDACE DE RUSSY"It got a little out of control." --Susan Lehrer, director of the women's-studies program at the State University of New York at New Paltz and an organizer of the conference "Revolting Behavior: The Challenges of Women's Sexual Freedom" In Peter Weiss's play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, the fiendish Sade, exploiting his keepers' "enlightened" vision of institutional management, directs his fellow inmates in the bathhouse of Charenton in a depraved tableau, a "mad marchlike dance," which leads to bedlam in the asylum. Parallels to this grotesque drama spring to mind in connection with "Revolting Behavior," a conference held at SUNY-New Paltz late last year, which I attended in my capacity as a trustee of the university. Described in The Wall Street Journal by the critic Roger Kimball as "a celebration of perversity and sexual libertinage," the conference included much behavior that was, in fact, more a dark sexual burlesque than a celebration. To call it a raw parody of rational academic discussion would be a vast understatement. The truth, spurned on grounds of bad taste by most of the media as unfit to be reported, is that the conference featured: * The thinly veiled recruitment of students and other attendees into a sadomasochistic network named the Lesbian Sexual Mafia, members of which spoke of "dungeons" and "whip stripes," and of their personal "normalcy" and great "power." * Proselytization for lesbian, anal, and public sex, as well as for bisexuality, female masturbation, and sadomasochism, all of which were presented in the context of "choice." * The demonstration and aggressive marketing of "sex toys" for women, including dildos and bondage materials, by a presenter who owns a sex shop in Manhattan. * The free distribution or sale of pornography and how-to lesbian sex manuals, including the porn star Annie Sprinkle's works and a pamphlet advising how to dispose of razor blades and similar instruments after "Blood Letting Sexual Activities." * Often-vicious diatribes against males (who have "unaesthetic penises" and who are frequently associated with rape and incest), and a pervasive bias against mainstream heterosexual practices ("vanilla sex"). * A lewd performance by a stripper from a bisexual bathhouse, who simulated all manner of sex acts, including sadomasochistic anal sex with a character representing a Hasidic Jew, who was whipped onstage. The champions of this profoundly anti-woman, and, in fact, anti-human exercise have portrayed it as normal campus fare or, as one of them contended, a "ho-hum" event. Susan Lehrer compared instruction in "safe and sane" sadomasochism to instruction in the use of condoms. "S & M is where people are," she solemnly pronounced. The most often parroted defense of "Revolting Behavior" and of similar campus events across the nation has been that academic freedom permits them. Roger Bowen, president of the New Paltz campus, who lent official approval to this conference and then endorsed it at its plenary session, took cover behind this sacred privilege. The New York Times joined the chorus, denouncing me in an editorial as a "meddling" trustee and proclaiming in a news story that the New Paltz campus is "the newest bastion of free speech." A review of the conference, ordered by Governor George E. Pataki and executed by SUNY administrators, audaciously omitted critics' detailed written testimony, reprimanded them, and exonerated President Bowen from culpability in permitting the conference, in all its offensive aspects, to proceed. The review panel argued that he was following "the time-honored tradition of [academic] free expression." Only recently has academic freedom been so arrogantly reduced to what the sociologist Edward Shils called a "prerogative of frivolity," or, more on the mark, a prerogative of obscene self-indulgence. Many of those who enjoy this liberty now show themselves willing to suspend judgment, standards, critical thinking, and virtue, opting instead for provocation. Moreover, they apply a double standard: Imagine the outcry among those responsible for "Revolting Behavior" if male faculty members had invited male recruiters from heterosexual-sadomasochism groups to campus to promote participation by female college students. Academic freedom, we must recall, is a right granted to scholars to enable the discovery and transmission of truth. As Bradford P. Wilson, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, has observed (The Chronicle, December 19, 1997), the American academics who secured this precious right never claimed immunity for any and all kinds of speech. Rather, he said, they sought "to safeguard only a particular type of discourse, carefully constrained -- not, to be sure, by subject, but very much by manner and method." In its authoritative founding statement of principles, the American Association of University Professors was more specific about the duties accompanying the exercise of academic freedom: "The liberty of the scholar within the university" extends only to "those who carry on their work in the temper of the scientific inquirer. ... [The scholar's] conclusions, be they what they may, ... should be set forth with dignity, courtesy, and temperateness of language. ... The university teacher, in giving instruction upon controversial matters, should ... set forth justly ... the divergent opinions of other investigators." In the minds of President Bowen and his defenders, however, academic freedom clearly has become confused with simple freedom of expression -- burning the flag and other, similar gestures. What is to be done when faculty members and administrators fail in their stewardship of the responsible exercise of academic freedom? What is to be done when, as at New Paltz, they govern as though academic merit and scholarly principle were totally relative or subjective concepts, and behave as though they are above any requirement to show respect for community values and for the noble traditions of higher learning? What if even campus presidents fail to fulfill these, their most basic duties? It must fall then to governing boards, sworn under oath to uphold the academic integrity of the colleges and universities they oversee, to hold administrators to account. Fortunately, the chancellor of SUNY, John W. Ryan, recently stepped forward with a bold and rigorous statement denouncing debased events like "Revolting Behavior" and reaffirming the high academic standards that campus conferences should reflect. He also indicated that the conference itself will be taken into account when President Bowen's overall performance is reviewed. This, in itself, must be taken as progress in the struggle toward sorely needed accountability within higher education. Absent such an exercise of oversight by higher-education leaders, the mad march on our campuses toward ever-greater depths of anti-intellectual deviance, driven by fringe groups and by ideologues concerned not with science and learning but with indoctrination, will advance. The academy will suffer -- and rightly so -- in taxpayers' esteem. Moreover, the resulting academic bedlam will aid the continuing corrosion of American culture as a whole. Candace de Russy, a former professor of language and literature, is a member of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York. She heads the board's Committee on Academic Standards. Copyright (c) 1998 by The Chronicle of Higher
Education Public Universities Need Rigorous Oversight by Trustees The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 11, 1996 By Candace de Russy "Activist" trustees of public colleges and universities -- sometimes chastised for "meddling" or" snooping" by their critics -- recently have caused a considerable stir in several states. I confess to being one of these trustees and have even gone so far as to snoop in campus course catalogues! Moreover, I am pleased to be counted among the activists. Many trustees have ceded too much of their statutory authority for overseeing public higher education to campus presidents and faculty councils. Trustees should reassert more forcefully their prerogative to stand apart from the many vested interests and factions on campuses and act as independent arbiters of their institutions' welfare. After all, trustees ultimately are accountable to the public and to the law, not to the disparate constituencies on campus. The people of each state have entrusted to lay trustees -- outsiders like themselves -- the responsibility for insuring that the state's public colleges and universities provide the highest-quality education and research at the lowest possible cost. The guidelines for non-profit boards issued by the Attorney General of Massachusetts are typical of those in most states: Trustees must see that their institutions are "faithfully carrying out [their] purpose without extravagance or waste ... in a way ... most beneficial to the community." In fulfilling those financial obligations, it is not necessarily in the public's or institutions' interest for trustees reflexively to press for ever-higher government subsidies for the colleges and universities they oversee, even though some administrators and faculty members see that as trustees' primary responsibility. From 1980 to 1993, while the Consumer Price Index rose by 75 per cent, tuition at four-year public colleges soared by 211 per cent. For the average family in 1979, the cost of a year at a public university amounted to 9 per cent of its annual income; by 1994, the figure had climbed to 15 per cent. Such increases have caused state legislatures and the general public to scrutinize public higher education much more closely than in the past. In the long run, trustees will help their institutions more by insuring that they spend tax dollars wisely and that colleges are accountable to the public, than by automatically urging higher appropriations. Further, trustees are legally -- and morally -- responsible for the academic, as well as the material, well-being of their institutions. According to New York State law, for instance, trustees are responsible for setting "standards and regulations covering the organization and operation of their [institutions'] programs, courses and curricula." They also are mandated to oversee the effectiveness of institutions' chief executive officers. When some trustees have tried to reassert this authority recently, however, various cliques and vested interests on campuses have charged indignantly that activist trustees are "micro-managers" engaged in "bald assertions" of legal power, in violation of the tradition of shared governance. To be sure, not everyone in the academy takes this position; some people have begun admonishing trustees to live up to their responsibilities more fully. For example, Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, an organization representing a large cohort of faculty members across the country, recently said:" The views of faculty and administrators should, of course, be accorded very considerable deference. But when they begin clearly to contravene the great public purposes for which state universities were established, trustees have a responsibility to step in." And in a dramatic plea to trustees in Academe, the magazine of the Association of American University Professors, Professors Robert Bing and Linda Dye of William Paterson College take trustees to task for delegating unfettered power to top campus administrators at the expense of faculty prerogatives. In an article in the July/August issue titled "Please Meddle," they lament" unbalanced governance" and "leadership chaos" on the campuses. They implore trustees to throw off their " fear of micro-management" and become "proactive," that is,"meddlesome." In my view, the proper role for trustees rests between overly detailed management of their institutions and total delegation of their obligations to campus administrators. Trustees should not undermine their administrators through micro-management, but neither should they buffer administrators from public accountability. Trustees should insure that administrators are properly carrying out the policies established by boards, and that the institutions they oversee are publicly accountable. Today a skewed interpretation of" shared" governance holds sway on many campuses. When properly conceived, shared governance can be very advantageous. But when it becomes, in effect, governance by multiple veto by campus groups with vested interests, it can stymie necessary reforms. This situation harms students the most, because it can breed academic mediocrity. The goal of providing the best possible education and research can get lost in a welter of campus politics and peacekeeping. The main source of this disequilibrium within campus governance is that trustees have relinquished their fundamental de jure obligations. First and foremost, trustees have ceded too much of their power to appoint chief executives -- chancellors and presidents -- to various campus groups, such as faculty senates or councils composed of campus leaders. Recently, at a Western state university, for example, a faculty search committee presented trustees with a short list of candidates for the presidency of the institution: one name. The board made the appointment. Unfortunately, such campus-based search committees often follow tortuous processes of consensus-seeking, which are likely to root out candidates committed to considering the interests of an entire institution or university system when they must make difficult choices. Rather, consensus-seeking tends to amass clusters of administrators beholden to one another and to the faculty or administrative group that helped promote them. Besides delegating much of their power to name presidents, many trustees then cede too much of their broad decision-making authority to those presidents. The chief executives in turn delegate decision making to deans, heads of departments, and other representatives of campus interest groups. These people's concerns are not necessarily for the well-being of students and institutions as a whole -- and certainly not for the wider community, including parents and taxpayers. In fact, a legislator from a Rocky Mountain state complained bitterly to me that his flagship state university" wanted the people of the state to serve it, rather than the other way around." In another failure of administrative oversight, some trustees do not review stringently enough the performance of their chief executive officers. Presidential reviews may be conducted infrequently and by less-than-impartial consultants. One such consultant, who is also an administrator at a land-grant university, commented about a colleague at a university in another state:" He and I are good friends. I always give him a good review, and he does the same for me." Trustees may |