Normal, agenda-free education, where are you?
In search of the normie, non-polarized college education
I’ll be back later this week with more Jewy stuff, but for the moment I wanted to wade gingerly into the debate about the politicization of higher education.
Let me begin with a story. When I taught at Yale, we offered about a dozen upper-level creative writing classes with different names and course numbers: Writing the Profile, Magazine Writing, Narrative Journalism, etc. I always believed they all taught the same thing, and they should all be titled English 400: Writing Good. Because, first, that would be more honest, rather than pretending that there were multiple ways up the mountain of good prose, and, second, because that’s what students really want, when it comes down to it: basic instruction in how to write good (okay, well). Or how to count well. Or do physics well. Or speak French well. They don’t want ideology, not for the most part.
So on to Florida.
In case you haven’t been following the case of New College, in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has moved to change the public liberal arts college from the lefty bastion of wokeness that he perceives it to be into something . . . more right-leaning, I guess?
From Insider Higher Ed:
“It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South,” DeSantis chief of staff James Uthmeier told The Daily Caller.
On Friday, DeSantis appointed six new trustees at NCF: Christopher Rufo, Matthew Spalding, Charles R. Kesler, Mark Bauerlein, Debra Jenks and Eddie Speir. Of those, the first four are well-known conservative academics or activists who appear to live outside Florida.
Arguably the most prominent of the trustees is Rufo, who gained national attention for his campaign against the obscure academic concept of critical race theory, often conflating it with diversity, equity and inclusion programs and fueling a conservative backlash against DEI efforts.
Spalding, a dean at Hillsdale College, and Kesler, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, were both part of the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission, which produced a widely panned rebuttal to The New York Times’s “1619 Project.” Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University, has long been an advocate for classical education, arguing for the need to improve civics education. According to a news release announcing the new trustees, only two appear to live in Florida: Jenks is an NCF graduate and local lawyer, and Speir is the founder of a private K-12 school.
The six trustees will serve on a 13-member board, which will also include five members appointed by the Republican-led Florida Board of Governors as well as one student and one faculty trustee.
Their self-proclaimed mandate is to transform the small, public institution into a facsimile of the private, Christian university in Michigan that has rejected federal funding, guided the Trump administration and sought a national footprint by launching a chain of charter schools.
New College is well known for its funky, alternative, some would say liberal bent—though it should be better known as the school whose Jewish students helped turn white supremacist student Derek Black into an open-minded, tolerant crusader for decency, turning his back on his Klan legacy, an amazing story documented in Eli Saslow’s book Rising Out of Hatred, which, if I had to choose a nation-wide all-school read for, say, eighth-graders (or whatever graders), is probably the book I’d pick.
So, predictably, liberals are up in arms over the dismantling of a school they perceived (rightly) was theirs.
I think what DeSantis is doing is utterly stupid and invidious. But while acknowledging that it’s a bad idea to destroy the culture of a good, functional school, and whatever DeSantis’s cronies erect in its place will almost surely be much worse, we can also acknowledge that small liberal arts colleges (like New College) tend to lean very far to the left, in ways that squelch open discourse and don’t serve students well. Meanwhile, “reformers” like DeSantis tend to look toward ideologically right-wing schools like Hillsdale.
I have found that almost professor I have talked to in higher education assumed, today, that universities and colleges should be ideological. Professors at the minority of conservative, often Christian schools are quite open about what they want for their schools, and teachers at secular liberal arts colleges admit pretty freely, when prodded, that their schools should be leftish in orientation. They won’t say “leftish,” but their version of “open-minded” or “tolerant,” or their views about the virtues and limits of “free speech,” pretty quickly reveal leftish assumptions. And the fact is, professors at secular colleges have chosen to enter a guild that, in the humanities anyway, is overwhelmingly left-leaning. It is now self-selecting and self-perpetuating. I spent fifteen years teaching at Yale, and of 100+ colleagues whose politics I knew, only three would ever, I think, have voted Republican in a presidential election (pre- or post-Trump). And two of those were scientists. And the other retired. If there is a single Republican teaching in Yale’s English, history, or philosophy departments today, I’ll eat my shirt (of course, I wear cinnamon-brioche shirts).
Let me make clear now that I don’t think scholarship can ever be bias-free, particularly the humanities. And I don’t think teachers should pretend not to have opinions or political views. I am pretty sure my students always knew mine. But I am haunted by the conversation I had a few years ago with an undergraduate about Supreme Court nominations. She was angry that her university president had not weighed in against certain Republican appointees. The conversation went in various directions, and finally I said to her, “It sounds to me as if you feel that the university should be, in principle, left-liberal, and that, to be a leader of the university, one should have to be on record as being pro-choice, pro–affirmative action, pro–universal health care, and so forth.” And she thought about it for a moment and said, “Yes, that is what I believe.” She was clear that there should be toleration for more conservative voices, but that they should not be permitted to be in roles of authority, like dean or president.
I also think of another conversation I had, with a leftist professor (he would definitely call himself a leftist, and a “radical” and “socialist”; this is not my opinion of him, but his self-description). I was telling him I was troubled by the lack of intellectual diversity on campuses, and what’s more, I was surprised that he, as somebody who liked argument, wasn’t more troubled by it. His department, in particular, was, by his own admission, ideologically homogeneous. “Does that feel good to you?” I asked him. “Or do you wish it were more diverse?” And he said, “Look, I’d rather the left have won the courts, the health care system, and the taxation laws. But we got the academy, so we have to do what we can with that.” In other words, the academy was his power base from which to fight back against institutions, like courts and state legislatures, that had been captured by the right.
Then there was the time I was on a panel as the sole liberal voice, alongside two professors from evangelical colleges. They were complaining about ideological conformity at state universities. And I said, “But you have ideological conformity, by design, at your schools. You make professors sign a state of Christian faith, and expel students who are apostates. How is that any better?” One replied, “But that’s our stated mission. State schools aren’t supposed to be like that.” To which I replied, “But what’s good for one student is good for another. Either we want students to learn diverse viewpoints, or we don’t. Either we want a diverse student body, or we don’t. It’s not clear why you think UC-Berkeley students should learn from a diverse faculty, but your students shouldn’t.” As I recall, he had no good answer.
But I don’t think these voices speak for what most students want. Students want to learn stuff. And a lot of students are getting worse educations than they might—and than they did, twenty or thirty years ago. A lot of students (and faculty) know this, and would love to be at a school where the faculty were more politically diverse, and where the education was less overtly politicized. All education has a politics to it, but there is a difference between acknowledging that there is a politics to a subject and making that politics the overwhelming focus of a syllabus, as too often happens. It’s a matter of degree and proportion.
Students just want to learn stuff.
Which is why I am surprised that no college has decided to make it their brand that they are trying to be apolitical, or less political, or de-politicized, or less polarized—whatever you want to call it. What if some school said, “Come here to escape the culture wars. We want to teach you about history, philosophy, biology, French, and other subjects in ways that are neither congenial nor hostile to whatever your partisan politics are.”
I am aware that some new schools are being started with such promises. But it surprises me that with all the older schools that are shrinking, closing, or merging, none has attempted to claim this space. I think there is market share there. More than 50 American colleges have closed in the last five years; I wonder why none of them tried to occupy a space that is sorely needed, the school that teaches you how to write good.
What I’ve been up to . . .
I read the new Dennis Lehane novel, Small Mercies. It’s as good as everyone says it is. And if it sends you back to that great nonfiction account of the Boston busing crisis, J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground, all the better. And if reading that book sends you to the 1990 miniseries made out of it, better still. Oh, look, you can watch it on YouTube.
Been watching the Amazon Primé series based on Daisy Jones & the Six. Really delicious novel, pretty darned good TV series. But here’s the best part: I was driving along the other day and heard a single that I dug on the radio, and it was, according to the deejay, “Regret Me,” by Daisy Jones & the Six.
And that was cool, because I love singles by fake TV bands. I love Monkees singles, and Partridge Family singles, and above all the great “How Do You Talk to an Angel,” by The Heights—perhaps the best thing to come out of 1992, other than the speech I gave at my high school graduation.