The radicals are reaping what they’ve sown.
To borrow a phrase from a writer many of my radical colleagues love to cite, the chickens are coming home to roost at colleges and universities around the country.
As anyone paying even a modicum of attention knows, the Trump Administration is endeavoring to curtail some of the more explicit ideological partisanship going on in higher education under the mask of scholarship and teaching. Beyond that, many schools are recognizing that bottom lines have shifted, and faculty hiring will have to adjust.
Recently, faculty and administrative communities on many campuses have discussed the difficulties departments are facing in replacing departing faculty lost through retirement or moves. The American Association of University Professors has been fretting about it for some years. My place of employment, Bucknell University, is currently experiencing just such a moment, as have institutions like American University and UNC-Chapel Hill.
For a long time at Bucknell, such positions were quickly filled with new faculty. Departments had only to place a perfunctory request, and it was granted. But budgetary matters have drastically altered the landscape. Tenure-track positions are large financial obligations. Additionally, the long-term viability of many institutions of higher education is far more tenuous than it has been. Now, many departments and programs find themselves receiving “Sorry, no can do” letters from the administration in response to requests for replacements.
The response from the faculty—which is, as all the data indicate, overwhelmingly leftist in political orientation—has been utterly predictable. “It’s neoliberalism!” some cry. “A war on the great liberal arts tradition of education!” shout others.
Wholly absent is any consideration of the real economic factors that have changed or the actions the faculty themselves have undertaken that have altered the hiring playing field.
On my own campus, protesting professors claim that the failure to immediately replace every vacated tenured position with a new tenure-track hire is an unconscionable assault on our ability to teach the full liberal arts tradition, as is our institutional mission. We are being handicapped, it is argued, in our ability to adequately cover the full panoply of liberal arts topics and themes by such mercenary materialist thinking.
This might be a defensible response. But it is less so when my colleagues, like those on other campuses, have been doing everything they can for decades to dismantle the liberal arts tradition and put in its place a collection of propagandistic fields of study that preach the Gospel of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Many of the positions being postponed are in departments like English and History that cannot fill the new courses they have created to teach politicized gibberish. Courses on Shakespeare and Medieval Europe have given way to ones on LGBTQ Literatures and Media, Masculinity in Modern American Drama, Witches, Wenches, and Wives, and Black Women’s History.
Unsurprisingly, there has been backlash from students—and especially from their parents—concerning the value of the politicized disciplines and programs in the students’ quest to make a living with their degrees. Many of the new courses and programs attract few students and majors, and their level of academic seriousness is laughable. But they certainly do help schools meet the DEI directives they constructed in the wake of the George Floyd riots of 2020.
The faculty who most adamantly criticize the current developments on campus are in many cases the very ones teaching the new courses. Or they are responsible for enthusiastically moving the curriculum to the Left. These professors are seldom interested in any detailed discussion of the economics of higher education. Instead, they prefer to denigrate anyone who dares allude to the topic as intrinsically an enemy of liberal arts education.
However, it should not be controversial to note that if an institution is charging in the neighborhood of $70,000 a year in tuition, it has to perform careful calculations as to how many consumers are willing to buy its product at such a price. “Oooh, neoliberalization!” will not do as a substitute for these calculations. One may call the process what one likes, but the unavoidable truth is that there is a bottom line. No empty rhetoric of “the independent value of a liberal arts education” is going to get you very far in getting paying customers in your classes.
Even if one felt sympathy for a defense of higher education in terms not utterly materialist, as the present writer does, the version of that defense that once existed—we are training gentlemen and gentlewomen, cultivated citizens with wisdom who will contribute to a viable culture and society—has been replaced. Who outside the ranks of those teaching courses on LGBTQ Literature and Black Women’s History believes that razing traditional and historical America and Western civilization to the ground is a winning proposition?
It should not be all that surprising that the very people who have created the dismal situation we face are least desirous of searching for solutions.
The American Mind presents a range of perspectives. Views are writers’ own and do not necessarily represent those of The Claremont Institute.
The American Mind is a publication of the Claremont Institute, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, dedicated to restoring the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life. Interested in supporting our work? Gifts to the Claremont Institute are tax-deductible.
