My first encounter with the leftist ideologues who would transform American universities came in March 1987 during a conference in Atlanta.
English professors from universities nationwide arrived sporting T-shirts with the caption “Dead White Males” in a circle with a line drawn through it. Thirty-seven years later, the heirs of their anti-Western, anti-white male animus have tightened their grip on a university system that thrives on slogans, cronyism and a great big dose of left-wing dogma.
1987 was also the year Chicago professor Allan Bloom held leftist ideologues responsible for The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom’s assessment of professors who see themselves as the “agents of the rare, the refined and the superior” still holds true, but his prediction that “this fad will pass” is dead wrong. Not only have the leftist ideologues survived three decades of fierce opposition to their rule, but they have succeeded in their mission to keep right-leaning scholars out of our universities.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has argued that conservatives simply aren’t smart enough to teach college-level courses, but the truth can be found in the games search committees play during the hiring process. It’s easy to guess what goes on when they meet to review applications for a tenure-track position, let’s say, in the English department at UNC Chapel Hill.
Quoting bits from articles by and about academe’s radicals, I shall take guessing one step further and imagine what might ensue in a search committee meeting whose members have attended an “equity-minded hiring” seminar to make sure they choose a candidate who has had “experience acting as an equity advocate.” My made-up committee is comprised of three members: two women, Drs. Frick and Frack, and one white male, Dr. Wright, will play the role of antagonist in my little drama.
Dr. Frick opens the meeting chortling that she has devised a workaround for the Board of Trustees’ new rule that prohibits requiring candidates to submit a DEI statement with their applications. Dr. Frick has found that having candidates name their role models, living or dead, works just as well as the rubric they’d been using for “assessing candidate contributions to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.”
Ignoring Dr. Wright’s joke that she has simply invented a new way to compute a candidate’s “woke score,” Dr. Frick blasts the Board of Trustee’s “hard-right appointees” who, over faculty objections, have founded a School of Civic Life and Leadership. Drs. Frick and Frack decry the board’s “attack on academic freedom” and fear it will derail their mission to “decenter the narrative of white, cisgender, heterosexual men.”
When Dr. Wright reminds his colleagues that the idea for the new school originated with the faculty, Dr. Frick huffs that’s all the more reason to spot candidates who might wield an “anti-intellectual conservatism” on campus. Dr. Frack agrees and proposes that on those grounds they should nix one of the semifinalists upfront.
The offending candidate had applauded UNC’s plan to revive student interest in their Western heritage and noted that C.S. Lewis was among the first to oppose the “uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”
When Drs. Frick and Frack argue that to admire C.S. Lewis is to self-identify as a “Christofascist,” Dr. Wright counters that renowned historian Andrew Roberts also thinks students should “study the glories of Western civilization in a way that is unembarrassed, unashamed and not saddled with accusations of guilt for centuries-old crimes.”
Dr. Frick would have Dr. Wright know that students feel “harmed by white Western civilization” and that the candidate they favor will model her career on 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief that “he who dares to undertake the making of a people’s institutions ought to feel himself capable of changing human nature, of transforming each individual.”
Seeing that a finalist for the job opening had been predetermined, Dr. Wright excuses himself, leaving Drs. Frick and Frack to ponder his heresy. Before they adjourn, they decide to alert their dean that Dr. Wright has created “a hostile work environment” during their meetings and should henceforth be excluded from the hiring process.
The games the hard left plays during the hiring process call to mind the Test Act, which Great Britain enacted in 1673 to exclude from public office candidates who did not conform to the established religion. Academe’s established religion involves keeping conservatives out of our universities. Contained within that one word is the sum of all the hard left’s fears.
Nan Miller lives in Raleigh.