Colleges under assault!

I've known this for a while, I guess, but we are the enemy. The news consolidator RealClearPolitics, which I check regularly to see how folks outside my media bubble think (I trust them because their bent is conservative but their selection of liberal pieces is good and fair), led me yesterday to an article called "Defund The Police? What About We Defund Universities" by a retired anthropologist of tribalism from McGill named Philip Carl Salzman. It acquainted me with a meme that's apparently been going the rounds for a few weeks now. "Defund colleges, not cops" written for the (American) Spectator by Peter Wood, president of the American National Association of Scholars, a conservative higher ed advocacy group, seems an earlier version.

In that other media bubble, "academia" is the root of all evil. According to Wood, it indoctrinates students in an ideology of "Despise America First" and abuse[s] its authority by beckoning students into political activism. Excoriating the statement in support of BLM from the president of his alma mater Haverford (of course!), he likens demands to move funds from policing to social programs to another form of looting. Worse, it is clear that American higher education is in the hands of a clerisy, the members of which apparently all went to the same seminary and worship the same color-coded god, Lord Diversity, and his attendants, Black Resentment and White Guilt. Great God almighty!

For his part Salzman arraigns colleges and universities for a cultural revolution culture administered by the many "diversity and inclusion" commisars whose salaries could have funded many scholarships and professorships in STEM fields. This extreme radicalism ... claims that America and Canada are evil, beginning life in sin as slave owners and colonial settlers who engaged in genocide, and continuing on those paths until today. But even in this theory all Americans and Canadians are not evil: only whites, males, heterosexuals, and Christians and Jews are evil oppressors. Females, people of color, LGBT+, indigenous natives, and Muslims, in contrast, are virtuous victims, and deserve to take the reins of control. To the barricades!

It's about control, clearly. As a card-carrying member of the academic cult, I feel obliged to acknowledge that academia is no utopia, and our research and teaching is more inclined to be critical than edifying. That's what we do, especially in the face of entrenched problems and their know-nothing defenders. (That's also why I feel obliged to read the views of the other side, which I know not all of my colleagues do.) We can get a little full of ourselves, become our own kind of bubbles, practice exclusions of our own. But we also help clarify what values matter and why, and what it would take to live them out - for our students and for society as a whole.

Could we be a society which is more
than a fight for control? 

We try to see America for what it is first because we are committed to values of truth and justice and participation for all which have been articulated particularly powerfully in American history. (Our patriotism is to judge America by its ideals rather than to idealize its stumbling reality.) We think These Truths might have merit beyond these shores and might be achievable for more than a select few, too, if we really committed to them. Jill Lepore: To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present.

Speaking of "beyond these shores," we are being "defunded" as we speak. ICE's policy to revoke the visas of all international students whose colleges have moved instruction online (building on other efforts to use visa restrictions to make coming to the US more difficult and more costly) are a body blow to the many schools dependent on foreign students. (No, students don't need to be in the US to take online courses here, but they come here to study in the United States, something heretofore welcomed and celebrated.) If the administration succeeds in pressuring more schools to open campuses despite the unchecked spread of covid (as it is trying to do with K-12 education too, heartless monsters they), we may actually become centers of infection.