The Decline of Higher Education: Thoughts on a generational takeover by the Left, and what options remain

When recruiting is focused so heavily on political ideology, you don’t simply wind up with academic scholars who happen to be all politically left: what you really get is political activists, not academic scholars. Scholars are defined by intellectual curiosity, but that’s the last thing you’ll find in political activists.

On a college campus, they might just as well be aliens, because these two kinds of people—scholars and activists—couldn’t be further apart. The proof of this is that the criteria for success of the one are the very same as the criteria for failure of the other. Political activists succeed to the extent they manage to stamp out opposing political views, but that means the end of rational analysis and debate, the heart of higher education. If things go the other way and the academic teacher succeeds, then the political activist has failed.

This is therefore the core of the problem we face: universities overrun by the wrong kind of people—political zealots who don’t understand academia, have no aptitude for it, and use it to achieve ends incompatible with it. While that condition remains, no real improvement is possible. Reform means in one way or another replacing the wrong kind of people in higher education with the right kind, and nothing short of that will have much effect.

In the last few years, critical race theory has overrun our public schools and the medical profession has begun to go woke, as has the military, the law, journalism, and even museums. Left radicalism has been making enormous progress through its dominance of the campuses.

This is exactly what the radicals promised us back in the sixties with their Port Huron statement. They admitted then that in America they could never succeed at the ballot box, and so they intended to seize control of the universities and use them to promote their ideology. They easily conquered the humanities and social sciences, and now that STEM fields have been brought to heel by means of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, their control of the campuses is virtually complete, and they have begun to use them just as they said they would.