Reasoning With the Other Zealots While Under Attack
Should professors reflect on their successes and failures, taking the proverbial hard look into a mirror to ask how we could do better? Of course we should. In fact, everyone should do that, no matter what kind of work they do -- or even if they do not engage in paid work at all. Being a decent human being involves self-doubt, commitment to doing better, and a fundamental humility that should always guide us, even when we are being brash or assertive. Too many people do not do that, however, and the world is seeing the kind of havoc a presidential administration staffed entirely by such people is capable of wreaking.
I focused on professors in my opening sentence, however, because my field is rife with people who are committed to telling the rest of us that we are being insufficiently introspective. In a column last week, "Reasoning With Zealots While Under Attack by Those Same Zealots," I responded to a particularly clever bit of misdirection of that genre, "Why Higher Ed Won’t Look Itself in the Mirror." The professor who authored that piece argued that "condescending dismissal is also a terrific way to avoid the hard questions about our own complicity in the degradation of the university," which bluntly asserts that we professors are not only stubborn snobs but are also therefore complicit in whatever it was that has led to the right's attacks on higher education in the US (and in other countries, to a lesser degree).
My column last week was something of a sequel to "Will Self-Criticism Save Colleges?' Is This a Joke?" which I published here on Dorf on Law on March 31 of this year. The fundamental argument motivating both columns is that the underlying decency that causes us to want to say, "To be fair, we know we're not perfect," is exactly the wrong response to people who are not looking for a way to reason with us but are instead looking for any weakness to attack, any opening to exploit, and any admission of guilt (or "complicity") to justify further attacks. As I put it last week, there are times when it makes no sense to ask: "What if we tried to reason with them?" This is such a time.
As the title of this column indicates, however, my story thus far has focused on only one group of unreasoning zealots who are trying to destroy academia. Those zealots are Republican politicians, who have been on the attack against academia forever.
For example, when Ronald Reagan was governor of California in the late 1960's, he responded to campus protests against the Vietnam War and the bombing of Cambodia by shutting down campuses across the state. Was this simply a public safety measure? Of course not? Was it a naked political maneuver, designed to appeal to "regular Americans" who hated long-haired hippies? Yes, but it was more than that.
As The Intercept reported a few years ago, a Reagan advisor spoke at a press conference (that is, an event at which he knew that he was going to be recorded) and said this in defense of Reagan's shutdown: "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. ... That's dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go to college." That was hardly a one-off. After campaigning against "beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates" in 1966, Reagan in 1967 said that the state had "no business subsidizing intellectual curiosity."
I could go further back in history, but the point is that there is nothing new about the attacks by today's Republicans on higher education. They are the zealots to whom I referred in Tuesday's column, who continue to fear an educated proletariat and despise intellectual curiosity. But those Republicans have always had powerful partners, a group that today is known by the shorthand "right-wing billionaires" but which has been active since long before becoming a billionaire was even considered possible.
In a moment, I will describe a few illustrative examples of what those right-wing billionaires have been doing to higher ed in this country, but the threshold question is whether there is an opening for reasonable discussion between academia and those moneyed interests. That is, even though Republican politicians are wholly uninterested in anything that we might have to say, is this other group less zealous and more amenable to sincerely seeking a meeting of the minds? After all, the people with money are the ones who back the Republicans so lavishly that their wildly unpopular policies do not keep Republican politicians out of office, which suggests that if the billionaires called off the attack, their political minions would cease and desist.
To be clear, however, the record is hardly unambiguous regarding who is controlling whom. Early in the long, dreary history of debt ceiling confrontations, for example, I asked whether the money guys were the Dr. Frankenstein who had created a monster. After all, a constitutional crisis over US federal borrowing would be especially bad for people who rely on financial market stability, so one would think that the wealthy creators of the AstroTurf populism that became the Tea Party would have reined in their raging creation, if they could. Similarly, one would think that Wall Street and other super-wealthy types would be against tariffs (and certainly against erratic trade policy), yet the monster they backed in 2024 would never listen even if they tried to stop him.
As it happens, however, there is no reason to think that there is any distance between the money people behind the Republican Party and that party itself, especially when it comes to their disdain for universities. Again, one might be very tempted to think that financiers and other business people would want to keep the golden goose known as American higher education alive and thriving. Instead, they have always been scornful of one of the countries most valuable assets (which is a net exporter, by the way), because they know that they have never been able to control what people at universities do.
At least not fully. There have always been big pots of cash available for people who are willing to say what donors want to hear. As a notable example, the billionaire John Olin pushed hard (with notable success) to create a hard right academic movement called "law and economics," and he was so skeptical that academia might one day "capture" his movement that he directed his foundation to shut down within a generation after his death, lest academics who disagreed with him ever be funded.
And the wealthy assailants have only become more brazen. In an excellent guest column last Friday, Professor David Marcus of UCLA's law school set the record straight about an event at his school involving a Trump Administration official, after which "carefully selected video clips of moments from the hour began to circulate online. These misleading clips have gone viral, fueled in part by Trump Administration social media accounts. The event has become the latest skirmish in a relentless conservative campaign to discredit universities as bastions of illiberal wokeness."
Exactly. Later on Friday, I posted a short note pointing readers to a similar (and similarly contrived) event at Stanford Law three years ago, noting that I had written a series of columns dissecting that imagined assault on free speech on campus. (The fifth of my columns discussing that incident includes links to the previous four.) Because Stanford is a private university and UCLA is public, one might think that the two situations could be meaningfully different. Both are in California, however, where Republicans do not run the state legislature, which means that neither can be attacked via the direct routes taken in Florida, Texas, Indiana, and so many other red states.
Yet there are no worries for the reactionaries. They are backed by the billionaires who gave us the current Supreme Court majority, and they have a longstanding strategy to attack academia: goad students into reacting in exploitable ways by curating a list of approved speakers (and funding their travel and speaking fees), where said list is assembled with the unmistakable goal of sending out speakers who will be as provocative as possible. And as Professor Segall pointed out on this blog yesterday, Republican-appointed judges have dutifully amplified that distorted version of the UCLA story, which has been spread widely in the Murdoch-iverse.
I ask again: What if we tried to reason with them? Are the people who fund this coordinated attack on higher education interested in anything other than total victory? Of course not. As I discussed in a column two months ago, the people who whine that liberals have created a "monoculture" on campus are in fact not looking to create a multiculture. Indeed, we are not allowed to speak any more about diversity, equity, or inclusion. The people who scold "the campus left" for our supposed stubbornness would apparently have us ask those who relentlessly disparage us: "If we were to create a quota system to guarantee that x% of professors are conservative, would that be OK?" Answer: "Sure, if x = 100."
In that same column, I pointed out that the moneyed interests are similarly subverting universities by funding "civics centers," which are a particularly transparent form of propaganda and are based on an incoherent idea to boot. They are openly partisan to the point where conservatives are fighting ideological battles among themselves. And those same donors are now pushing into accreditation, trying to take over the levers that would allow them to directly punish universities that do not toe their preferred line. Would it help to reason with the people who used their power to get the President of Harvard fired?
The point is that the attack on higher education is not being carried out by people who have a good-faith argument that could be met with a similarly good-faith effort to find common ground. The politicians who are carrying this out in red states and in the federal government are not looking for compromise, and the billionaires who are trying to take control of the rest of academia are no less single-minded. Pretending otherwise only makes things worse.
- Neil H. Buchanan