Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (22 page)

I
T IS THE SEASON when high school juniors, parents in tow, set out on their tours of ivied campuses, in search of the right investment for their education dollar. This spring I made a similar tour. Speaking at colleges in Chicago, Boston, Lewiston (Maine), New Haven, Quinnipiac (Connecticut), Houston, Dallas, and College Station (Texas), I conducted my own hands-on survey to see how American colleges have changed since I was an undergraduate in the 1950s. Or, to be more precise, to check conclusions I had already drawn about these matters on the basis of previous trips I had made in the last decade.

When I was an undergraduate, the censors attacked the university from without. Now, they are entrenched in the faculties and administrations themselves. Then, the university defined itself as an institution "dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge." Now, every term of that definition is under siege by postmodernists and deconstructionists who have become the new academic establishment and have redefined the university as "an institution dedicated to social change." That is one reason why the academy, once perceived as a redoubt of intellectual freedom and cutting-edge discourse, has become the butt of snickering jokes about political correctness and the font of Kafkaesque tales about bureaucratic censorship and administrative obtuseness.

In Chicago, I encountered a very bright second-year graduate student in the famous Committee on Social Thought program who had previously completed four years of undergraduate work at Harvard where he had never heard the name Friedrich von Hayek. In a way, it was the most shocking anecdotal evidence I retrieved in my forays into the halls of learning. It is not just that Hayek won a Nobel Prize for economics in 1973, or that he is the author of a classic text of the modem era,
The Road to Serfdom,
which was already required reading for students at Columbia when I went there in the 1950s, or that he is one of the three or four greatest social thinkers of the twentieth century — the Karl Marx of the libertarian-conservative worldview. Any of these would have been reason enough to make this student's ignorance dismaying. But Hayek is also one of the handful of social scientists who (along with his teacher Ludwig von Mises) demonstrated more than sixty years ago why the socialist system could not work and, thus, why it would eventually collapse, as it did in 1989. The implosion of the Soviet empire was a dramatic vindication of the analysis Hayek and his colleagues had made.

It was not the first time I had encountered on university campuses ignorance of Hayek and other conservative intellectuals, nor was it accidental. Such ignorance is a direct consequence of the tenured left's dominance of liberal arts institutions and its politicization of the curriculum and the faculty hiring process since the 1960s. This, in fact, was the subject of the lectures I gave at the campuses I visited.

At Bates College in Maine, for example, I spoke in defense of the following proposition: "The Intellectual Tradition of the Left is Bankrupt and Its Hegemony at Bates Is An Abuse of Academic Freedom." To anticipate the situation I encountered at this pricey liberal arts college, let me quote an e-mail I received from a professor at Smith, a comparable institution, when I challenged the faculty there about these academic abuses: "I would gladly crush you in a debate on students' so-called 'right not to be ideologically indoctrinated in the classroom,"' wrote Professor E. C. Graf. "Your phrase 'students' academic freedom' is already a laughable oxymoron, as if students ever head such a thing or ever should. . . . As for admitting that I 'indoctrinate' my students instead of teaching them, tell me, my friend, when has there ever been a difference?"

In a rare departure from the norm, I received an invitation to Bates from the Dean of the College, who informed me shortly after introducing himself that he was a "leftist." Out of one hundred or so colleges I have spoken at in the last several years, as I have mentioned, I have been officially invited only to four. The college administrations will roll out no red carpets, provide no honoraria or airfares for a conservative like me, as they will for my former political comrades on the left, nor will faculty members offer credit to students for attending my lectures (a common practice as well). Even on this visit to Bates, where the dean himself invited me, my reception proved to be a little unusual.

I arrived at the airport in Portland the night before my scheduled evening lecture, where a university-provided driver picked me up and deposited me at the door of an apartment that the university had also made available. But there the hospitality stopped. Until my evening lecture the next day, I was left to my own devices, wondering whether the dean who invited me would like to have a lunch or even coffee in his offices to get acquainted. In fact, as noon approached the day after my arrival, I decided to drop in on the dean to thank him for my invitation and inquire if he would like to have lunch. When I got there, a secretary informed me he was unavailable. Instead, a student escort was provided to take me to the school cafeteria, where I ate by myself. The cafeteria meal was complimentary, and the dean, perhaps feeling guilty about my unannounced appearance, eventually showed up to take me back to his office. In manner he was entirely cordial, while explaining that he had taken some criticism from members of his faculty merely for inviting me. When I returned to California, I received a somewhat testy letter from him because of a full-page advertisement I had run in the school paper on the day of my lecture, which he had not seen at the time. The advertisement announced that the dean was inviting students to attend my evening talk. It then continued with the following headline: "Marxism Is A Resurgent Doctrine in the Former Soviet Empire and Apparently on American Campuses Too."

Below this headline was a reminder to students that the false doctrines of marxism had led to the deaths of one hundred million people. Below that was a selection of book titles written by authors like Thomas Sowell, David Gress, and myself, offered as "antidotes" to what students were being taught by their professors at Bates.

In all fairness, the dean had a point, which I readily conceded. I had undoubtedly made his life more difficult. Still, his anguish was just another indication of the pressure he was under from his leftist faculty because of my visit. How left? Well, in the Bates catalogue, one course listed was called "The Cuban Revolution: Problems and Prospects" which included a two-week on-site visit to Cuba. Aviva Chomsky, daughter of the MIT grouser, had taught the course until she left Bates for a more "working-class" school (as the dean regretfully informed me). At my talk that evening, I could not resist making the observation that the Cuban revolution had no prospects.

Since I had a whole day to kill before my scheduled talk, I decided to sit in on one of Bates's political-science courses to check my impressions of academic life. I asked students for directions to the building in which political science courses were taught, and went to the department office on the ground floor. None of the administrators seemed to have a problem with my desire to audit a class. Accordingly, I approached a professor as she was entering her classroom and asked permission to attend.

She was an Indian woman in her thirties and spoke with an English accent. She seemed pleased at the prospect of having an adult in her audience and had no hesitation inviting me in. All through the class she smiled at me and talked in my direction — and even encouraged me to answer a question when the rest of the class could not. She taught from a single text, and it was obvious from her remarks that the class consisted in reading through the text a chapter at a time. In the college courses I had attended at Columbia some forty years ago, there was rarely an "official" text for the course, and if there was one, my professors seldom referred to it. Any text included was more an aid to students. The real "text" for the course was the professor's lecture, and students were expected to read several books by leading scholars in the field whose views usually differed strongly from the professor's. A political science course devoted to modem industrial societies, as this one was, might have had required readings by Weber, Marx, Durkheim, Tonnies, and Hayek.

In this course, however, there was a single six hundred-page text entitled
Modernity
, edited by the well-known English New Leftist Stuart Hall. Like Hall, every contributor to the text was a marxist. There was no lecture. The teacher proceeded in Socratic fashion to guide the students page by page, and paragraph by paragraph, through the textbook assigned. It was like a science course based on an accepted body of knowledge, where a single class textbook is the norm.

Except that this norm was the discredited intellectual tradition of marxism. I looked over at the text of the student next to me and asked what the acronym ACS, which was staring out of the page, stood for. She said "Advanced Capitalist Society." I noticed another acronym MIBTC and was told it stood for "Military-Industrial-Bureaucratic-Technocratic-Complex." The teacher was admonishing the students to pay attention to the main points in the authors' arguments and to take note of the way they grounded them — whether in authorities or facts. Then she had the class break up into small groups, each of which was to apply this technique to a different section and assess whether the author of that section satisfactorily proved his point.

My group was assigned a little section on American militarism (seriously). The question put by the text was whether militarism emerged out of the capitalist economic structures of ACS, or whether once it emerged it became systemic. There was no question, of course, whether American society could reasonably be described as "militarist." One young woman in my group wondered aloud whether the author had proved there was an MIBTC merely by pointing out that cell phones made by AT&T were used by the army in the Gulf War. (I stepped out of my role as observer to assure her he had not.)

Subsequently, I bought
Modernity
from Amazon.com and found that the passage was typical. The viewpoints in the text ranged from classical marxism to feminist marxism to postmodernist marxism.

There were no opposing views introduced except to be refuted. In the book's index there was not a single reference to Hayek. On the other hand, there were plenty of discussions of obscure marxists like Nicholas Poulantzas, who wrote a book on the "ruling class" in the 1960s before jumping out a window at age twenty-nine.

After the class, I went up to the teacher and said that I admired her pedagogy in advising the students that she was not there to tell them
what
to think, but to teach them
how
. On the other hand, I thought that assigning an ideological marxist tome as the course's only text worked at cross-purposes with that goal. At once the smile disappeared from her face. She said: "Well, they get the other side from the newspapers." Education like this costs Bates parents thirty thousand dollars each year in tuition alone.

This was not to be the end of my auditing adventure, however. Afterwards, the lecturer complained about me to the dean, who had ignored me until then. The dean called me up at my apartment to tell me I should have gone through his office if I wanted to sit in on a class. I explained the circumstances that had led me to the class, the encouragement of the departmental administrators, the pleasure with which the lecturer herself had welcomed me, and the reason for her change of heart. But to no avail. Obviously she had given him a hard time, and there was no way he was going to sympathize with me. I realized that this intimidation was similar to the intimidation over the advertisement and his invitation to me. It served a purpose, and served it effectively: to minimize the contact between professors and students and conservatives like myself.

That was no doubt why attendance at the little reception with faculty he arranged for me before my talk was limited to the handful of older professors at Bates who shared my views, or at least were not ideologically repelled by them, and who were protected by tenure. I nonetheless admired their courage in attending my event: I knew that even in the darkest days of the McCarthy era communist faculty were not threatened with ostracism by their peers as are politically incorrect academics by the reflexive McCarthyism of the tenured left.

I gave my speech to about sixty students, among whom seven or eight formed a very unhappy contingent of campus leftists. Had I not been officially invited, it is more than likely that even these few would not have been there. I spoke about the religious ideas that had led to the destruction of one hundred million people in our century, killed by progressive missionaries in order to realize their impossible dreams. Revolutionary leftists were modern Manichaeans, who believed that the world was ruled by alien powers of darkness. Even democracies were not free societies, but were dominated by these powers, which Marx called "ruling classes," against whom all those who believed in social justice were at war.

Even though these marxist fantasies had led to unprecedented ruin for all the societies that eventually came under their sway, their currency was evident throughout the curriculum. Now the alien powers were called the "patriarchy," or the "white male oligarchy," or more obliquely, "institutional racism." But they were just as fantastic, and belief in them inspired passions potentially as destructive as the passions of classical marxists. No one, I said, was oppressed in America (except perhaps children by abusive parents). To even suggest as much was to enter the realm of the absurd.

I give the leftist students credit for waiting until the end of my talk to vent their outrage over the blasphemies I had uttered. One young woman got so emotional she decided to leave the building to save herself from further contamination. Another young woman stood up and with tremendous urgency sputtered, "But what about the hierarchies? You didn't mention the hierarchies!"

She was referring, of course, to the hierarchies of race, gender, and class that were the staples of her Bates education and the modern-day equivalents of Marx's boogey man. Her professors had undoubtedly schooled her in the idea that these hierarchies oppress people of color, women, and wage-slaves in America. In America! In the year 1999!