I agree with your eloquent case for more relevant and muscular humanities, but would suggest that maybe university leadership isn't stepping up to defend the non-STEM side of things because so much of the present faddish state of it has become indefensible...? A lot of programs really are rotted out with little or nothing left to offer, regardless of whatever reassuring rhetoric a talented fundraiser might be able to muster. In my experience non-quantitative academia has already done more to devastate itself than Trump-Vance could even contemplate. The way forward is probably less a food fight with the executive branch than getting back to rich meaningful timeless work that's relevant beyond a few hundred cosseted specialists who won't read each other's journal articles, either.
That was my thought as well. No one stood up for the real humanities when it was taken over by a despicable identarian hate cult. Why would they stand up for the usurper?
I was an English major thirty years ago and things were already going sideways then. Nonetheless, as recently as a dozen years ago I would have still been a sympathetic to universities. Even as I watched my then-girlfriend get a doctorate from a prestigious program in Comp Lit despite having no real ability to read anything but English, which she assured me was the norm. Now I'm enjoying watching academia burn. Hopefully something useful can rise from the ashes.
Meanwhile, so many of the greatest novelists of the 20th century didn't even go to college, let alone get MFAs. Now we have a firehose of well-credentialed sewage. How essential universities are to the production and appreciation of great literature is questionable at best.
I agree with you that there has been much deterioration of the tradition of rigorous questioning within elite universities, but might this moment of stress might serve as a catalyst for the right leader to tack her institution towards a healthier vision? Outside of government, these institutions are the most powerful actors directed by a mission that supersedes the accumulation of wealth (in theory). They have deep political connections, huge endowments, and a significant talent pool. While they may have failed to live up to their ideals, perhaps this moment can remind them of their causa sui and inspire them to take a genuine stand for furthering humanity’s understanding of the world and the self.
Despite our country’s history of falling far short on our own ideals of freedom and liberty for all, we continue working towards her ever-greater realization. Perhaps we could extend this same belief and effort to these institutions.
I grew up a bookish lad near the bucolic campus of Washington University, which has some very picturesque gothic-looking buildings with ivy growing up the sides. I assumed I'd probably become an academic, perhaps in classics, and idealized that world. And then at Brown, then covering a variety of academics for PBS news, and then in many years at Columbia I became pretty disillusioned about higher ed. Like many other sprawling institutions elite universities have fallen prey to their own institutional imperatives to grow and grow, so the leader is often pretty limited to just smoothing things over and trying to keep the cash flowing and all the stakeholders happy--the vision becomes pretty peripheral to the day-to-day sausagemaking.
So it was humbling to attend the Heterodox Academy conference last summer in Chicago, it was a whole ballroom full of the sort of thinkers I'd hoped to meet a higher concentration of throughout my career, and gave me more hope that at least pockets of academia can yet be salvaged. But I think that's likelier to come from insurgents and upstarts making moves than the elite institutions that are like Gulliver pinned down by throngs of Lilliputians... maybe Dartmouth as the smallest and flintiest of the Ivies, but I wouldn't bet on it!
Quoting David Brooks quoting Princeton President John Hibben's 1913 address to students here..."You, enlightened, self-sufficient, self-governed, endowed with gifts above your fellows, the world expects you to produce as well as to consume, to add to and not to subtract from its store of good, to build up and not tear down, to ennoble and not degrade. It commands you to take your place and to fight your fight in the name of honor and of chivalry, against the powers of organized evil and of commercialized vice, against the poverty, disease, and death which follow fast in the wake of sin and ignorance, against all the innumerable forces which are working to destroy the image of God in man, and unleash the passions of the beast. There comes to you from many quarters, from many voices, the call of your kind. It is the human cry of spirits in bondage, of souls in despair, of lives debased and doomed. It is the call of man to his brother ... such is your vocation; follow the voice that calls you in the name of God and of man. The time is short, the opportunity is great; therefore, crowd the hours with the best that is in you."
Can you imagine a university president delivering a speech like that today?
Universities are meant to shape whole people, to enrich their lives and ways of thinking about the world, and to help them become better citizens (and not just in the fake get a Fulbright to be a do gooder featured on the school website then go to work at McKinsey way). If universities refuse to teach the humanities in a rigorous and meaningful way, the whole project of the university is largely pointless.
I am somewhat optimistic that we may be reaching a tipping point in the humanities crisis. Getting a computer science or STEM degree is no longer a sure way to secure a job because of AI, and I think there is a hunger for people with a command of the humanities. Serious humanities thinkers are like the last keepers of ancient scrolls, preserving a dying language and religion. And maybe people will want a revival.
You hit the nail on the head. All computer science allows you to do is catalogue and keep track of knowledge. It does not create knowledge. Now that AI allows a scholar to quickly research existing knowledge he can take it from there and create new poetry, historical analysis, novels etc. And the creation of knowledge is what the humanities are all about. But to put the current situation in perspective, the battle over knowledge for knowledge’s sake is as ancient as time. It was certainly all the rage when I attended Georgetown in the early 1960s . Then it was the Classics Department vs The Foreign Service School and modern languages vs Latin and Greek. The Foreign Service School won. But the wheel of time turns and Ancient Rome and Latin are now the rage because in our current interconnected world with clashing cultures, if not civilizations, the Roman Empire seems relevant. How do we choose an Emperor? Or do we let the Senate choose the Executive and for what term. What is the role of the military in governance. Are there barbarians at the gate and if do we placate them or attempt to destroy them? Computer Science cannot even pose these questions much less discuss them rationally as Elon Musk is discovering. As a product of an excellent humanities education, I look forward to the future where humanities again becomes the dominant college experience. You get that FIRST, then specialize, Doctor, lawyer, scientist. The humanities provide the basis for the development of critical thinking skills, otherwise you are merely a techie blundering around like Musk’s Doge teens and twenty somethings destroying civilized government. And reap a terrible backlash.
I don't think fighting back against Trump is a great option for universities. They just don't have any cards. And Trump loves to fight, it always ends up helping him when people fight. Better to lay low and support the justice system against his efforts to subvert it. And encourage congress to act.
I think the humanities are in a mess of their own making. They have lacked faith for a long time which has allowed trendy political bullshit to take over. It has little to do with Trump. I agree with Jonathan Haidt that universities are making students weak and depressed, and I agree with the right that universities radicalize students to the left. Neither is good. I remember sneering at conservatives talking about "viewpoint diversity" circa 2015. But they were right, there should be more viewpoint diversity.
This was a wonderful piece, Ross. A vital tension is that being principled is inherently risky, and university leaders are increasingly opposed to risk. In part because universities like Yale sit atop so much money it creates risk aversion (despite the fact those finances would create the ability to weather risk, except it would shrink the 'value of the institution'). So I'm not sure they believe in nothing. It's worse: they believe in good fiscal mangment at the expense of everything else.
It's not too hard to defend the humanities in principle. Difficulties begin when you try to defend them in practice, given their current state as academic disciplines. You want to tell me that "reading books, learning languages, or understanding history" is highly beneficial to a human being. Few people would disagree. Now explain to me how THIS particular department (take a humanities department at a reasonably fancy school of your choice) is actually furthering those goals, above and beyond what could reasonably be accomplished by frequenting a public library and watching informative YouTube videos. Be specific: "My students were asked to read this, and then we discussed that, and then they wrote about this other thing [did they? or did ChatGPT write their essays?], and this was beneficial because of XYZ." As soon as you get specific, you start running into trouble.
I’m surprised you aren’t addressing the impossibility of a woke university defending itself against the government shutting down speech. What is she going to say? “Students must be free to defend Palestine liberation! Only white men, racists, transphobes, misogynists, and conservatives should not be allowed to speak!”
It seems to me that the university system has become so anti-free speech, so monocultural, that the collapse that we all warned about - including you, I thought - has finally inevitably happened.
All other rights flow from free speech. In the end it’s the only thing I care about. But the insanely censorious Yale that existed in October last year didn’t have that. Protecting Palestinian protests - and them alone - from censor doesn’t get us there. “They’re still shouting down all non-woke speakers and firing professors for wrongthink, but at least Hamas supporters can speak freely!” Is not second place.
I mean, you already nailed it: These people largely don’t really believe in anything except their own power and privileges. The minority that do have deeper moral commitments are by and large committed to noxious, arcane and unpopular ideologies whose principles don’t command broad support.
And that’s really the crux of the problem - support. It would be one thing if universities retained widespread legitimacy in our society as the impartial guardians of knowledge and scholarship they are supposed to be. To say that they have squandered this legitimacy in recent decades would be an understatement. If the President of Columbia came out tomorrow with a ringing defense of the right to protest and of academic freedom, at least half the country would roll their eyes as they recalled the vast litany of incidents from recent years where universities allowed unpopular speech to be suppressed on spurious grounds, persecuted professors and students who dared to contravene certain orthodoxies, and committed themselves to policies such as requiring “diversity statements” (ie DEI loyalty oaths) from job applicants. There is a reason why Trump isn’t getting a lot of pushback in his unprecedented assault on higher education, and that’s because higher education threw away the institutional legitimacy that would have been their best defense against this years ago in the service of ideological and political agendas that have little or nothing to do with the impartial quest for knowledge and its preservation (and are, in fact, antithetical to those purposes).
It’s not so much that Trump has weakened higher education as it is that higher education weakened itself. Trump is merely taking advantage of this. The reason it hasn’t mounted a serious defense is that the nominal leaders of our institutions of higher education are fundamentally demoralized, and not only by Trump. Much of academia long ago traded any true passion for higher learning for a careerist mindset that cared more about social status and advancement than knowledge for its own sake. So much of the cancel culture pervading universities has been waged with just that purpose in mind, rather than any sincere intent to make the world better. The point has been to undermine rivals and climb the academic career ladder. They can’t defend higher education because they don’t really believe in it themselves. When what they care most about isn’t the pursuit of knowledge per se, but rather their own power and positions, then of course they’ll cave to anyone credibly threatening those things.
"The humanities are the last bulwark against the erosion of the inner life. A world where the humanities barely exist and aren’t taken seriously is one of decadence and spiritual exhaustion."
A great Yale Alumnus, William F. Buckley, once wrote (but never delivered) the following lines as part of his Class Day Oration, and which more than anything presents a vision of the humanities in general and Yale in particular that would meet accord with the feeling of the nation. Had McInnis not only been capable of believing along those terms but actually did so, she might have felt she had something to say.
"Is OUR EFFORT to achieve perspective all the more difficult by virtue of our having gone to Yale? In many respects it is, because the university does not actively aid us in forming an enlightened synthesis. That job is for us to perform: to reject those notions that do not square with the enlightenment that should be ours as moral, educated men, beneficiaries of centuries of historical experience. Yale has given us much. Not least is an awesome responsibility to withstand her barrage, to emerge from her halls with both feet on the ground, with a sane head and a reinforced set of values. If our landing is accomplished, we are stronger men for our flight.
Keenly aware, then, of the vast deficiencies in American life today-the suffering, the injustice, the want-we must nevertheless spend our greatest efforts, it seems to me, in preserving the framework that supports the vaster bounties that make our country an oasis of freedom and prosperity. Our concern for deficiencies in America must not cause us to indict the principles that have allowed our country, its faults notwithstanding, to tower over the nations of the world as a citadel of freedom and wealth. With what severity and strength we can muster, we must punch the gasbag of cynicism and skepticism, and thank providence for what we have and must retain. Our distillation of the ideas, concepts, and theories expounded at Yale must serve to enhance our devotion to the good in what we have, to reinforce our allegiance to our principles, to convince us that our outlook is positive: that the retention of the best features of our way of life is the most enlightened and noble of goals. Insofar as the phrase 'For God, for Country, and for Yale' is meaningful, we need not be embarrassed to mean 'For God as we know Him, for country as we know it, and for Yale as we have known her.'"
Great article! Perhaps the universities themselves have to make internal changes in order to reasonably justify even fighting for themselves? Is it possible that the presidents are so spineless because their circles have all become subservient to the whims of the politics that has taken root in the humanities? And has so far refused to leave
Yes. But this is such a deep problem. The entire leadership class we have been forming is worthless when called to actually lead. The question is not just why are the leaders failing, but why did we elevate them to these positions in the first place? What was the system that made this quisling the president? The entire system has been run for quite some time with no values at all, and we are now reaping the consequence.
Also, yes to the muscular humanities. Yes to the muscular anything, frankly. For many years now, I can’t think of any other way of putting it—the progressive movement glamorizes weakness. It also has had a completely imaginary conception of what power is and how to wield it. Are the results surprising to anyone?
I'd love to include a college entrance essay question on when a student in question displayed courage. Did they ever stand up for a cause that was unpopular among their friends? Did they argue on behalf of someone that was being insulted by their group? Did they do something that might have hurt them in the short term, because it was the right thing to do in the long term? We've systematically raised a generation of leaders that can't fathom doing anything that would halt their career trajectory. It starts in school, making sure there's no threat to that elite college admission, and continues right through a career, when it's practically a badge of honor to cause no trouble, make no waves, and ride the consensus to riches and social status. We all need to start celebrating the troublemakers who are busy trying to make things better, even it hurts their individual prospects. Because right now, most of our leaders are as self-absorbed and greedy as Trump, but have the manners to hide that.
I have come to really distrust the autodidact, even if it seems theoretically virtuous. With no tradition of argument and debate, of being accountable to defend one's ideas, you run into arrogance and a lack of genuine humility in the face of the work, and people who are like the Comic Book Guy joke, pedantically demanding fealty to his authority because he knows arcane and useless facts. Reading, writing, understanding how narrative works, how history or any kind of human endeavor involves sifting and sorting and sequencing to be intelligible, which inevitably leads to cuts and changes and shifts, is inherently valuable for a lot of reasons, but except with rare cases of a powerful intellect checking its own work relentlessly and consciously troubling to participate in intellectual life, you get rigidity instead of flexibility, and resistance instead of exploration.
Very interesting! May I suggest that you elaborate on this further in one fashion or another. That could be a sequel substack piece or fleshing this out into 170 or so page book / manifesto. Or it could mean conducting an online class/seminar that has, say, 4-6 sessions which people could pay to register for. Each session could have the first hour where you elaborate on this, with the attendees having been required to read something in advance. Then the second hour could be you responding to Q/A from those registered. Or some variation of this. In any case, keep going.
I think its a two-fold problem. One, those leading academic institutions are not fighters, by selection or predisposition. Not outside their little academic bubble anyway. And if you are going to stand up to this administration publicly, you better be a fighter.
And even if they were, I don't know if they really know what they are selling. They know how to pitch donors and keep cash coming in. That's been their job for many years. Pitching the public writ large on the inherent value of these institutions (outside of hard STEM disciplines) is a much different task. Especially when the average member of the American public has seen tuition go up like 400% over inflation over the last 40 years. That better be a damn compelling value proposition. Not the usual tropes of "oh, we produce better citizens", "well, you have a better inner life with some humanities exposure" and so on (although I agree with all that). That's way too wishy washy.
I actually think universities face a turnaround/restructuring type of challenge. The old business model is going to need to change. They gotta get leaner, pass the bulk of that on to consumers, deliver more tangible value and get back to basics of knowledge formation and transfer. And they need to do it quickly.
I'm not sure it can be done at scale. I think the humanities in particular are going to fragment to some degree. You are already seeing it. Really smart people leaving the academy and popping up in all sorts of other little microculture places. Stripping it down to very basics of higher education. The master teaching the apprentice type of set-up.
I agree with your eloquent case for more relevant and muscular humanities, but would suggest that maybe university leadership isn't stepping up to defend the non-STEM side of things because so much of the present faddish state of it has become indefensible...? A lot of programs really are rotted out with little or nothing left to offer, regardless of whatever reassuring rhetoric a talented fundraiser might be able to muster. In my experience non-quantitative academia has already done more to devastate itself than Trump-Vance could even contemplate. The way forward is probably less a food fight with the executive branch than getting back to rich meaningful timeless work that's relevant beyond a few hundred cosseted specialists who won't read each other's journal articles, either.
That was my thought as well. No one stood up for the real humanities when it was taken over by a despicable identarian hate cult. Why would they stand up for the usurper?
I was an English major thirty years ago and things were already going sideways then. Nonetheless, as recently as a dozen years ago I would have still been a sympathetic to universities. Even as I watched my then-girlfriend get a doctorate from a prestigious program in Comp Lit despite having no real ability to read anything but English, which she assured me was the norm. Now I'm enjoying watching academia burn. Hopefully something useful can rise from the ashes.
Meanwhile, so many of the greatest novelists of the 20th century didn't even go to college, let alone get MFAs. Now we have a firehose of well-credentialed sewage. How essential universities are to the production and appreciation of great literature is questionable at best.
I agree with you that there has been much deterioration of the tradition of rigorous questioning within elite universities, but might this moment of stress might serve as a catalyst for the right leader to tack her institution towards a healthier vision? Outside of government, these institutions are the most powerful actors directed by a mission that supersedes the accumulation of wealth (in theory). They have deep political connections, huge endowments, and a significant talent pool. While they may have failed to live up to their ideals, perhaps this moment can remind them of their causa sui and inspire them to take a genuine stand for furthering humanity’s understanding of the world and the self.
Despite our country’s history of falling far short on our own ideals of freedom and liberty for all, we continue working towards her ever-greater realization. Perhaps we could extend this same belief and effort to these institutions.
I grew up a bookish lad near the bucolic campus of Washington University, which has some very picturesque gothic-looking buildings with ivy growing up the sides. I assumed I'd probably become an academic, perhaps in classics, and idealized that world. And then at Brown, then covering a variety of academics for PBS news, and then in many years at Columbia I became pretty disillusioned about higher ed. Like many other sprawling institutions elite universities have fallen prey to their own institutional imperatives to grow and grow, so the leader is often pretty limited to just smoothing things over and trying to keep the cash flowing and all the stakeholders happy--the vision becomes pretty peripheral to the day-to-day sausagemaking.
So it was humbling to attend the Heterodox Academy conference last summer in Chicago, it was a whole ballroom full of the sort of thinkers I'd hoped to meet a higher concentration of throughout my career, and gave me more hope that at least pockets of academia can yet be salvaged. But I think that's likelier to come from insurgents and upstarts making moves than the elite institutions that are like Gulliver pinned down by throngs of Lilliputians... maybe Dartmouth as the smallest and flintiest of the Ivies, but I wouldn't bet on it!
Quoting David Brooks quoting Princeton President John Hibben's 1913 address to students here..."You, enlightened, self-sufficient, self-governed, endowed with gifts above your fellows, the world expects you to produce as well as to consume, to add to and not to subtract from its store of good, to build up and not tear down, to ennoble and not degrade. It commands you to take your place and to fight your fight in the name of honor and of chivalry, against the powers of organized evil and of commercialized vice, against the poverty, disease, and death which follow fast in the wake of sin and ignorance, against all the innumerable forces which are working to destroy the image of God in man, and unleash the passions of the beast. There comes to you from many quarters, from many voices, the call of your kind. It is the human cry of spirits in bondage, of souls in despair, of lives debased and doomed. It is the call of man to his brother ... such is your vocation; follow the voice that calls you in the name of God and of man. The time is short, the opportunity is great; therefore, crowd the hours with the best that is in you."
(From this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-organization-kid/302164/)
----
Can you imagine a university president delivering a speech like that today?
Universities are meant to shape whole people, to enrich their lives and ways of thinking about the world, and to help them become better citizens (and not just in the fake get a Fulbright to be a do gooder featured on the school website then go to work at McKinsey way). If universities refuse to teach the humanities in a rigorous and meaningful way, the whole project of the university is largely pointless.
I am somewhat optimistic that we may be reaching a tipping point in the humanities crisis. Getting a computer science or STEM degree is no longer a sure way to secure a job because of AI, and I think there is a hunger for people with a command of the humanities. Serious humanities thinkers are like the last keepers of ancient scrolls, preserving a dying language and religion. And maybe people will want a revival.
You hit the nail on the head. All computer science allows you to do is catalogue and keep track of knowledge. It does not create knowledge. Now that AI allows a scholar to quickly research existing knowledge he can take it from there and create new poetry, historical analysis, novels etc. And the creation of knowledge is what the humanities are all about. But to put the current situation in perspective, the battle over knowledge for knowledge’s sake is as ancient as time. It was certainly all the rage when I attended Georgetown in the early 1960s . Then it was the Classics Department vs The Foreign Service School and modern languages vs Latin and Greek. The Foreign Service School won. But the wheel of time turns and Ancient Rome and Latin are now the rage because in our current interconnected world with clashing cultures, if not civilizations, the Roman Empire seems relevant. How do we choose an Emperor? Or do we let the Senate choose the Executive and for what term. What is the role of the military in governance. Are there barbarians at the gate and if do we placate them or attempt to destroy them? Computer Science cannot even pose these questions much less discuss them rationally as Elon Musk is discovering. As a product of an excellent humanities education, I look forward to the future where humanities again becomes the dominant college experience. You get that FIRST, then specialize, Doctor, lawyer, scientist. The humanities provide the basis for the development of critical thinking skills, otherwise you are merely a techie blundering around like Musk’s Doge teens and twenty somethings destroying civilized government. And reap a terrible backlash.
I don't think fighting back against Trump is a great option for universities. They just don't have any cards. And Trump loves to fight, it always ends up helping him when people fight. Better to lay low and support the justice system against his efforts to subvert it. And encourage congress to act.
I think the humanities are in a mess of their own making. They have lacked faith for a long time which has allowed trendy political bullshit to take over. It has little to do with Trump. I agree with Jonathan Haidt that universities are making students weak and depressed, and I agree with the right that universities radicalize students to the left. Neither is good. I remember sneering at conservatives talking about "viewpoint diversity" circa 2015. But they were right, there should be more viewpoint diversity.
Excellent! May every college president read this essay.
Solid article.
This was a wonderful piece, Ross. A vital tension is that being principled is inherently risky, and university leaders are increasingly opposed to risk. In part because universities like Yale sit atop so much money it creates risk aversion (despite the fact those finances would create the ability to weather risk, except it would shrink the 'value of the institution'). So I'm not sure they believe in nothing. It's worse: they believe in good fiscal mangment at the expense of everything else.
It's not too hard to defend the humanities in principle. Difficulties begin when you try to defend them in practice, given their current state as academic disciplines. You want to tell me that "reading books, learning languages, or understanding history" is highly beneficial to a human being. Few people would disagree. Now explain to me how THIS particular department (take a humanities department at a reasonably fancy school of your choice) is actually furthering those goals, above and beyond what could reasonably be accomplished by frequenting a public library and watching informative YouTube videos. Be specific: "My students were asked to read this, and then we discussed that, and then they wrote about this other thing [did they? or did ChatGPT write their essays?], and this was beneficial because of XYZ." As soon as you get specific, you start running into trouble.
Exactly. I love the humanities as a subject, I detest it as an academic discipline.
I’m surprised you aren’t addressing the impossibility of a woke university defending itself against the government shutting down speech. What is she going to say? “Students must be free to defend Palestine liberation! Only white men, racists, transphobes, misogynists, and conservatives should not be allowed to speak!”
It seems to me that the university system has become so anti-free speech, so monocultural, that the collapse that we all warned about - including you, I thought - has finally inevitably happened.
All other rights flow from free speech. In the end it’s the only thing I care about. But the insanely censorious Yale that existed in October last year didn’t have that. Protecting Palestinian protests - and them alone - from censor doesn’t get us there. “They’re still shouting down all non-woke speakers and firing professors for wrongthink, but at least Hamas supporters can speak freely!” Is not second place.
I mean, you already nailed it: These people largely don’t really believe in anything except their own power and privileges. The minority that do have deeper moral commitments are by and large committed to noxious, arcane and unpopular ideologies whose principles don’t command broad support.
And that’s really the crux of the problem - support. It would be one thing if universities retained widespread legitimacy in our society as the impartial guardians of knowledge and scholarship they are supposed to be. To say that they have squandered this legitimacy in recent decades would be an understatement. If the President of Columbia came out tomorrow with a ringing defense of the right to protest and of academic freedom, at least half the country would roll their eyes as they recalled the vast litany of incidents from recent years where universities allowed unpopular speech to be suppressed on spurious grounds, persecuted professors and students who dared to contravene certain orthodoxies, and committed themselves to policies such as requiring “diversity statements” (ie DEI loyalty oaths) from job applicants. There is a reason why Trump isn’t getting a lot of pushback in his unprecedented assault on higher education, and that’s because higher education threw away the institutional legitimacy that would have been their best defense against this years ago in the service of ideological and political agendas that have little or nothing to do with the impartial quest for knowledge and its preservation (and are, in fact, antithetical to those purposes).
It’s not so much that Trump has weakened higher education as it is that higher education weakened itself. Trump is merely taking advantage of this. The reason it hasn’t mounted a serious defense is that the nominal leaders of our institutions of higher education are fundamentally demoralized, and not only by Trump. Much of academia long ago traded any true passion for higher learning for a careerist mindset that cared more about social status and advancement than knowledge for its own sake. So much of the cancel culture pervading universities has been waged with just that purpose in mind, rather than any sincere intent to make the world better. The point has been to undermine rivals and climb the academic career ladder. They can’t defend higher education because they don’t really believe in it themselves. When what they care most about isn’t the pursuit of knowledge per se, but rather their own power and positions, then of course they’ll cave to anyone credibly threatening those things.
"The humanities are the last bulwark against the erosion of the inner life. A world where the humanities barely exist and aren’t taken seriously is one of decadence and spiritual exhaustion."
May Ross give the commencement speech!
A great Yale Alumnus, William F. Buckley, once wrote (but never delivered) the following lines as part of his Class Day Oration, and which more than anything presents a vision of the humanities in general and Yale in particular that would meet accord with the feeling of the nation. Had McInnis not only been capable of believing along those terms but actually did so, she might have felt she had something to say.
"Is OUR EFFORT to achieve perspective all the more difficult by virtue of our having gone to Yale? In many respects it is, because the university does not actively aid us in forming an enlightened synthesis. That job is for us to perform: to reject those notions that do not square with the enlightenment that should be ours as moral, educated men, beneficiaries of centuries of historical experience. Yale has given us much. Not least is an awesome responsibility to withstand her barrage, to emerge from her halls with both feet on the ground, with a sane head and a reinforced set of values. If our landing is accomplished, we are stronger men for our flight.
Keenly aware, then, of the vast deficiencies in American life today-the suffering, the injustice, the want-we must nevertheless spend our greatest efforts, it seems to me, in preserving the framework that supports the vaster bounties that make our country an oasis of freedom and prosperity. Our concern for deficiencies in America must not cause us to indict the principles that have allowed our country, its faults notwithstanding, to tower over the nations of the world as a citadel of freedom and wealth. With what severity and strength we can muster, we must punch the gasbag of cynicism and skepticism, and thank providence for what we have and must retain. Our distillation of the ideas, concepts, and theories expounded at Yale must serve to enhance our devotion to the good in what we have, to reinforce our allegiance to our principles, to convince us that our outlook is positive: that the retention of the best features of our way of life is the most enlightened and noble of goals. Insofar as the phrase 'For God, for Country, and for Yale' is meaningful, we need not be embarrassed to mean 'For God as we know Him, for country as we know it, and for Yale as we have known her.'"
Great article! Perhaps the universities themselves have to make internal changes in order to reasonably justify even fighting for themselves? Is it possible that the presidents are so spineless because their circles have all become subservient to the whims of the politics that has taken root in the humanities? And has so far refused to leave
Yes. But this is such a deep problem. The entire leadership class we have been forming is worthless when called to actually lead. The question is not just why are the leaders failing, but why did we elevate them to these positions in the first place? What was the system that made this quisling the president? The entire system has been run for quite some time with no values at all, and we are now reaping the consequence.
Also, yes to the muscular humanities. Yes to the muscular anything, frankly. For many years now, I can’t think of any other way of putting it—the progressive movement glamorizes weakness. It also has had a completely imaginary conception of what power is and how to wield it. Are the results surprising to anyone?
I'd love to include a college entrance essay question on when a student in question displayed courage. Did they ever stand up for a cause that was unpopular among their friends? Did they argue on behalf of someone that was being insulted by their group? Did they do something that might have hurt them in the short term, because it was the right thing to do in the long term? We've systematically raised a generation of leaders that can't fathom doing anything that would halt their career trajectory. It starts in school, making sure there's no threat to that elite college admission, and continues right through a career, when it's practically a badge of honor to cause no trouble, make no waves, and ride the consensus to riches and social status. We all need to start celebrating the troublemakers who are busy trying to make things better, even it hurts their individual prospects. Because right now, most of our leaders are as self-absorbed and greedy as Trump, but have the manners to hide that.
I have come to really distrust the autodidact, even if it seems theoretically virtuous. With no tradition of argument and debate, of being accountable to defend one's ideas, you run into arrogance and a lack of genuine humility in the face of the work, and people who are like the Comic Book Guy joke, pedantically demanding fealty to his authority because he knows arcane and useless facts. Reading, writing, understanding how narrative works, how history or any kind of human endeavor involves sifting and sorting and sequencing to be intelligible, which inevitably leads to cuts and changes and shifts, is inherently valuable for a lot of reasons, but except with rare cases of a powerful intellect checking its own work relentlessly and consciously troubling to participate in intellectual life, you get rigidity instead of flexibility, and resistance instead of exploration.
Very interesting! May I suggest that you elaborate on this further in one fashion or another. That could be a sequel substack piece or fleshing this out into 170 or so page book / manifesto. Or it could mean conducting an online class/seminar that has, say, 4-6 sessions which people could pay to register for. Each session could have the first hour where you elaborate on this, with the attendees having been required to read something in advance. Then the second hour could be you responding to Q/A from those registered. Or some variation of this. In any case, keep going.
I think its a two-fold problem. One, those leading academic institutions are not fighters, by selection or predisposition. Not outside their little academic bubble anyway. And if you are going to stand up to this administration publicly, you better be a fighter.
And even if they were, I don't know if they really know what they are selling. They know how to pitch donors and keep cash coming in. That's been their job for many years. Pitching the public writ large on the inherent value of these institutions (outside of hard STEM disciplines) is a much different task. Especially when the average member of the American public has seen tuition go up like 400% over inflation over the last 40 years. That better be a damn compelling value proposition. Not the usual tropes of "oh, we produce better citizens", "well, you have a better inner life with some humanities exposure" and so on (although I agree with all that). That's way too wishy washy.
I actually think universities face a turnaround/restructuring type of challenge. The old business model is going to need to change. They gotta get leaner, pass the bulk of that on to consumers, deliver more tangible value and get back to basics of knowledge formation and transfer. And they need to do it quickly.
I'm not sure it can be done at scale. I think the humanities in particular are going to fragment to some degree. You are already seeing it. Really smart people leaving the academy and popping up in all sorts of other little microculture places. Stripping it down to very basics of higher education. The master teaching the apprentice type of set-up.