Abstract
During the 1980s, a neoconservative cultural counterrevolution organized in response to the previous two decades of political turmoil and intellectual ferment, which had resulted in the emergence of a strong academic left in American universities. The cultural counterrevolution began with several acts of academic repression designed to purge some of the most prominent leftists from academia, although this repression mostly took other forms during the 1980s. The intellectual leaders of this counterrevolution included figures such as Ronald Reagan, William J. Bennett, Allan Bloom, John Silber, and Roger Kimball. However, the neoconservative critique advanced by these individuals was quickly embraced as policy by national-state institutions, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education. The counterrevolution was also aggressively implemented through nonprofit organizations such as Accuracy in Academia and the National Association of Scholars.
On April 17, 2024, pro-Palestinian students established an encampment of approximately fifty tents at Columbia University. The protest site was named the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, where students began demanding that the university divest from assets and companies that supported Israel’s war on Gaza. Within three weeks, pro-Palestinian protests had spread across the United States and, by May 8, 2024, more than 2,700 persons at fifty-five universities in twenty-six states, mostly students and faculty, had been arrested or detained. Many of the students and faculty were badly beaten in acts of violence that were mostly initiated by police, while encampments were decimated by overwhelming police force (New York Times 2024). The police violence has been openly lauded by neoconservative and Far Right politicians, with some university presidents being praised for their immediately violent response to student protesters (see, for example, Despart and Salhotra 2024). At the same time, student and faculty protesters have been portrayed as terrorists and as a threat to the academic freedom of other students and faculty, who claim to feel unsafe despite the generally peaceful nature of the protests.
This article suggests that the violent response by university administrators and state officials is the much-anticipated culmination of a cultural counterrevolution with deep roots that go back to the 1980s. During the 1980s, the emerging neoconservative movement constructed a narrative of universities as institutions that had been overrun by intolerant left-wing professors who were polluting the minds of impressionable undergraduate students with anti-Christian, anti-Western, anticapitalist, and anti-American ideas. Universities were portrayed as threats to the continued existence of Christianity, Western civilization, capitalism, and the US Constitution. Thus, during this time, a new cadre of highly aggressive university administrators began resurrecting what I call a managerial concept of academic freedom, which largely portrayed the Left’s exercise of academic freedom as a licentious threat to the responsible exercise of academic freedom by other faculty and students. On both counts, the rhetoric of threat and academic freedom has been invoked during the recent spate of pro-Palestinian protests on US campuses. Consequently, I suggest that the intellectual rationalization for a violent response to university protests in 2024 has been in preparation by right-wing neoconservatives for the last four decades.
The intellectual leaders of this counterrevolution included figures such as Ronald Reagan, William J. Bennett, Allan Bloom, John Silber, Charles Sykes, and Roger Kimball. However, the neoconservative critique advanced by these individuals was embraced as policy by national-state institutions, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the US Department of Education. The counterrevolution was also aggressively implemented through nonprofit organizations such as Accuracy in Academia and the National Association of Scholars. Thus, the 1980s set in motion a cultural counterrevolution that is still underway.
Political Origins of the Neoconservative Cultural Counterrevolution
The neoconservative cultural counterrevolution originates in the 1980s as a response to the previous two decades of political turmoil and intellectual ferment, which had resulted in the emergence of a strong—although far from hegemonic—academic Left in American universities. The cultural counterrevolution began with several acts of academic repression designed to purge some of the most prominent leftists from academia. While most people associate repression of the academic Left with the early history of the modern American university (1890–1920) (Barrow 1990, chaps. 7–8)1 or with the McCarthy era (1950s), academic repression has been a recurring phenomenon in the United States. Academic repression surges when corporate and political elites feel threatened by internal or external challenges to the capitalist system (Schrecker 1986). Consequently, the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s witnessed another cycle of academic repression, which resulted in the termination, dismissal, or departure under duress of many leftist professors, including Samuel Bowles, Michael Parenti, Kenneth Dolbeare, Henry Giroux, Carl Boggs, Angela Davis, Marlene Dixon, Joel Samoff, Paul Piccone, and many of the critical legal scholars, such as Daniel K. Tarullo, David M. Trubek, and Clare Dalton.
In a historical survey of these cases, Michael Parenti observes that “one could add many more instances from just about every discipline including political science, economics, anthropology, literature, history, sociology, psychology and even physics, mathematics, chemistry, and musicology” (Parenti 2010: 116; see also Jacoby 1987; Kaplan and Schrecker 1983). During this time, the traditional targets of academic repression—political science, economics, and sociology—expanded dramatically to encompass animal rights activist-scholars, radical ecologists, and critics of bioengineering in fields such as environmental science, biology, biochemistry, and medicine, while the targets also came to encompass proponents of radical feminism, gay, lesbian, and transgender studies, ethnic studies, Black studies, and area studies. The result was that the old Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s were conjoined to a Green Scare, Pink Scare, Brown Scare, Black Scare, and Yellow Scare—a veritable rainbow of right-wing hate campaigns (Nocella, Best, and McLaren 2010).
With Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the White House in 1981, a new conservative movement was gaining momentum in the media and popular culture, so that a dark cloud of crisis loomed over American universities as faculty contemplated the prospect of another ideological purge on campuses across the United States. Academic leftists remembered Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign promise to “clean up the mess at Berkeley” (Kerr 2001: 288) In fact, Reagan successfully removed former University of California (UC) system president Clark Kerr from office and then, against the promises of the UC Berkeley chancellor, used force to suppress student dissent.2 In what came to be known as Bloody Thursday, Reagan ordered Berkeley police officers and California highway patrol officers to clear Peoples’ Park of all student protesters beginning at 4:30 a.m. on May 15, 1969. As the confrontation turned violent, Reagan called on the National Guard to finish the job (Van Niekerken 2019). In effect, Reagan had launched his political career with a violent attack on the academic Left.
Reagan’s assault on the academic Left played into a wider cultural counterrevolution that had begun to pick up steam as the student movement, civil rights movement, and antiwar movement began to wind down in the 1970s. A key triggering event was the Great Recession of 1974–75, which marked the end of the New Deal in the United States and the beginnings of a crisis of the Keynesian Welfare State (KWS) (Eckstein 1978; O’Connor 1973; Habermas 1975; Offe 1984). The American university had become a key component of the welfare state—a cornerstone of its ideological state apparatus—and so the Great Recession also marked the beginnings of a protracted and still ongoing fiscal crisis in American higher education.3
The Committee for Economic Development (1973: 7), a corporate policy planning organization, summarized the emerging crisis in a report entitled The Management and Financing of Colleges:
The era of campus violence seems to have passed. Students are no longer locking up administrators, burning buildings, or engaging in strikes. But the crisis in higher education is not over. Many colleges and universities are in financial trouble. Many students are still dissatisfied with some aspects of higher education. Professional pride is not keeping faculty members from joining unions. Society meanwhile is reassessing the relative value of a college education. There is skepticism because a college degree is no longer ready assurance of a job. There is also evidence of reordering the place of higher education in the scale of national priorities as legislators question expenditures for this purpose.
The CED’s assessment was echoed by the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education (1975: 1), which concluded that rising costs, shrinking revenues, and a leveling of enrollments in higher education had combined to generate “the greatest overall and long-run rate of decline in its growth patterns in all of its history.” Suddenly, open faculty positions became scarce in the United States, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. Clark Kerr (1975: 1), former president of the University of California system—the architect of the contemporary multiversity—who was now chair of the Carnegie Commission, declared that “seldom has so great an American institution passed so quickly from its Golden Age to its Age of Survival.” By 1980, the sociologist Barbara Ann Scott (1983) concluded that higher education had entered a new era of “crisis management” as administrators grappled with the convergence of fiscal, legitimation, and rationality crises of the university.4
Republican state legislatures were already becoming less inclined to fund higher education, and this made university administrators increasingly wary of offending them. However, the idea that universities had been overrun by Marxists and other radicals fueled a particularly aggressive attack on university faculties by neoconservatives, who greatly exaggerated the presence of radicals in American universities. Yet, for this reason, academic radicals were seen as an exceptionally powerful threat to the traditional American values of free-market capitalism, limited government, and Judeo-Christian (evangelical) religious morality. Over half of US high school graduates were now attending colleges and universities with the understanding that they would graduate into positions of government, business, community, and cultural leadership. Thus, neoconservatives sought to reestablish what they perceived as the waning intellectual hegemony of an unholy alliance between God, Western civilization, and capitalism—often in that order.
The election of Ronald Reagan as US president in 1980 welded together a coalition of the Republican Party’s traditional corporate-oriented economic libertarians with a mass base of Protestant evangelicals and neoconservative culture warriors, with many of the latter influenced by the political philosophy of Leo Strauss (Deutsch and Murley 1999; Drury 1997). As US president, Ronald Reagan fired another shot across the bow of the academic Left when the National Commission on Excellence in Education released its final report, A Nation at Risk (1983). The National Commission on Excellence in Education was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and was chaired by David Gardner, the incoming president of the University of California system. After eighteen months of public hearings and deliberations, the commission released its report, declaring,
Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. . . . We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. . . . If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. . . . We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983: 1)
In a preview of what lay ahead, the report concluded that “our society and its educational institutions seem to have lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling, and of the high expectations and disciplined effort needed to attain them” (1). While much of the NCEE report focused on the problems of economic competitiveness—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)—and the need to place renewed emphasis on these fields of study, the commission nevertheless noted,
Our concern, however, goes well beyond matters such as industry and commerce. It also includes the intellectual, moral, and spiritual strengths of our people which knit together the very fabric of our society. . . . A high level of shared education is essential to a free, democratic society and to the fostering of a common culture, especially in a country that prides itself on pluralism and individual freedom. (2)
Thus, the NCEE report also suggested that a fundamental purpose of higher education was to preserve and transmit a “common culture,” and this indictment of the higher educational system was aimed directly at the social sciences and humanities. It raised the question of how to maintain the national unity of a capitalist social formation that was now splintering along lines of class, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, region, and citizenship status. In this regard, Nicos Poulantzas (1978: 47n17) observes that the general function of the state is the “maintenance of a formation’s unity.” Poulantzas emphasizes that
the state’s economic or ideological functions correspond to the political interests of the dominant class and constitute political functions . . . where the object of these functions is the maintenance of the unity of the formation, inside which this class is the politically dominant class. It is to the extent that the prime object of these functions is the maintenance of this unity that they [i.e., the functions and modalities of the state] correspond to the political interests of the dominant class. (54)
The American state was now engaged in an effort to restabilize the capitalist social formation after nearly two decades of ideological dissent, economic turmoil, and political rebellion.
Intellectual Origins of the Neoconservative Cultural Counterrevolution
E. D. Hirsch Jr., a professor of English at the University of Virginia, brought new focus to this problem when he published an essay on “cultural literacy” in 1983. Hirsch (1983: 159) admonished STEM proponents by declaring that “technical research is not going to remedy the national decline in our literacy that is documented in the decline of verbal SAT scores. . . . The national decline in our literacy has accompanied a decline in our use of common, nationwide materials in the subject most closely connected with literacy, ‘English.’” Hirsch was encouraged to expand his essay into a book by Robert Payton, president of the Exxon Education Foundation, and Diane Ravitch, a neoconservative historian of education and future US assistant secretary of education (1991–93) under President George H. W. Bush. Hirsch (1987: xi) called not just for an improvement in literacy—reading, writing, and arithmetic—but for cultural literacy, which he defined as “the background knowledge necessary for functional literacy and effective national communication.”
In contrast to a theory of education grounded in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey, which emphasize the individual free development of students, Hirsch proposed an anthropological view of education based on the idea that “a human group must have effective communications to function effectively, that effective communications require shared culture, and that shared culture requires transmission of specific information to children” (xvii). Thus, the restoration of national unity required a shared common knowledge base, because informed national dialogue was not possible if large numbers of citizens could not understand the content of the national conversation. In this respect, Hirsch argued that literacy and critical thinking is “no autonomous, empty skill but depends upon literate culture” (xvii). To give content to the concept of cultural literacy, Hirsch proposed a list of more than 4,700 terms, concepts, phrases, persons, events, and places that every culturally literate American should know, which came to be known as “The List” (152–215; see also Hirsch, Kett, and Trefil 1989).
In Hirsch’s defense, he did not offer a particular interpretation or ideological perspective regarding items on The List, but he did insist that a person should know something about these things if one was to participate intelligently in a democratic republic. However, soon after the essay’s publication, Bennett, who was chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), embraced the “The List” concept in an NEH report entitled To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (1984). Hirsch later lamented that “this endorsement from an influential person of conservative views gave my ideas some currency, but such an endorsement was not likely to recommend the concept to liberal thinkers, and in fact the idea of cultural literacy has been attacked by some liberals on the assumption that I must be advocating a list of great books that every child in the land should be forced to read.” Hirsch (1987: xiv) considered this criticism “thoroughly mistaken” and he argued that anyone who read his book would find that it did not attach itself to any particular ideology, historical narrative, or political party. Indeed, Hirsch spent much of the next few years trying to distance himself from Bennett and his neoconservative usurpers (Kimball 1990: 22–29).
In this regard, Hirsch rejected the charge that The List had a conservative bias, because one could find terms such as AFL-CIO, agribusiness, Bolsheviks, William Jennings Bryan, Vladimir I. Lenin, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Fidel Castro, de-Stalinization, Ho Chi Minh, Eastern Establishment, leftist, Communist Manifesto, communism, and socialism that required an informed American to have some knowledge of corporate and class distinctions, Marxism, socialism, and communism. Similarly, Hirsch rejected the charge that The List was sexist, because one could find List entries on terms such as abortion, feminism, Jane Addams, Joan Baez, Susan B. Anthony, and Helen Keller. Hirch also rejected claims that The List was racist, because it included terms such as abolitionism, Chicano, Maya Angelou, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. DuBois, and Nelson Mandela. Finally, one could also find a great number of non-Western terms, places, people, and events on The List with the expectation that a culturally literate American was expected to know something about the rest of the world. Hirsch (1983: 166) even conceded that this “canonical knowledge could not be fixed once and for all. . . . The canon changeth. And in our media-paced era, it might change from month to month—faster at the edges, more slowly at the center.”
“Cultural Literacy” as God, Capitalism, and the American State
Nevertheless, neoconservatives successfully hijacked the concept of cultural literacy and quickly channeled its meaning into a narrowly defined Straussian discourse. In fact, William Bennett played a key role in capturing the concept of cultural literacy for neoconservative political purposes. While an undergraduate at Williams College, Bennett became fascinated with Plato’s philosophy under the tutelage of Laslo Versenyi, who was chair of the ancient and medieval studies program and a proponent of “Socratic humanism” (Versenyi 1963). Bennett went on to study political philosophy under John Silber at the University of Texas. When Silber became president of Boston University, Bennett was recruited to teach philosophy and served as Silber’s assistant. During this time, Bennett’s main scholarly writings were articles published in neoconservative journals like Commentary, Policy Review, and the Public Interest. When the Reagan administration took office, Irving Kristol, editor of the Public Interest, along with other neoconservatives pushed for Bennet to become chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) (Fiske 1985).
Once appointed director of the NEH, Bennett (1984: iii) convened a national study group to review the “state of learning in the humanities in higher education.” The study group included well-known academic neoconservatives such as John Silber, Chester E. Finn Jr., Diane Ravitch, and David Riesman. In his forward to the study group’s final report, To Reclaim a Legacy, Bennett pointed out that in the first years of the Reagan administration “most of the national attention has been directed to elementary and secondary education.” He observed that the federal government’s scrutiny had prodded state and local governments to lead the way in “long overdue” changes to K-12 education, but he noted that “higher education has largely escaped the public’s eye. . . . This situation should and will change.” Bennett insisted that the public, parents, employers, students, and alumni had the right to ask “whether today’s colleges and universities are offering to America’s youth an education worthy of our heritage” (iv).
In To Reclaim a Legacy, Bennett narrowed Hirsch’s concept of cultural literacy to the idea that the study of “Western civilization must take its place at the heart of the college curriculum” (4). Unlike Hirsch, the study group prescribed a mandatory list of great books and authors, which consisted almost entirely of the Straussian great books list of “dead white men” from Plato to the Federalist Papers, but they went on to insist that the Bible is “the basis for so much subsequent history, literature, and philosophy” that it ought to be considered the greatest book of all time (16).5 The study group observed that reestablishing this common curriculum would “depend on faculty competence and interest,” but given the current inclinations of faculty, the study group concluded that “curricular reform must begin with the president” (34). The conclusion was that revitalizing the nation’s higher education institutions would require university presidents with “uncommon courage and discernment” (34). To Reclaim a Legacy made it clear that this was “the challenge of academic leadership” and it opened the door for so-called courageous and discerning presidents (and provosts, deans, and department chairs) to implement and enforce a neoconservative curriculum in the social sciences and humanities (34–36).
To Reclaim a Legacy set off a wave of neoconservative criticism of higher education and, partly as a result of his success at bringing radical faculty into the spotlight, Bennett was promoted to US secretary of education in Reagan’s second term as US president. Roger Kimball (1990: 21), a conservative art critic and social commentator, would observe that “much of this concern [with tenured radicals] originally crystallized around former US secretary of education William J. Bennett’s monograph To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education” (see also Mulcahy 1986). Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) credited Bennett as “the first Secretary to understand the ideological and political possibilities” of the US Department of Education (quoted in Fiske 1985).
Thus, with encouragement and approval from the Reagan administration, neoconservatives mobilized an ideological counterrevolution that included organized groups such as Accuracy in Academia (AIA) and the National Association of Scholars (NAS). Accuracy in Academia was founded in 1985 by Reed Irvine, a former Federal Reserve economist, who headed the organization until his death in 2004. Its first president was Malcolm Lawrence, who graduated from the University of California Davis with a bachelor of arts degree in political science. When AIA was founded, Lawrence claimed there were ten thousand Marxist professors on US college campuses instilling a leftist bias in young minds. The group initially collected one hundred course schedules from mainly public universities to identify courses and professors whose classes would be audited by students recruited by AIA. Lawrence identified radical scholars such as Bertell Ollman (New York University), Howard Zinn (Boston University), and Samuel Bowles (University of Massachusetts Amherst) as “the kind of professor” they intended to monitor and to challenge publicly about their course content. Lawrence indicated that the AIA would focus mainly on courses in sociology, economics, history, and political science, and he also considered the new field of peace studies to be “fertile grounds” for their surveillance (Marshall 1985: 841).
AIA continues to describe itself as a nonprofit research group based in Washington, DC, that wants US universities “to return to their traditional mission—the quest for truth.”6 However, the AIA’s “truth” is narrowly defined in terms of a Western intellectual heritage that unites Christianity, liberal democracy, and laissez-faire capitalism into a seemingly single hyphenated word or concept. AIA claims that university professors “use the classroom and/or university resources to indoctrinate students” with ideas critical of the Western intellectual heritage, and it contends that universities systematically discriminate against conservative students and faculty by violating their academic freedom. However, in contrast to the old McCarthyism that relied on external government investigations and denunciations, the AIA established a new and more sinister form of ideological warfare.
AIA was the first “campus watch” initiative, which set the stage for later organizations, such as David Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom, Academic Watch, and Turning Point USA, which now regularly survey universities from coast-to-coast looking for objectionable, leftist, and un-American thoughts and values in the university curriculum. Many have gone so far as to create and distribute blacklists of ostensibly dangerous or un-American professors (McCarthy and Kamola 2022). AIA also set the precedent for establishing right-wing campus watch groups that send students into classrooms to monitor and report back on any left-wing or radical deviations from conservative orthodoxy, although usually with grossly inaccurate, exaggerated, or false accounts of what actually transpires in the classroom. This surveillance technique constitutes an expansion and deepening of a recurring strategy of terror without violence that I have discussed elsewhere as a well-established intimidation tactic against the Left in US higher education (Barrow 1990: 232–36).
However, as Anthony Nocella II, Steven Best, and Peter McLaren (2010) point out, this new form of social surveillance, as opposed to government surveillance, allows the new guardians of the Right to penetrate deeper into the academy than government agents, Congress, or state legislatures could ever to do in the past because they are able to monitor individual courses, syllabi, and faculty from within the classroom. These two mechanisms of repression are often linked to letter writing campaigns aimed at trustees and senior administrators, media smear campaigns, and organized email assaults designed to embarrass, intimidate, humiliate, discredit, discourage, and isolate faculty who cut against the grain of orthodox right-wing opinion. These campaigns are designed to demonize individual faculty, to discredit dissenting viewpoints or entire fields of study, and to generate an atmosphere of fear and paranoia that can be exploited by its perpetrators. While such tactics may not discourage the brave of heart, Robert Jensen (2010: 168) observes from firsthand experience that these campaigns can have a “chilling effect” on other faculty who are afraid of guilt by association (see also Hunter 1992).
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) was established in 1987 by Herbert I. London, a conservative professor and political activist and Stephen Balch, an associate professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY. London was a professor of history at New York University and a registered Republican who unsuccessfully ran for mayor of New York City (1989), governor of New York (1990), and New York comptroller (1994). He ended his career as president of the conservative Hudson Institute (1997–2011).7 The primary goal of the NAS was to restore what conservatives considered the leading casualties of the campus culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s: the teaching of Western culture and a triumphal interpretation of American history (Cohen 2008).8 The enemies of this intellectual heritage included Marxists, post-structuralists, postmodernists, postcolonialists, and feminists. In contrast to the AIA, which directly targeted individual professors and courses, the NAS largely focused its lobbying efforts on the US Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC, as well as state legislatures, state higher education coordinating boards, and university boards of regents to secure changes in federal and state funding and conservative curriculum mandates and curriculum prohibitions.
By 2019, the NAS claimed only 3,036 dues-paying members, which is a pitifully small proportion of the US professoriate (National Association of Scholars 2019: 19). However, even in its infancy, the NAS was able to wield an intellectual and political influence disproportionate to its support within academia because of its ties to conservative politicians and think tanks, a burgeoning network of right-wing media outlets, and generous funding support from corporate and conservative foundations. The NAS initially received funding from the John M. Olin Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Castle Rock Foundation, and others. During the 1980s, the NAS had direct ties to the Reagan administration through its advisory board, while Chester Finn, an influential neoconservative education policy analyst helped develop its proposed education policies.
The AIA and NAS were the institutional manifestations of a cultural critique that was emerging among neoconservative scholars and journalists and percolating through the broader society through newspaper editorials, magazine articles, talk radio, and television news programs. This critique expressed a growing hostility toward the liberal university, which steadily gained traction during the 1980s, but seems to have reached its apogee during Donald Trump’s US presidential administration, when a 2017 Pew Foundation poll found that 59 percent of Republican and GOP-leaning respondents (conservatives) agreed that “higher education has a negative effect on the direction of the country” (Kreighbaum 2019).9 Scholars and commentators such as Allan Bloom, John Silber, Charles J. Sykes, William Bennett, and Henry I. London fueled the growing neoconservative attack on higher education, which rapidly won adherents in US state and federal governments. This development resulted in university boards of trustees populated by corporate executives and politicians with similar views, and this led to the appointment of increasingly servile university administrators, who were more than willing to police their campuses (literally) than at any time since the McCarthy era.
Allan Bloom, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and a leading Straussian political philosopher, published an unlikely bestseller during this time entitled The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987). The book was an incoherent screed against the rise of “cultural relativism,” which Rolling Stone dismissed as “a pop polemic, a long and tendentious treatise on the decline of the American youth” (Greider 1987). Despite scathing criticism from liberals and the Left, Bloom’s book spent much of the year at number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list (Kimball 1990: 21).
In Bloom’s description of the American university, Marx and Engels (and Foucault) had replaced Plato and Aristotle as centerpieces of the university curriculum. Marx’s Communist Manifesto was held in higher regard than Plato’s Republic, which led Bloom (1987: 380) to conclude that “it is difficult to imagine that there is either the wherewithal or the energy within the university to constitute or reconstitute the idea of an educated human being and establish a liberal education again.” Bloom blamed the “Marxist debunking” (56) practiced by university professors for having weakened “our conviction of the truth or superiority of American principles” (28–29). Marxist professors had successfully convinced their students that the US Founding Fathers were racists, promoters of Indian genocide, and representatives of capitalist class interests. Thus, Bloom offered a pessimistic prognosis for the United States as he argued that “our politics have become inextricably bound up with universities,” and he was “very much in doubt how the future will judge our stewardship” (382).
Bloom was building on a theme that had been introduced into neoconservative discussions by John R. Silber, the president of Boston University as early as 1974. However, Silber (1974: 30) was more pugnacious than Bloom in his willingness to stop radical scholars from “poisoning the well of academe.”10 When Silber became president of Boston University in 1974, he went to war against radical scholars at this own university, including Henry Giroux and Howard Zinn. Silber emphatically declared his support for academic freedom, while denying it to scholars on the left by drawing from an old distinction between academic freedom and academic license that has been a cornerstone of the managerial concept of academic freedom since the early twentieth century.
The Managerial Concept of Academic Freedom
While it was not often recognized at the time, Silber was resurrecting and rearticulating a managerial concept of academic freedom that was first adopted by American university presidents during the Progressive Era (1900–1920) as a response to the country’s first major wave of academic freedom cases.11 This concept of “academic freedom” was adopted by most college and university presidents by the end of the 1920s, but as Silber would argue this concept had given way to academic license during the 1960s and 1970s. The distinction between academic freedom and academic license was first clearly articulated by Nicholas Murray Butler, who was president of Columbia University from 1902 to 1945. Butler was one of the architects of the modern research university, but he was also considered an authoritarian president, who had effectively driven Charles A. Beard to resign from the university’s faculty in 1917–18, along with several other left-wing and antiwar professors (Barrow 2014b). Beard (1917: 446) described Butler as “reactionary and visionless in politics, narrow and medieval in religion.” He was a prominent Republican Party activist who served as the party’s US vice presidential candidate in 1912, and in 1920 he unsuccessfully sought the Republican party’s nomination for US president.
In his book Scholarship and Service, Butler (1921: 115) argued that “the proper freedom of speech of university professors” depended on “habits of self-control, self-direction, and self-ordering.” Butler’s articulation of this principle was not just an abstract moral position, because he claimed it rested on the “reasonable presumption” that what already exists must carry greater moral and intellectual authority in the academic profession than “untested and untried” theories. Academic freedom was therefore always disciplined by the moral and political presumption that preservation of the status quo and its institutions commands more weight than experimental ideas. While the academic profession could examine untested theories of society, university professors were restricted in these speculative undertakings by the emerging disciplinary boundaries that define the limits of professional expertise. An economist had no right to talk about political institutions. An expert on rural poverty could not speak professionally about a graduated income tax. In this respect, professional expertise, as opposed to the wild speculations of a pseudoscientist, was always confined to teaching and publishing empirical “facts” that were generally accepted by other experts in the field. Academic freedom became academic license when professors went beyond these facts to theoretical speculations about untested alternative political, moral, or social arrangements (116).
Butler was more precise than most administrators in specifying exactly what he meant by untested theories. Academic freedom crossed the line into academic license at any one of five points. One source of academic license was “irreverence” for the “religious faith or the political convictions of others” (65). Butler claimed that this principle automatically excluded the espousal of atheism or any overtly partisan political views—what would later be called “indoctrination” in the US courts. A second boundary was crossed when professors advocated “all forms of artificial equality” (85), which contravened the basic concept of liberty that underpinned American capitalism. Academic license was also at work whenever a professor took classroom time to express personal opinions on any subject. Similarly, a professor engaged in academic license whenever he or she used the authority of professional expertise to “pronounce publicly on issues of current public controversy” (90). In this respect, Butler argued the “serious, scholarly and responsible investigator” was not a “demagogue” or “propagandist” but confined his or her speculative utterances to the classroom or to scholarly journals (158–59). Butler defined a propagandist as anyone who supported “the agitation in favor of woman suffrage,” prohibition, trial marriage, and “what is called socialism” (179). Indeed, according to Butler, the concept of academic freedom should not be a refuge for any type of radicalism, and this idea has long underpinned the conservative rejection of academic freedom. Moreover, despite the endless string of academic freedom violations already documented by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) by this time, Butler concluded that based on his definition of academic freedom, there were no more than two “genuine cases” in the United States where academic freedom had been violated since 1870.
However, when it came to policing the acceptable boundaries of academic freedom, Butler considered faculty self-discipline the cornerstone of a liberal university. Butler defined liberalism as the ground that stood between “the philosophy of anarchy” (including not only anarchism but the “industrial autocracy” of unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism) and an “unprogressive civilization.” Colleges and universities are entrusted with training the leaders of a progressive democracy, and therefore Butler felt there were legitimate reasons to protect students from the “outside influences” of “agitators and propagandists.” Thus, liberalism could not include anything that was “queer, odd, unconventional, otherwise minded,” or “in perpetual opposition” to the status quo. A sober and disciplined understanding of liberalism excluded “freaks, oddities, revolutionaries” (179–80). The development of liberal democracy required leaders with a liberal education, but liberal tolerance had to be balanced by self-restraint and self-discipline if liberalism was to avoid degenerating into a competition between demagogues or falling into reckless social experimentation. Thus, the principle of academic freedom was always balanced by the principle of academic responsibility.
It is likely that most Left academics, in fact most university faculty, have generally failed to understand that the managerial concept of academic freedom continues to be the operative definition of academic freedom among senior administrators and boards of trustees. Faculties tend to identify the university exclusively with themselves as a collective body of mature scholars and, consequently, the professor’s concept of academic responsibility and institutional loyalty precludes a priori any notion that a faculty member could ever act against the interests of the university. Professors are the university, and their academic ideal is to pursue truth for its own sake wherever it leads them. Thus, from a professor’s perspective, it is inconceivable that academic responsibility or professional loyalty could impose external restraints on research or teaching.
On the other hand, university presidents understand the university as a far more complex institution that encompasses other groups besides the faculty. For example, President William Dewitt Hyde of Bowdoin College described the university as a compound composed of six elements: founders, donors, trustees, president, faculty, and public constituents. The president’s managerial role was to ensure that all groups cooperated toward fulfilling the institution’s founding mission. If viewed through this lens, academic freedom was further circumscribed by a need to balance the rights of an institution’s various and often competing groups. Thus, Hyde ([1901] 1977: 19) defined academic freedom as “the harmonious working of the six constituent elements of the university.” Hyde argued that the academic mission of an institution was established by its founders—which could be the state—and it was the responsibility of the trustees to ensure that this mission was carried out with each successive generation of students. Founders had the right to designate an institution’s goals (whether public or private), while trustees were the contemporary guardians of that mission. Hyde argued that both public and private higher education institutions were a public trust with a public constituency. This view was consistent with Butler’s (1921: 115) argument that the principle of academic responsibility imposed a requirement on professors to not offend “common morality, common sense, common loyalty, and decent respect for the opinions of mankind.” Similarly, Hyde ([1901] 1977: 13) argued that “a professor is under obligation to respect the constituency of the college . . . a professor has no right, deliberately and intentionally, to offend the friends and supporters of the institution which he is employed to serve.”
However, when professors talk about a “public trust,” they are usually referring to an abstract concept (i.e., a general will) that is defined as they choose to define it. For senior university administrators, however, the concept of a public trust has a very specific empirical referent. Hyde defined the “most important element” of a university’s public constituency as the “institution’s own alumni,” which in practice usually means prominent business executives and politicians (2). Hyde assigned the next order of importance to donors and benefactors, who had an “obvious right” to satisfy themselves as to “the wisdom of the policy of the institutions to which they give their money” (3). This was the real public that made an institution possible through contributions and benefactions. Thus, the precise point at which a president’s managerial judgment led him or her to deem a particular professor’s actions or statements as academic license quite simply comes down to the point where revenues from alumni, legislators, or wealthy benefactors are being imperiled by that faculty member. A professor who engages in public political activities, strikes, and boycotts; writes popular pamphlets and newspaper editorials; or causes public confrontations on the campus was obviously more likely to produce this effect than someone who only teaches classes and publishes scholarly articles. It would be perfectly acceptable and noncontroversial to pursue activities that support a university’s public constituencies, such as being a consultant to business, so effectively the onus of “responsibility” falls entirely on the academic Left.
On this point, Arthur T. Hadley ([1903] 1977: 343), a president of Yale University (1899–1921), concluded that administrative conflicts with faculty would be unavoidable precisely because “teaching costs money.” Hadley recognized that a university was “more likely to obtain this money if it gives the property owners reason to believe that vested rights will not be interfered with.” In this respect, he was perfectly willing to concede “academic freedom in theory.” However, he explicitly warned faculty that in practice “the outcome of the conflict is generally in favor of the corporation [i.e., the university], be it public or private, and against the individual teacher or group of teachers. This is partly due to the corporation’s material advantage in holding the base of supplies.”
The managerial concept of academic freedom thus grants some autonomy to individual professors, but it is always an inherently insecure and ambiguous position. One can never be certain at what point various ideas will be considered politically controversial, as evidenced recently by the fact that critical race theory circulated in American universities for nearly forty years before it erupted as a major concern of state legislatures and local school boards. Yet it is a simple fact of academic life in a capitalist society that advocating the platform of the Republican Party—no matter how extreme—at a local meeting of the chamber of commerce will likely never be considered controversial by the public constituency that administrators consider most relevant to their managerial decisions. Any idea to the left of free-market capitalism, limited government, and evangelical Protestant moral values may be controversial under various circumstances.
These circumstances can be highly contingent on developments in local, state, or national politics, and these circumstances often revolve around what political movements or critical ideas are perceived as a real threat to the capitalist system by politicized capitalists and their politician servants. It can even depend on the mere attentiveness and aggressiveness of individual university trustees. Public controversy can be sparked off by an ill-considered statement quoted in a local newspaper or on Twitter, or an off-the-cuff remark overheard at a campus reception. Thus, if one moves outside a relatively narrow range of safe opinions, what counts as academic freedom at any particular university can be an accident of local circumstance, subject to wide fluctuations across time. A change in the university presidency, a new party majority in the state legislature, local labor unrest, or a new member on the board of trustees can quietly widen or narrow the range of academic freedom, so its practical meaning can often shift without warning at particular institutions and catch by surprise anyone bold enough to be standing on its boundaries.
The Illiberal Liberal University
President John Silber recycled this old argument for a contemporary national audience in his best-selling book Straight Shooting: What’s Wrong with America and How to Fix It (1989). A major source of what was wrong with America, according to Silber, was that radical university professors were poisoning the wells of academe. Silber (1989: 101) argued that at one time the concept of academic freedom had “entailed an immunity for what is said and done by dedicated, thoughtful, conscientious scholars in pursuit of truth or the truest account.” However, during the 1960s and 1970s, academic freedom had been transformed into “immunity for whatever is said and done, responsibly or carelessly, within or without the walls of academe, by persons unconcerned for the truth.” The latter practice was not academic freedom but academic license, and it was being promulgated by “reckless, incompetent, frivolous, or even malevolent persons” (99–100). Silber singled out Herbert Marcuse (UC San Diego), Noam Chomsky (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Howard Zinn (Boston University) as notably egregious examples of academic license run amok. He went so far as to claim that the radical Left was undermining academic freedom—which he defined as a free marketplace of ideas—by using “their ideology to license doctrine and limit controversy” so that only “their versions of revealed truth” were allowed a voice on university campuses (101).
Thus, Silber argued that the radical Left was a threat to the free marketplace of ideas, and he argued that the most serious threat to academic freedom was the practice of well poisoning. Silber defined well poisoning as a situation where “political zeal leads a usually careful scholar to careless and rhetorical distortion that he would usually avoid and despise” (102). Silber complained,
Despite the fact that one hears frequently about the “repression” of radical faculty by “reactionary administration,” it appears that well poisoning rarely gets the poisoner into any trouble whatever and may (if done with adequate attention to public relations) advance him in the profession. That this extraordinary state of affairs should obtain is largely due to our almost universal acceptance of an absolute concept of academic freedom, namely, that the academic can say whatever he pleases about whatever he pleases, whenever and wherever he pleases, and be fully immune from unpleasant consequences. (110)
Silber was convinced that the underlying problem was the institution of academic tenure, which, by protecting faculty, “encourages anyone to become a sophist.” While Silber did not believe that tenure guaranteed academic freedom, he did think that it encouraged “academic license and abuse” and that “this problem is exacerbated whenever the university becomes politicized” (110). Thus, by Silber’s definition of academic freedom, left-wing scholars could be removed from their positions because their speech and scholarship was “academic license” and not academic freedom, while the long-term solution to the problem was to significantly modify, if not eliminate, tenure on university campuses (139–59).12
In a similar vein, Charles Sykes’s influential book ProfScam (1988) described American higher education as a wasteland. This wasteland was almost single-handedly the fault of professors, who “working steadily and systematically—have destroyed the university as a center of learning and have desolated higher education” (4). Sykes wrote an elegant critique that claimed that “the story of the collapse of American higher education is the story of the rise of the professoriate” (4). Sykes’s book was an indictment of the entire professoriate, as he also had nothing kind to say about the behavioral “pseudo-scientists” in the social sciences whom he described as modern day sorcerers.13 However, Sykes reserved his greatest ire for the Marxist professors, who “are no longer a rarity on campuses” (141). Yet, by the late 1980s, it was not just the Marxists who were a problem on university faculties; he was also dismayed by “the purple-haired semioticians, the deconstructionists, the fierce neo-Marxists, the Lacanians, the vicious feminists, and what [Alan] Bloom bluntly labels the ‘new Stalinisms’ of the modern literature department” (198). Sykes signaled that the neoconservative political agenda had to include limiting or abolishing “the professoriate’s self-serving distortion of academic freedom” (8).
Finally, as he departed the US Department of Education, William Bennett again added fuel to the flames with Our Children and Our Country: Improving America’s Schools and Affirming the Common Culture (1988). Bennett’s work repeated the now commonplace neoconservative mantra that “in the 1960s and 1970s, we neglected and denied much of the best in American education. . . . We allowed an assault on intellectual and moral standards. . . . Our schools fell away from the principles of our tradition” (9). In Our Children and Our Country, Bennett further narrowed the concept of cultural literacy to one of “moral literacy” (77–90). Bennett explicitly called on schools and universities to begin teaching moral literacy (a subcategory of cultural literacy), which he defined as “the moral and philosophical underpinnings of the document [the US Constitution] at the base of our republic.” Bennett argued that the US Constitution expresses our common values as a nation and a civilization. He claimed that “as the emblem of our national values, the Constitution reflects three distinct but related elements of our common culture: the Judeo-Christian ethic, the democratic ethic, and the work ethic” (167). Thus, moral literacy consisted of teaching students the superior virtues of Judeo-Christianity, liberal democracy, and capitalism. Moreover, insofar as Bennett considered these three principles to be the cornerstones of “Western civilization,” one must also regard the US Constitution as the highest embodiment of that civilization. Therefore, any intellectual perspective that is critical of these ideas either violates the will of God, undermines the republic, or destabilizes capitalism—if not all three simultaneously, as in the case of Marxism.
Hence, Bennett chastised university professors for falling short of fulfilling “the moral and intellectual mission of the academy,” which in the neoconservative view is to preserve and transmit the moral foundations of Western civilization. Bennett echoes a familiar refrain in pointing to the “disappearance of a common curriculum in many of the nation’s colleges and universities, and the resulting failure of many students to acquire, after four years of college, even a rudimentary knowledge of the civilization of which they are both products and heirs.” For Bennett, the common curriculum (Western civilization) consists exclusively in teaching “the classical and Jewish-Christian heritage, the facts of American and European history, the political organization of Western societies, the great works of Western art and literature, and the major achievements of the scientific disciplines” (193). As with most neoconservatives, this claim is advanced with no recognition of the fact that the meaning and content of these concepts is essentially contested (Gallie 1956), that “facts” are often in dispute, that scientific achievements are not confined to the West, and that the West itself exists (and has always existed) in a larger global context—something that Hirsch at least recognized in his work.
Moreover, if one was to take Roger Kimball’s analysis of American higher education at face value, one would have concluded that the New Left had completely overrun universities by the end of the decade. In 1990, Roger Kimball published Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education. The book was praised by Allan Bloom, and after being republished in three editions, its cover branded it as “the now-classic critique of contemporary academic life.” Kimball is an art critic and conservative social commentator with no firsthand knowledge of academic life, but he is the editor and publisher of the New Criterion and the publisher of Encounter Books.
Tenured Radicals propelled Kimball to prominence in the early 1990s as he declared that “proponents of deconstruction, feminist studies, and other politically motivated challenges to the traditional tenets of humanistic study have by now become the dominant voice in the humanities departments of many of our best colleges and universities” (1). Kimball warned that tenured radicals, who had survived from the 1960s were “seeking to subvert the tradition of high culture embodied in the classics of Western art and thought. . . . Their object is nothing less than the destruction of the values, methods, and goals of traditional humanistic study” (1). Whether in the form of Marxism, gender studies, or Black studies, Kimball claimed that the adherents of these theoretical approaches all found common cause in their “thoroughgoing animus to the traditional values of Western thought and culture.” One could add to this subversive group of tenured radicals a motley assortment of “deconstructionists, post-structuralists, and other forbiddingly named academics who congregate in departments of English, French, comparative literature, history, and other disciplines” (2).
Moreover, Kimball argued that this New Left was waging “war against Western culture” and that the primary target of its attack was “the traditional literary canon and the pedagogical values it embodies” (4). On this point, Kimball too appropriated the concept of cultural literacy, but as with William Bennett, he narrowed it to include only “the academic canon” of dead white men (16). Consequently, Kimball offered high praise for William Bennett’s To Reclaim a Legacy and to Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, but he had harsh words for Hirsch, whom he criticized for capitulating to liberal and left-wing critics (26–29). In the end, however, Kimball was convinced that tenured radicals were winning the culture war, as, with “few notable exceptions, our most prestigious liberal arts colleges and universities have installed the entire radical menu at the center of their humanities curriculum at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels” (5).
Finally, neoconservatives closed out the decade by also hijacking Jacques Barzun’s nostalgic musings about a bygone era in higher education even though Barzun’s critique of the contemporary university was not so much an attack on the Left as the forlorn longing for an older, smaller, and simpler university. Barzun longed for a return to the university that existed before large administrative bureaucracies, dependence on government grants and financial aid, corporate and foundation grants, and ceaseless demands from external constituencies clamoring for universities to solve the world’s political, economic, social, and environmental crises. Barzun, who had been provost at Columbia University, found that such demands disturbed the quiet reflections and Friday afternoon cocktail receptions of gentleman professors. Therefore, most of Barzun’s critique of the contemporary university is actually quite Veblenesque in its criticism of bureaucratic expansion, the proliferation of administrators, the emergence of self-promoting entrepreneurial faculty, and the subordination of the university to the state, markets, and corporations. In fact, a close reader of Barzun’s The American University will find that the word Marxist appears exactly one time in the book.14
Nevertheless, Barzun (1980, chap. 11) was frequently invoked as an intellectual ally of the New Right assault on the American university, partly because he articulated a proto-Straussian adherence to the “ancient classics” (for example, Plato and Aristotle), while using the term “modern classics” as an epithet.15 One such appropriation was by Herbert I. London, who wrote the introduction to a second edition of Barzun’s classic book. London (1993: ix) argued that because Barzun’s book had been published in 1968, just before the Columbia University student strike, Barzun “did not fully foresee the extremes that emerged from the noisy radicalism of the 1960s,” nor could he imagine “the corrosive influence of an all-embracing orthodoxy on campus.”16 London (1993: xi) lamented the new “‘post-modern’ period in university life,” where ideas once evaluated on their merit were now “filtered through the net of race, class, gender, and Third World ideology.” Like many other neoconservatives, London complained that academic standards had been “reduced to the lowest common denominator . . . in an effort to address the representation of blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and other designated minorities.” The alleged result of this filtering and dilution of academic standards was that “most college students have not read the great works of Western civilization . . . are scientific and math illiterates, and cannot construct logical arguments in debate or written statements” (xii–xiii). In fact, London argued, “the organizing principle of the new scholarship inheres in its . . . unremitting attack on cultural institutions, as well as political and economic institutions,” and he singled out Howard Zinn’s (1999) widely acclaimed A People’s History of the United States, first published in 1980, as an exemplar of the new scholarship (xvi). London concludes his criticism with the admonition that American university professors were now engaged in “a search for orthodoxy, whether that takes the form of symbols, deconstruction, or the emergence of an obsession with Third World authors” (xviii).
The Truth and Power of Ideas (and Guns and Clubs)
The cultural counterrevolution on US university campuses was also followed by a steady militarization of those campuses over the next two decades. Anthony Nocella II and David Gabbard observe that during the Occupy movement (2011) it became evident for the first time that a new cadre of authoritarian university administrators were not only reestablishing a managerial concept of academic freedom but were often backing it up by having spent the last three decades quietly militarizing their campuses and strengthening the mechanisms of administrative discipline and punishment. University presidents, particularly at large universities, had spent decades expanding and arming campus police forces, which they began using as an overtly coercive and repressive apparatus on university campuses against students and faculty (Nocella and Gabbard 2013).17 According to US Bureau of Justice Statistics, three-quarters of four-year colleges and universities with 2,500 or more students in the United States are now served by a campus law enforcement agency, which employ sworn officers with full arrest powers. The number of police officers per capita on campus has also increased during this time. Many campuses now employ more than 100 to 150 police officers, or enough armed men and women to form a full military company (or several platoons) in an armed combat situation.
Nocella and Gabbard call attention to another trend: not just that campus police departments are expanding in numbers but that larger departments are creating specialized emergency response units, detective squads, and special victims units. They are increasingly called on to conduct criminal background checks of prospective employees (including faculty at many campuses), which effectively inserts them into the faculty search and screen process. Campus police increasingly monitor expansive camera surveillance systems in dormitories, hallways, cafeterias, and campus grounds, while increasing their use of more intrusive community policing, bicycle patrols, and motorcycle patrols. Thus, campus police departments have largely completed the transition from unarmed security services responsible for building access, parking enforcement, and key control to well-armed professional police departments with detective, surveillance, and even paramilitary units. Law enforcement agencies and senior administrators have justified these changes as necessary to provide security for faculty and students, but with rare exceptions they simultaneously enhance the surveillance and intimidation capabilities of senior university administrators. Gabbard observes a “general criminalization of dissent and activism” on campuses through the use of restrictive free speech zones, faculty suspensions, and student expulsions (Nocella and Gabbard 2013: 195–96). This trend was acutely manifest in how university administrators and campus police responded to the Occupy movement on campuses, and it has been an even more salient response in the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests on campuses.
The mythical golden age of the American university crashed on the shoals of an authoritarian neoliberalism as state governments steadily reduced funding for public higher education beginning in the mid-1970s, and the federal government reduced funding for student financial aid by converting much of that aid from grants to loans. However, the exaggerated image of American universities being overrun by leftists was always somewhat silly. Seymour Martin Lipset and Everett Carl Ladd Jr. conducted a survey of 60,477 faculty members in American universities in fall 1969 for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. They found that only 13.8 percent of political science faculty identified themselves as politically “Left,” compared to 58.0 percent who considered themselves “Liberal” (American Political Science Association 1970). Among political science graduate students (25 percent) and faculty under age thirty (22 percent), the proportion who self-identified as “leftists” as compared to “liberals” was higher than for senior faculty, and, if we take the latter figures as more indicative of the faculty profile in the 1980s, then it is likely that no more than one-quarter of all political science faculty, if even that many, self-identified as “Leftists” of any kind (Ladd and Lipset 1975; see also American Political Science Association 1970). The figures reported by Ladd and Lipset would have been a few percentage points higher in sociology and a few percentage points lower in economics, history, and philosophy, but the simple fact is that most social science and humanities professors in US universities are mainstream centrists and liberals, but they are not leftists. It just looks that way to neoconservatives, who identify anyone and everyone to the left of Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek as a “leftist” or a “Marxist,” including Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden. In fact, today it is rare to find a political science department with more than one Marxist of any kind, and those numbers have dwindled since the 1980s. Kevin Funk and Sebastian Sclofsky (2021) have recently demonstrated that Marxism has virtually disappeared from the graduate curriculum in “top” political science departments in the United States (see also Sclofsky and Funk 2018). In this vein, however, Bertell Ollman (2002: 49) once asked the telling question: If neoconservatives “think that one or even a few Marxists could wreak such havoc on the minds of the young, what are they saying about the truth and power of their own ideas?”
Notes
Liberal historians euphemistically describe this period as the origins of “academic freedom.” See Hofstadter and Metzger 1955.
The University of California system has ten campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. Each campus has a chancellor, and the entire system is overseen by a president.
Scott’s analysis was anchored in early works on crisis management by Claus Offe (1973). See also Habermas 1975; Barrow 2010.
Karl Marx was notably absent from Bennett’s list of dead white men.
See Accuracy in Academia, “About AIA,” https://www.academia.org/about-aia/ (accessed October 16, 2024).
See “About Dr. Herbert I. London,” https://herbertilondon.org/about/ (accessed October 16, 2024).
See National Association of Scholars, https://www.nas.org/ (accessed October 16, 2024).
The Pew survey found that 67 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning respondents had positive views of higher education and its impact on the direction of the United States.
On the continuing influence of Silber’s essay among neoconservatives, see Husock 2022.
The following section is a revised version of Barrow 1990: 194–98.
In 1993, John Silber ignited controversy on the Boston University campus for proudly declaring that “Boston University has resisted the imposition of doctrines that would curtail intellectual and academic freedom,” including “some versions of critical theory, radical feminism, and multiculturalism, among other intellectual positions,” which he deemed “ideological in character and inhospitable to free inquiry” (Leatherman 1993).
Sykes took this description from Andreski Stanislav (1972: 16), who refers to behavioral social scientists as “sorcerers clad in the paraphernalia of science . . . wooly-minded lost souls yearning for gurus,” who were more concerned with methodology and mindless quantification than with addressing any significant social questions.
Barzun (1968: 208) states merely that “it is idle to argue the Marxist bias” of student activists in 1968.
The Liberty Fund Inc. republished Barzun’s book Teacher in America in 1980 with a new preface by Barzun, although it was originally published in 1944, 1945, and 1954.
In an ironic twist of fate, David Truman, one of the founders of contemporary pluralist theory, had just been appointed provost at Columbia University a few months before the student uprising. See Stokes 1991.
For a lengthier version of this argument, see Barrow 2014a.
