Restoring Academia Requires an Unlikely Alliance
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Universities in the West today would be tragically unrecognizable to their medieval and early modern founders. Pursuits of truth, knowledge, scientific facts, inquiry and critical scrutiny, shared purposes of higher education rooted in both classical and modern practices, are overshadowed by the cancerous spread of subjective postmodernism.
Cancel culture and self-censorship have neutralized institutional neutrality. Professor Owen Anderson, who teaches world religions and ethics at Arizona State University, received a failing annual performance review following anonymous student complaints alleging a “Christian bias.” All the professor did, against the university’s recommendation to incorporate “decolonizing and anti-racism ideologies” into classroom instruction, was to pose scholarly questions about the theory of the “highest good” and Thomas Aquinas. The fact that Professor Anderson is a vocal critic of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), so much so as a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the school’s DEI training, contextualizes the penalty.
Last year, the University of California (UC) decided to scale back a social-justice-themed postdoctoral program that used DEI-based hiring criteria. The decision was met with a firestorm of faculty protests. Leftist professors, many of whom were hired through the program’s incentive structure to retain participating scholars, coordinated a highly effective campaign to pressure the administration. The campaign began with an open letter from anonymous “Concerned UC Faculty, administrators, staff, professorial colleagues, and constituents,” opposing the program’s elimination and supporting UC’s core values of DEI. It also included an elaborate toolkit with action alerts, talking points, a mass email campaign, and a sample press release. Subsequently, a petition with more than 1,000 signatures and endorsements from unions and nonprofits was submitted to the UC president, who was also invited to a press conference organized by the graduate student union. Unsurprisingly, UC is now reversing course and reviving the program.
