Woke Universities Lead America to a Primitive State Higher education now stands for mob rule, civic ignorance and contempt for truth and free inquiry. By John M. Ellis
In this election season it’s almost impossible to find pro-Trump bumper stickers or signs anywhere in my town. The reason is not lack of support but fear of vandalism, or worse: People nationwide have been physically assaulted and even threatened with loss of their livelihoods for no other reason than that they plan to vote as one half of the country does, and political goals are now commonly pursued by violent means. With this our civilization seems to be regressing to a more primitive stage of its development—a time when disputes were settled by force instead of rules, and before the First Amendment guaranteed the right to speak freely on the social and political issues of the day.
That’s bad enough in itself, but worse yet is that this social regression began on college campuses, of all places, before spreading to the national culture. On one-party campuses, radical-left faculty have established a political orthodoxy that student mobs enforce, and the political culture of the nation is poisoned as those students take home with them their professors’ habit of seeing opinions that differ from theirs as an evil not to be tolerated.
The left-wing political orthodoxy is also taking the place of traditional civics. Recent graduates know much less about U.S. government than older Americans do. In 2018 the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation gave a sample of Americans a test based on the exam for U.S. citizenship. Only 19% of people under 45 passed, while 74% of those over 65 did, meaning even elderly people who learned the material more than 40 years ago can summon it from memory better than recent grads. Similar studies have found a regression in knowledge of U.S. history. Today’s universities are presiding over a nationwide reversion to civic illiteracy. That’s a disaster for the country, but it suits campus radicals. A well-informed citizenry would hardly wish to be governed by people whose ideological kin have reduced so many countries to economic and political deserts.
America’s universities were once the leading edge of an advanced culture, reinforcing and expanding the country’s best features. They steered differences of opinion away from rancor and toward well-regulated, informed debate. They welcomed eccentric opinions, expanded the boundaries of thought and learning in every sphere, prepared students for citizenship by rooting them in their society’s government and history, and trained students for nonpartisan service in the specialized professions an advanced society needs.
None of that persists today. Far from being the leading edge of an advanced culture, the universities drag America back toward a more primitive state. They have contempt for the restraints and rules that define society, such as political neutrality in nonpolitical institutions. For radicals, politics takes precedence over everything, and every field within social science and the humanities eventually degrades into a mere channel to spread progressive orthodoxies.
In an advanced society, journalists have the vital job of keeping the citizenry well-informed so that the government can be held to account. Only in less-developed cultures is the press commonly under firm political control. But since America’s university journalism programs are now overwhelmingly left-activist, we now effectively have the politicized press of an undeveloped nation. The same holds for schoolteachers, at present also trained by campus radicals, which is making public school systems increasingly ideological. Socialist dictatorships and banana republics hold their universities under strict political control; it’s astonishing that the U.S. seems to be joining that club.
Race relations in America are devolving under the same progressive leadership. Campuses are in a constant state of hysteria about “systemic” racism, with small armies of diversity administrators always eager to jump at the slightest infraction, real or imagined. Why does invisible campus racism need such zealous policing? If radical leftists can persuade enough people that America is rotten at its core with racial prejudice, they’ll gain traction for their program of radical social transformation. Power-hungry radicals whip up racial tensions where none exist because their authority depends on social division.
In the past, universities were indispensable in maintaining American culture, but now they undermine and sicken it. The public should learn to see through the patina of prestige that still covers elite schools, and should assess realistically the damage these schools are doing today. That damage goes beyond a failure to develop graduates who think independently. Universities now attack the most basic principles of American society, and do so with lavish taxpayer support. We should decide how best to cut them off.
Mr. Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of “The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done.”
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