Peter W. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars. He is an anthropologist and author of “A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now” (Encounter Books, 2007) and of “Diversity: The Invention of a Concept” (Encounter Books, 2003). His articles have appeared in Partisan Review, National Review Online, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/05/we-need-a-radio-free-america-on-campus/
Deep within the United States Code a dynamite charge lies buried. Once ignited, it could blow the current landscape of higher education to smithereens, replacing its monotonous ideological expanse with an alpine variety of competing views and perspectives.
Triggering the charge would require a willingness to overcome political reflexives that often serve conservatives well. But the hour is late, the need for action desperately real, and pragmatism sits proudly at the nation’s helm.
So let us strike the fuse.
The dynamite is a provision in federal law planted nine years ago. That’s when Congress created the American History for Freedom (AHF) program. It promised federal funding for university centers promoting the study of traditional American history, free institutions, and Western civilization.
But when Barack Obama was elected, the congressmen and senators who had pushed for the bill wisely decided not to seek a federal appropriation. Obama would have opposed it and the whole program would have come under withering attack. Those of us who had worked hard to get AHF passed in the first place decided to bide our time. It has been a long wait.
The First Ka-Boom
How good is this dynamite? It should be compared to the explosives that the radical Left brought to campus at the end of the 1960s: black studies, women’s studies, and environmental studies. These three were the leading edge of the Left’s attempt to politicize the university.
Each had its own agenda but those agendas overlapped in their disdain for America and in their rejection of the university as a place reserved for open-minded inquiry. The proponents of these programs pleaded for them as exceptions to the old academic standards, which they thought would continue to be upheld in English, history, the sciences, and so on.
That proved to be an illusion. The radical environmentalists adopted Barry Commoner’s “First Law of Ecology,” namely, “Everything is connected to everything else.” You can’t expect radical environmentalists to keep their eco-apocalyptic creed isolated in the Environmental Studies Department. It has to be integrated into all the other departments because, “Everything is connected to everything else.” The same principle applied to black studies and women’s studies. Identity politics moves like a blob of mercury. It doesn’t stand still.
The political doctrines first spread to other academic departments via missionaries who held “dual appointments”—for example, women’s studies and political science, or black studies and English. But soon the bridges grew more plentiful. We saw the rise of cross-listed courses, “History 305, the Antebellum South, also listed as Black Studies 309, Slavery in Pre-Civil War America.” And soon there were distribution requirements and major requirements that entrenched the “studies departments” as central to whole of undergraduate education. The faculty in these departments also found their way onto search committees and other university bodies and carried their political programs with them.
Instead of occupying a space set apart in the curriculum for political indoctrination, the politicized departments became the agent for politicizing whole institutions.
That was the dynamite planted by the academic left circa 1968.
