America's Campus Revolution

David Brooks, meet your colleague, Bret Stephens. 

While Brooks, see the previous post, has expressed his deep admiration for New Age crank Marianne Williamson, Bret Stephens shows us what happens when a moral revolution occurs on America’s campuses. There we see the cultural revolution that Brooks believes we need, in action, destroying the minds of young Americans.

Stephens explains:

Anyone who has followed the news from college campuses over the past few years knows they are experiencing forms of unrest unseen since the late 1960s.

Now, as then, campuses have become an arena for political combat. Now, as then, race is a central issue. Now, as then, students rail against an unpopular president and an ostensibly rigged system. Now, as then, liberal professors are being bullied, denounced, demoted, threatened, sued and sometimes even assaulted by radical students.

But there are some important differences, too. None of today’s students risk being drafted into an unpopular, distant war. Unlike the campus rebels of the ’60s, today’s student activists don’t want more freedom to act, speak, and think as they please. Usually they want less.

Most strange: Today’s students are not chafing under some bow-tied patriarchal WASP dispensation. Instead, they are the beneficiaries of a system put in place by professors and administrators whose political views are almost uniformly left-wing and whose campus policies indulge nearly every progressive orthodoxy.

And Stephens is smart enough to understand that it’s not about Donald Trump. He does not see it as the Obama legacy, but we can forgive him, for now. He is reporting on a book written by the former dean of the Yale Law School Andrew Kronman. It is called The Assault on American Excellence:

What’s happening on campuses today isn’t a reaction to Trump or some alleged systemic injustice, at least not really. Fundamentally, Kronman argues, it’s a reaction against this aristocratic spirit — of being, as H.L. Mencken wrote, “beyond responsibility to the general masses of men, and hence superior to both their degraded longings and their no less degraded aversions.” It’s a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few. And it is being undertaken for the sake of a radical egalitarianism in which all are included, all are equal, all are special.

“In endless pronouncements of tiresome sweetness, the faculty and administrators of America’s colleges and universities today insist on the overriding importance of creating a culture of inclusion on campus,” Kronman writes.

“They stress the need to respect and honor the feelings of others, especially those belonging to traditionally disadvantaged groups, as an essential means to this end. In this way they give credence to the idea that feelings are trumps with a decisive authority of their own. That in turn emboldens their students to argue that their feelings are reason enough to keep certain speakers away. But this dissolves the community of conversation that the grown-ups on campus are charged to protect.”

This is a bracing, even brutal, assessment. But it’s true. And it explains why every successive capitulation by universities to the shibboleths of diversity and inclusion has not had the desired effect of mollifying campus radicals. On the contrary, it has tended to generate new grievances while debasing the quality of intellectual engagement.

Ah yes, on our therapied campuses, no one cares about learning. No one cares about competing for better grades. No one cares about working hard to excel. Because if you do well someone else who does not do as well will feel bad. And we can't have that.

Everyone now cares about feelings, as though college were a therapy mill designed to make everyone feel good about himself. It’s the therapy culture on steroids, and suffering its own special kind of roid rage:

All this is meant to make students “safe.” In fact, it leaves them fatally exposed. It emboldens offense-takers, promotes doublethink, coddles ignorance. It gets in the way of the muscular exchange of honest views in the service of seeking truth. Above all, it deprives the young of the training for independent mindedness that schools like Yale are supposed to provide.

Clearly, Kronman is right. As is Stephens. As for Brooks, as I said in the prior post, an intervention is in order.