Leftist professors and their influence on the world
I’m both fascinated and puzzled by this essay by Russell Jacoby, a professor (now emeritus) in UCLA’s history department.
He writes:
…[M]y ’60s generation [posed as] much more radical than previous American intellectuals. We were the leftists, Maoists, Marxists, Third Worldists, anarchists, and protesters who regularly shut down the university in the name of the war in Vietnam or free speech or racial equality. Yet for all our university bashing, unlike earlier intellectuals, we never exited the campus. We settled in. We became graduate students, assistant professors and finally—a few of us—leading figures in academic disciplines.
Excuse me? Excuse me? I’m a member of that generation, and although I’m not a member of any “academic discipline,” I’ve served my time as student and research employee in a number of academic institutions. I’ve also observed them from the outside. The serious real-world ambitions of the 60s radicals have been apparent for a long long time, maybe even from the start but certainly for many decades now.
What did the author think was happening in the teaching field? For example, did he notice – being a historian and all – the popularity of the history books of Howard Zinn in the American school system, including the public school system? Talk about being in an ivory tower – I think Jacoby was practically Rapunzel.
He writes:
Within 30 years, the timber and tone of faculties were refashioned. In the 1950s the number of public leftists teaching in American universities could be counted on two hands. By the 1980s, they filled airplanes and hotel conference rooms. In the 1980s a three-volume survey of the new Marxist scholarship appeared (The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, vol. 1-3). Endless new journals, each with their own followings, popped up, such as Studies on the Left, Radical Teacher, Radical America, Insurgent Sociologist, Radical Economists. In the coming years leaders of the main scholarly organizations like the Modern Language Association or American Sociological Association elected self-professed leftists.
So he had noticed. But somehow he didn’t seem to think it would matter. I have to conclude that he considered that some sort of academic game was being played, and that students would be able to slough off the lessons their teachers were so busy cramming into their heads. He seems to have thought there would be no important consequences in the real world.
But most students do go out into that real world, as opposed to staying in the cocoon of university life as professors. And that certainly was especially true for law students, who were among the first exposed most heavily to radical leftism (in the Critical Legal Studies movement), and many of whom graduated to become real-world movers and shakers.
I’m trying not to be too hard on Jacoby, because I can’t say that most of us – and I definitely include myself – realized just how fast it was happening and just how bad it had gotten. But anyone familiar with academia had to be aware that there was serious and widespread instruction and outright indoctrination in leftism going on, and therefore serious potential danger not to be waved away.
And yet Jacoby writes:
In a series of bestselling books—Tenured Radicals, Illiberal Education, The Closing of the American Mind—conservatives raised the alarm: Radicals were taking over the university and destroying America, if not Western civilization. In The Last Intellectuals I differed. The new radical scholars were proving to be obliging colleagues and professionals. The proof? They penned unreadable articles and books for colleagues. They were less subversive than submissive. Earlier American intellectuals wrote for a public; the new radical ones did not. They were not public intellectuals, but narrow academics…
I argued that the conservatives should awake from their nightmare of radical scholars destroying America and relax; academic revolutionaries preoccupied themselves with their careers and perks. If they made waves, they were confined to the campus pool.
This was denial of epic proportions.
I will give him credit, though, for admitting that he was wrong. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do.
One of the biggest problems with academics (I come from a family of them). Is there seems to be an overweening need to prove they are. The best!, The brightest! The Future!.
And while there are many in academia that are. Much like in most other fields it is a small minority who are actually gifted. So the move to protect their ego’s went to an area they actually had control. MORAL superiority.
In this new paradigm intelligence and consistency actually work against you. Obedience and moral turpitude are the preferred traits. Therefore anyone willing enough can join their new “elite”.
It is charitable to grant him credit for admitting publicly that he has been wrong, as few indeed are those who ever do so on issues of major importance. What is perhaps most fascinating is that he is now, in old age, basically admitting the truth concerning the oft-discussed (on this site and elsewhere) Gramscian “Long March” (Dutschke), emerging from the academy and subsequently responsible for the institutional capture of every single system and every single organization with any real power or any genuine authority in our moribund republic.
About 3/4 of all youths enrolled in higher education are enrolled in public institutions. About half of these are enrolled in red states. Red, blue, doesn’t matter. They’re all disasters in pretty much the same ways. Republican state legislators accomplish nothing.
At the University of Notre Dame, Pete Buttegig’s dad was the world’s leading “scholar” on the famous Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Young Pete helped his daddy edit and translate the academic journal on Gramsci.
So, yeah the Left has taken over the academy and poisoned young minds.
“In the 1950s the number of public leftists teaching in American universities could be counted on two hands.”
_________
Buckley, Kendall, and Kirk disagreed.
“The elder Buttigieg made a significant contribution to the study of Gramsci’s works with his three-volume English translation of Gramsci’s “Prison Notebooks” (“Quaderni del carcere”), and he served for a time as secretary of the International Gramsci Society.” Snopes.
Joseph A. Buttigieg (1947–2019) was professor emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame. He was the author and editor of a number of books, including A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective, The Legacy of Antonio Gramsci, Criticism Without Boundaries, Gramsci and Education, European Christian Democracy, and most notably the complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (Columbia, 1992–2007). He was also founding member and president of the International Gramsci Society.
Eeyore:
Perhaps the accent was on the word “public” as opposed to “private” or “secret”?
The problem with academics is myopeia due to overspecialization. Like a NT professor who specializes in the gospels and so knows not even the most basic things in Paul (or vice versa) and so knows less than a 16 year old kid who grew up in a decent church and actually read the NT. Now extend that to all academic “disciplines.” Wherein is the “discipline”? In discipling yourself to ignore all subjects outside your tiny area of specialization, which in turn makes you a moron even on your specialization. What good is a gospel specialist who can’t even cross reference relevant related passages in Paul? Zero. So it is with historians specializing in Julius Ceasar but knowing nothing about the rest of Roman history, or whatever.
The problem with academics is myopeia due to overspecialization.
No it isn’t.
@Eeyore – I’d have to agree. There’s a Cary Grant movie (Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, IIRC), where he’s talking to his child, who is parroting some clearly anti-American propaganda she’s picked up from her teacher.
He snorts and dismisses it, but it’s pretty clear that this was quite common in the NY school system in the mid 1940s.
Neo, my Wife and have History Degrees (BA/MA’s) that we earned in the 1960’s. We had Profs that were WWII Vets and the new gen that were educated in the 50’s. I do not remember nor/or was not aware of the Left bias then. The University was a former Land Grant institution. The year I saw the first Baby Boomers. The Campus was growing, new buildings going up to meet the demand. Good times. Then, VietNam intruded on the plans of all the Men. It certainly made an impact on the Campus. We started to see “radicals” against the War. My Wife went on to teach, first 10 yrs in HS then 20 in JH. She is so glad she is retired. We both just do not understand what is going on anymore.
I think that the professors that espouse socialism and communism would scream bloody murder if their salaries were redistributed and their perks disappeared. All in the name of socialism of course.
My daughter is refusing to discuss the failings of socialism over capitalism (she having drunk deep at the internet well) so I have been thinking about this a lot. Both systems hurt people. Capitalism seems to be cruel on a more individual basis, where socialism hurts whole populations. I feel The people who love socialism and communism don’t have any real world experience. They don’t realize or know how much people can fuck things up.
As one who spent his entire career within academia from 1981 to 2019, I have a sense of the trajectory of the transformation of the academy. From my observation, the major transformation in higher ed really got going just post 9/11, and then rapidly accelerated by 2010 and was finished just about as I retired. What brought about such rapidity was the hiring of young radical faculty in that time period especially in English and Sociology, then it quickly spread through the humanities, social studies, and at the end the sciences. Those faculty (and also the administrators hired in the time frame) were those born 1970 and later.
Now who taught those grad students? Well, the radical Baby Boomer faculty. Though in defense of about half of my BB faculty colleagues, many were appalled by the transformation that had taken place by about 2015. However, they were also the ones who went along with each small increment of change in the late 90’s early ’00s which eventually lead to the avalanche of change, thinking they were just supporting “reasonable liberal ideas”. Definitely fools taken in by the knaves who only belatedly realized what had happened. And in the school I was at I can point at the 7-8 knaves who got the whole transformation rolling.
VDH has a good recent article about this at first slow, then very fast transformation:
https://pjmedia.com/columns/victor-davis-hanson/2022/12/22/are-universities-doomed-n1655607
I was a campus radical, or at least was part of radical crowd, in the late ’60s. When I say “radical” I mean the kind of people who had no philosophical argument with the Weather Underground, though they were too hedonistic to actually go that far. And I was by nature drawn to academia, and spent a lot of time in and around it, including 25 years on IT staff at a college. By 1975 or so a significant number of my radical friends were well on their way toward PhDs and tenure, and had not significantly changed their ideas. My view of the whole period lines up pretty well with physicsguy’s.
SHIREHOME on January 2, 2023 at 5:13 pm said:
Neo, my Wife and have History Degrees (BA/MA’s) that we earned in the 1960’s. We had Profs that were WWII Vets and the new gen that were educated in the 50’s. I do not remember nor/or was not aware of the Left bias then.
I was an English major in 1961, using it to get a student loan as I studied premed (which was ineligible for student loans at that time.) I also did not detect bias. The radical changes, I believe, came with the Vietnam War. The leftist students stayed in school on deferments and got the graduate degrees that set them on the path to radicalize the students they taught later.
I was in medical school during the 60s. Even some medical students went radical, especially on drugs.
Eric:
I went to public school in New York City from kindergarten through all of high school. I never heard a single anti-American statement from any teacher or administrator. Not one, ever. So no, it was not only not commonplace, it was nearly unheard of.
Seeing Jacoby’s mea culpa (of sorts), I was reminded of New Deal/New Frontier liberal Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s Disuniting of America (first published in 1992) decrying the rise of ethnic identity and the end of the ‘melting pot’ goal of assimilation of immigrants. Given how Schlesinger was the handmaiden of the Kennedys (including the execrable Teddy) who pushed for open immigration and multiculturalism, it was a remarkable book. Not so much an admission of personal fault, but equally clearly an admission that multiculturalism was tearing the nation apart…his work was even more prescient than it was accurate as of its writing.
Related: this article at Quillette
https://quillette.com/2023/01/01/stuck-in-the-middle-of-academia/
SHIREHOME; Mike K; Eric:
Not only did I never hear an anti-American word from a teacher in grade school or high school, but not even in college or law school. That takes us right through a great deal of the Vietnam War. Plenty of teachers probably were against the war, and some were leftists, but they kept it out of the classroom.
Neo, why do you believe he is now being honest? Think about his motives.
Bill G:
Looking him up, I notice that he just recently became emeritus. So maybe he feels more free to write about what he sees, now that he doesn’t have to deal with faculty meetings and the like. Or maybe he notices what’s going on around him more easily because he’s not quite as busy. Or maybe there’s some other reason I haven’t thought of, but it seems to me that he should have at least noticed a lot of this many many years ago.
David, the Quillette article seems to be too defensive. “The Closing of the American Mind” is still the best description of what has been happening since it was written. My youngest daughter was a student at U of Arizona 10 years ago. The study guide for the final exam in her “American History Since 1877” class included the following “facts.” The “Silent Majority” of the 1960s was made up of white people who refused to accept the 1964 Civil Rights Act. No mention of Nixon or Vietnam.
The same study guide informed the students that Plains Indians, hunter gatherers, taught the pioneer settlers how to farm.
Fortunately, she was not convinced and graduated still conservative.
Mike K, I graduated in 68. Not many choices for me. I chose the Navy.
Neo, I too never heard any anti-American sentiments from my Profs either. My German History Prof was a young Shave Tail Lt at the end of WWII. He said he interrogated Nazis. Not a please experience.
To be sure Jacoby might have twigged faster than he did. Nonetheless, the final two paragraphs are pretty devastating to the Left:
____________________________
The self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous students who filter into the public square. The former prospered in their campus enclaves by plumping each other’s brilliance, but they left the rest of us alone. The latter, their students, however, constitute an unmitigated disaster, intellectually and politically, as they enter the workforce. They might be the American version of the old Soviet apparatchiks, functionaries who carry out party policies. Intellectually, they fetishize buzz words (diversity, marginality, power differential, white privilege, group safety, hegemony, gender fluidity and the rest) that they plaster over everything.
Politically, they mark a self-immolation of progressives; they flaunt their exquisite sensibilities and openness, and display exquisite narcissism and insularity. Once upon a time leftists sought to enlarge their constituency by reaching out to the uninitiated. This characterized a left during its most salient phase of popular front politics. No longer. With a credo of group safety the newest generation of leftists does not reach out but reaches in. It operates more like a club for members only than a politics for everyone.
Related:
“Why I’m leaving college and choosing education over indoctrination”—
https://nypost.com/2023/01/02/why-im-leaving-college-and-choosing-education-over-indoctrination/
Key grafs:
“…I no longer have any interest in paying to be told my blackness is a disability and all white people are evil. And asked what my pronouns are when — at least in my opinion — it should be clear as day….
“…During my sophomore year, while campaigning for student government, I was targeted by my school newspaper — slandered as a racist, labeled a homophobe and called a threat to our campus’ marginalized communities. The author of that piece is a white male.
“I have thick skin, however. And my decision to leave has less to do with my own campus than it does with having a deeply held passion for helping other conservative students in far less-ideal situations hold their own on theirs.
“We cannot afford to lose our college campuses to the radical left. That would mean we have lost a generation. And to have lost a generation would mean we have lost our country.”
This is the voice of a man who has merely begun to tread the path of awareness. Further down the road will come the realization that very little in academe, almost nothing outside the hard-sciences domain, is worth anything at all. And even in the hard-sciences very very few are top people. For example, there is no-one today in the entire field of US mathematics who comes close in quality or productiveness of the master, Euler. Yes, the professor of math at any Ivy League institution is much closer in mathematical ability to the girl serving coffee at Starbucks than he or she is to Euler. Think about it. Entire fields of academia could be shut down without anyone noticing at all, academic philosophy (a contradiction in terms!) for example; so-called “ethics” is another example. What kind of insane delusion has led Western Nations to think that investing a third of the lives of almost all their children, and their capital, to the service of miserable “learning” factories would do any much good at all? Before the insanity of Climate Change came the insanity of Higher Learning For All.
Lifelong Indoctrination Inc.
Again take a look at Jordon Peterson’s videos about Pareto distributions, and how in an organization—any organization—a relatively small number of workers are responsible for doing half or more of the productive work.
Thus, in an organization with a thousand workers 100 people do more than half of the productive work.
I’m reminded of the old saying, “PhDs know almost everything about next to nothing”. And certainly they are experts in their fields. But that usually doesn’t extend to other areas.
There are few true polymaths.
Jacoby was perhaps comparing the Academic Left of the 1980s to other leftist movements, labeled by John Patrick Diggins the Lyrical Left of the 1910s, the Old Left of the 1930s, and the New Left of the 1960s. Jacoby wasn’t entirely wrong in thinking that the Academic Left had turned its back on real politics and was unlikely to achieve anything on its own, but he forgot that each version of the left had given birth to the next. Diggins would probably regard the Woke Left as the child of the Academic Left in the same way that the New Left was the child of the Old Left.
What caused the change? We certainly can’t ignore the effect many years of propaganda. There was also the generational cycle. Late Boomers in general didn’t think much of the Sixties radicals, nor did Gen Xers think much of their leftist professors. But memories fade, and a new generation rebels against its parents rather than against earlier generations. Millennials didn’t go through the insecurities of the 70s, so the spark of rebelliousness was already growing in them, and when the Great Recession hit in 2008, it spun many of them leftward. It’s also noteworthy that Millennials came of age when the Soviet Union was long gone, so they didn’t have the example of socialism’s failures to confront, and since the country has a very different ethnic make up now than it did a century or a half-century ago, race was clearly going to be a major focus of progressive and leftwing movements.
Professors have been liberal for some time — maybe since the last Victorians died off — but for many, liberal meant voting for Democrats and didn’t go much further. I wonder how much of the shift had to do with the humanities running out of things to say and do (or at least running out of things that appeared new and easy) and falling back on race, gender, and sexuality.
I also wonder how much the “wokeness” of major corporations has to do with the current climate. “Wokeness” may have started in academia, but did the fact that so much of the culture and so many in power seem to go along have a feedback effect that helped push it further?
This article was a mix of apology and apologetics. He still doesn’t get it.
Thus, in an organization with a thousand workers 100 people do more than half of the productive work.
And that’s measured just how?
He knows that THEY know they academics were on a mission to destroy this country and remake it into their progressive/communist vision. Jacoby is a list of epic proportions.
Re: Origin of woke in academia
It’s not so clear cut; Human Resources was made out of Personnel departments in an attempt to insulate corporations from running afoul of civil rights laws. The brand new HR started hiring ‘experts’ in race and gender relations to ‘educate’ their people. Academia responded with programs to create more such ‘experts.’
Is the origin in poorly (or, depending on your interpretation of the authors’ intentions, incredibly well) written civil rights law? The judicial decisions that left corporations vulnerable to suit? The corporations’ attempt to insulate themselves from that vulnerability? Academia’s chosen methods to ‘educate’ the ‘experts’ that corporations were clamoring for?
What’s the big surprise when you have tenured professors like Brittney Cooper at Rutgers University brazenly urging ” we got to take these motherf*ckers out” when referring to white people. How does this cretin keep her job?
There was John Dewey of course. The beginnings there go quite far back in time. There is some mention of post secondary school. Certainly, teacher’s colleges are in that category.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey#On_education_and_teacher_education
Man, do I hate auto correct.