{I have decided to take a deeper dive into the origins of the “cultural Marxism”/ “political correctness” brouhaha. How deep I can go, and how long I can remain beneath the murky waters of academia, remains to be seen.}
Last week on “The Attack of the Postmodern Cultural Marxists,” the intrepid trio of James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose was fighting the good fight against Critical Theory and Political Correctness. In today’s episode, we flash back to an earlier, more innocent time, a time when America was still Great; but Red Forces were already at work undermining that Greatness and poisoning the minds of America's Impressionable Youth. Before the Postmodern Cultural Marxists, and paving the way for their invasion, there were the Secular Liberal Academics, armed with their specious “academic freedom”. One brave man stood against them; here is his story.
In 1951, mirabile dictu, a new star was sighted in the sky of American conservatism: William F. Buckley, Jr. published, at the tender age of twenty-five, his first book, God and Man at Yale. In addition to heralding its author’s bright future, the book deconstructed what he saw as the shibboleth of “academic freedom”. Buckley’s assault on the citadels of liberal academia had little immediate effect (other than launching his career), but his arguments are worth revisiting.
Buckley’s book featured an Introduction from veteran journalist (and convert to conservatism) John Chamberlain, who, like Buckley, described universities as business enterprises beholden to their stockholders and their customers. 1 Chamberlain posed succinctly the question Buckley would address:
Should the right to pursue the truth be construed as a right to inculcate values that deny the value-judgments of the customer who is paying the bills of education? Must the customer, in the name of Academic Freedom, be compelled to take a product which he may consider defective?
The “customer” here is the student, or, alternatively, the bill-paying parents of the student. Should not he who pays the piper get to call the tune? Is not the “customer” always right? Why allow professors to bombard students with views the students do not want to hear and that the parents of said students do not want them to hear? Moreover, Buckley argued, the trustees of a university have the right and the duty to make sure the product being offered in the classroom conforms to standards and values they have set; “In the last analysis,” he wrote, “academic freedom must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools they oversee and support.”
If, Buckley insisted, the trustees and alumni of Yale were overwhelmingly God-fearing Christians who believed in the free market and in American-style individualism, and if the same was true of the parents who sent their children to Yale for instruction, should not the school’s teaching reflect and promote those values? According to Buckley—who used, by his own admission, somewhat informal research techniques—Yale was awash with professors teaching agnosticism, socialism (that is, Keynesian economics), and collectivism, the very opposite of what All Good Yale Men believed. In moderately high dudgeon, Buckley proclaimed himself shocked by the “extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude that, under the protective label of “academic freedom,” has produced one of the most extraordinary incongruities of our time: an institution that derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists and then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of these supporters to be atheistic socialists.” The nerve of such people!
Buckley did not expect, and was not advocating, either “academic freedom” (as commonly understood) or “scholarly objectivity”; both concepts, he thought, were as fanciful as unicorns. He believed that a university’s job was to promote certain values and certain ideologies and to do so unapologetically. Teaching being an activity done by humans, academic impartiality was a myth: “It has never been practiced, and, in fact, can never and ought never to be practiced.” The university and its hired help (professors) should endorse certain values and ideas and should dismiss and even condemn others.
Ironically, Buckley’s rejection of the university’s claim to “value-neutrality” foreshadowed claims that would be made decades later by left-wing “critical theorists” who posited that impartiality is only a façade which always conceals some agenda, and that an important function of education is to teach students to strip away the façade and reveal the agenda behind it. In the same way, Buckley and his conservative colleagues paved the way for claims of “hidden liberal bias” in the media, thereby anticipating postmodern suspicions of “hegemonic narratives”.
In God and Man, Buckley privileged students’ perceptions of left-wing bias over faculty or institutional protestations of neutrality. Like today’s students denouncing a professor for allegedly “racist,” “sexist,” or “homophobic” comments or attitudes, Buckley found the demons of collectivism and atheism lurking in every lecture and in every text. 2 As a Christian conservative, he felt marginalized and ignored in the Yale milieu; like other marginalized individuals (or members of marginalized groups), he was keenly aware of, and sensitive to, the significance of what perspectives are not offered or encouraged, either in texts, in lectures, or in class discussion. He bemoaned, for example, the failure of Yale’s economic courses to balance the theories of Keynes and Marx with those of Hayek, von Mises, and Frank Knight; if, like Buckley, you supported the Chicago school of economics, you were, or you felt like, a pariah. 3
Buckley asked the reader to consider a hypothetical situation: a well-qualified professor of economics cannot get hired at a university because he espouses, and intends to teach, the virtues of socialism. Buckley saw nothing inappropriate about this; school authorities, he said, have every right to proscribe views with which they disagree. After all, no professor could get hired by any respectable university to advocate for Nazism, white supremacy, or anti-Semitism; lines had to be drawn regarding acceptable discourse. Universities are employers who can hire and fire whom they please and who can, like any employer, dictate terms of employment—such as the content of an academic class—as they see fit. If the socialist (or racist, or anti-Semitic) professor cannot find work, then he can either change his tune or his profession.
Buckley’s view, in 1951, foreshadowed by several decades the claims of postmodernists like Stanley Fish: There’s no such thing as academic freedom, Buckley insisted, and it’s a good thing, too.4 Such was the conservative argument: impartiality was a myth and liberal bias was everywhere—if you were astute enough to see it. Liberal professors smuggled their views into ostensibly “objective” presentations; the selection of course materials alone sent messages about “politically correct” opinions. Conservatives wanted to change that, not by eliminating academic bias but by making such biases more explicit and more favorable to conservative views; they wanted schools to teach and straightforwardly espouse traditional Christian values, free market economics, Eurocentric male literature, and a version of history centered on “American Exceptionalism”.
As I said at the outset, Buckley's book did not succeed in its aim; academia persisted in its comfortable liberalism. Decades later, however, other critics, and not only conservatives, spoke out against stultifying academic orthodoxies and against what they saw as an alarming trend towards "political correctness". We shall consider those critics next.
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1 In his Introduction, Chamberlain observed that he and Buckley might be, as we say, on the wrong side of history, but, he added, “There is no compulsion on the decent human being to be “with history” when history is driving headlong toward an abyss.”
2 Buckley also provided unverified quotations attributed to professors, quotations intended to confirm their supposed biases. In the 1990s, critics of “political correctness” claimed that students were surreptitiously recording classroom lectures and discussions so that they could denounce instructors who uttered “incorrect” words or phrases. Once again, Buckley got there first, though without the latest technology.
3 He also questioned the failure of a professor teaching a class on “Historical and Literary Interpretations of the Old Testament” to provide a “Christian” perspective. I assume Buckley eventually learned that the “Old Testament” is the sacred scriptures of Judaism, so that a primarily Christian perspective on them would be, well, odd.
4 My allusion here is to Stanley Fish’s classic, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too.
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