Campus Wars: Reclaiming the Socratic Legacy

As with most conflicts of consequence, most people know of them, while many live in ways that enable them to ignore or avoid them altogether. Such is the case with the various struggles over higher education in the United States that erupted over the past century, characterized in a turn on James Davison Hunter’s phrase as the Campus Wars. These struggles are the result of persistent and perhaps natural ideological tension between professors and the broader community. The tension results from the relatively liberal or progressive political views of the professoriate and from its willingness to share those views. The fact that this tension only occasionally results in overt conflict is probably more a function of emergent political opportunities than of objective changes in political orientations.

The history of the conflict is rich. Previous waves of contest produced the controversies that led to the original declaration of the principles of academic freedom by the American Association of University Professors in 1915, academic complicity and reaction to the intrusions of the House Un-American Activities Committee of Joseph McCarthy, and the criticisms of university practice as characterized by moral confusion, victim centered activism and epistemological relativism. Today, the American university is again a kind of battleground on which rival camps struggle over new issues. The stakes in these campus wars are not immediately clear to an observer. Among the complaints from vocal proponents on the right: lack of commitment to the principles of truth and objectivity, illiberal ism, opposition to the canons of the western intellectual tradition, left-tilted political imbalance, excess sensitivity to the demands of minorities and women, lockstep secularism, vaporization of sexual deviance, socialism, globalism, and even anti-semitism.

In a land of big-tent politics, this breaks out as a Democratic-Republican cleavage in which victorious parties claim their spoils after hostilities have ended. This lumping leads to the admixture of odd elements and surprising coalitions. A recent meeting of right reformists at the American Enterprise Institute brought together leaders of movements with radically disparate agendas, from the abolition of campus speech codes in the spirit of the first amendment, to a project of revolutionary transformation led by a vanguard of university trustees unapologetically framed in Leninist terminology. This last feature may help make sense of campus wars activism, which derives its ends from the right, but takes its means from the playbook of the left. This is most clear in the one-man movement of David Horowitz, whose academic bill of rights is becoming familiar to lawmakers at all levels.

Reactions from within the university to these challenges are either muted or shrill. Most professors have heard little about the range of activities that may threaten their workplace, and those that have, like Stanley Katz, are tempted to avoid engagement for fear of giving the opposition attention and granting undue recognition. Others, like Michael Be rube, have made mini careers out of broadside defenses that, whatever their merits, tend to reinforce the opponents' stereotypes. While it is not clear how citizens of the university should react to these challenges, the idea that they are of little significance and will fall under their own weight seems untenable. In a study of a random sample of 1,417 college and university professors in spring 2006, my colleague Neil Gross and I found that perceptions of threat to academic freedom among professors appear to be higher than they were among social scientists surveyed by Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens in the McCarthy era fifty years before. The sources of such threats are not entirely clear, but the finding is arresting. Of course, in a world economy hungry for human capital and wedded to the model of scientific knowing, there is little that could permanently derail so central an institution as American higher education, but academic skeptics should recognize the scale, depth and scope of the current wave of criticism. The fronts of the wars range from website black lists, to accreditation panels, to courtrooms, to state budget committees, to quads and classrooms, to say nothing of the airwaves and therefore the dinner tables around the nation. Some of these fronts appear to be turning against the status quo under the leadership of a cadre of cavilers of whom Horowitz is most visible, but perhaps, least legitimate.

This brings us to the heart of the matter. Today’s reformers are far from benighted Luddites. They are well informed carpers, mobilized by concerns about the future of American higher education. Among these warriors, a deep-seated generative need manifests as defiance. They see radicals, Marxists, Islamists and feminists and even New Dealers and progressives as opponents of free inquiry and tolerance who must be opposed by all honest scholars. One critic, John Agresto, suggested that these supposed extremists are nothing more than enemies of humanism who lack the Socratic humility that looks for truth from the position of wonder. However faculty members react to this conflict, they should contest this last perspective in whatever ways they can.

The Socratic legacy is ours to claim. We are the gadflys who question authorities and take them to task in public. We are the outsiders who flaunt the orthodoxy of our own oikos system and live less than traditional lives in pursuit of truth. We are also those who stand accused by authorities as corrupter of the young and may be put to metaphorical trials on that account. We do so because, in our best moments, we love the truth and seek its beauty. We should be the modern day Socratics, but we must be sure we deserve the title. The challenge we face is to follow the model in its Delphic spirit. We must vigorously seek to know ourselves and to overthrow our excesses, so that from our position of enlightened ignorance, we can question the critics when they accuse us of intellectual despotism and play the gadfly.