Universities are left-wing hotbeds? Nonsense.
Forget about woke discourse and look at what colleges actually do: They hoard endowment funds, gobble up real estate, and churn out far more management consultants than social justice warriors.
Whatever you think of the outcry over speech on college campuses, the past month will surely confirm the general consensus that universities are overrun with radical leftwing views, including “critical race theory,” “decolonialism,” and Marxism. That impression is bound to deepen with Claudine Gay’s resignation last week as Harvard’s president, a situation that played out as another predictable skirmish in the culture wars.
But here’s the simple truth: No elite university is driven by left-wing politics. It can seem otherwise, because over the course of our young century universities have committed themselves to social justice rhetoric. But they have not committed themselves to social justice, which should disappoint the actual left much more than it does. Our national discourse about universities tends to be focused narrowly on the Ivies, which are not representative. But even if we keep the focus there, the idea that universities are hotbeds of left-wing lunatics is just wrong.
It’s true that there’s a good deal of leftwing activism from students and that there are prominent professors voicing antiracist views, like the much-discussed Ibram X. Kendi of Boston University. But these same universities have influential moderates and conservatives and produce figures like Brett Kavanaugh (Yale) and Representative Elise Stefanik (Harvard), and that’s not an accident. As institutions, elite universities flaunt radical rhetoric while acting in conformity with the rightward swing of our society over the last half century.
At least as far back as William F. Buckley’s 1951 book “God and Man at Yale,” there has been a tradition of conservatives complaining of liberal tendencies on campuses. The latest such critic is Christopher Rufo, who claims that leftists have gone on a neo-Marxist “long march
through the institutions,” taking over universities, among other things. On the basis of this spurious understanding, he has curried favor with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and gone so far as to shut down “undesired” programs at the New College of Florida.
The argument that campuses are beset by a lack of “viewpoint diversity” or by outright Maoism runs into trouble when you see that Harvard isn’t pumping out community organizers and beret-wearing literary critics. A whopping 57 percent of Harvard grads go into finance, consulting, or technology; the top landing spots are Google, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs.
Painting universities as inveterately left-wing requires us to think of them as only a reflection of the political views of some of their members. In other words, these are debates about university culture rather than the social outcomes that universities actually produce.
This is not the right way to examine any institution, which should be scrutinized primarily by its actions and effects in the real world. On this score, universities are corporations — some state-controlled — that act in keeping with a right-wing vision of markets and capital and that prepare their students, largely uncritically, for that market.
Over the last 50 years, universities have become increasingly corporatized. As federal and state governments have pulled back funding, tuition has ballooned and the customer-service model has flourished. Instead of an emphasis on fundamental research and a liberal arts education, faculty and students must contend with a casualized labor force — the replacement of full-time faculty with adjunct lecturers — endless real estate development, and a bloated class of administrators tasked with promoting student “wellness.” These are the strategies that created the perfect storm at West Virginia University, where a consultancy recently helped the school’s president decimate a flagship state institution. Bates College professor Tyler Austin Harper has recently argued that universities have set themselves up for this attack by using a thin version of ideas from the humanities to put in promotional brochures. But they’ve done more than this: They’ve also entrenched their most conservative tendencies under the cover of “woke” rhetoric.
Whatever elite university presidents say, they preside over massive amounts of wealth they are tasked with expanding. Endowments at the top schools are in the tens of billions of dollars, but when the pandemic hit, the actual constituents of those universities had to learn the bitter lesson that the funds were generally not usable. The money is parked wealth, used to create real estate empires that have a tenuous relationship to any educational mission — and sometimes contradict it directly. A case in point is West Virginia, where mismanaged capital commitments contributed to the deficit that the president solved by jettisoning major parts of the research institution. It will simply not do to pretend that such institutions are “radical” or “progressive.”
When any corporation vaunts its progressive bona fides, you should be skeptical. Universities are indeed participating in what I think of as “ideology wholesaling.” This involves a lot of talk that veers directly into political stances, but it avoids any institutional shifts that would back up those stances with actions. Sure, universities have diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, but then, so do Starbucks and many other major corporations. I don’t think these policies are successful, and there’s plenty of room for debate about how to weigh merit against a fair shot. But make no mistake: Elite universities aren’t attacking some conservative minority when they sell themselves as woke: They’re doing PR.
But surely the students come out “indoctrinated” with DEI and Marxism? Think again. Evidence shows that students do not change their political views in college to any significant extent, and the reason is clear to anyone who cares to pay attention. The biggest majors are not comparative literature and gender studies but psychology, economics, and computer science. No one is getting “decolonialism” in those departments. You can either point out that the humanities are in free fall and struggling to survive or you can say that they are the face and the leading force of the university as an institution. You can’t have it both ways.
Universities are not indoctrinating students with leftwing views. But they are treating them as “human capital,” a concept that economist Gary Becker turned into economic doctrine. The University of North Carolina, which just excluded both the humanities and the social sciences from its prestigious “distinguished professorships,” is undertaking a human-capital-based analysis of all its departments measured according to “return on investment” for each degree.
There is evidence that studying economics makes people less cooperative and more prone to seeing social processes as zero-sum competitions. That’s not an electoral political view, but it’s firmly a right-wing effect and it clearly plays a role in students’ lives after college. Sharp rises in tuition over the last decades, combined with a decline in funding even for state universities, has made liberal arts institutions follow the professional school model where a giant price tag requires a fancy lawyer or doctor job to pay back the loans. Universities have in turn sent a clear message to students and their parents: Our degrees are worth nothing but the salaries you get out of them. The cumulative effect of this hypercapitalist thinking is that our country moves further to the right, not to the left. If some dean happens to read Lenin in her spare time — well, it’s a free country.
The university’s mission is split between a meritbased promotion of research and the education of a public of informed citizens. Neither of these goals is well served by the human-capital theory of education, and the shift in that direction has become a crisis not for the “radical humanities” but for the United States as a nation. When you hear actual left-wing voices from the university, this is what they are complaining about: a vocation — higher education — that has betrayed the public and the project of knowledge at the same time, selling itself as liberal while acting in the service of conservative ends. That — and not a caricature of a loony leftwing university — is the problem facing higher education today.
Leif Weatherby is associate professor of German and director of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University. His writing has appeared in such publications as The New York Times and The Daily Beast.
Evidence shows that students do not change their political views in college to any significant extent.