Are college campuses training young Americans in balkanization and grievance politics—and thus functioning as the fountainheads of national division? Heather Mac Donald joined a panel of experts and donors to respond:
The wildfire that has been tearing through America’s institutions this summer began on college campuses. It is taking down meritocracy, our history, and the possibility of law and order. The destruction is being wrought in the name of fighting America’s allegedly endemic racism.
The claim that white supremacy is the centerpiece of our society—and the resulting obsession with “diversity”—are now the sole unifying concepts in academia. From the moment a freshman matriculates, he learns that he is either the oppressed or the oppressor. He learns that Western civilization is the source of global suffering. Fantastically, he is even taught to see pervasive racism and sexism on his own campus, the most welcoming environment in history for traditionally “marginalized” groups.
For several decades now, college graduates have carried such delusions with them into the working world. The nostrums of Identity Politics have infused the media. They’ve taken over corporate H.R. departments. They have compromised meritocratic standards in everything from judicial appointments to science faculties.
This summer, grievance politics exploded with unprecedented fury. Having absorbed ample theoretical justification for mayhem during their college studies, well-organized Antifa anarchists assaulted police officers, torched courthouses, and destroyed the life’s work of entrepreneurs. Politicians, business leaders, and philanthropists, schooled in the same ideas, barely demurred. Company after company, group after group, denounced the police and America’s supposedly constitutive bigotry.
Heretofore I have shrunk from giving up on universities entirely. Their core mission has seemed too precious to abandon: teaching students gratitude for their sublime cultural inheritance. Obviously, most of academia jettisoned that mission years ago. One could still hope, however, that somewhere, someplace, a student would experience the Eros of learning, and plunge headlong into truth and beauty under the tutelage of a charismatic professor, thus keeping alive for future generations the lessons of the classical canon.
I have now discarded that hope. This summer nearly every college president participated in the outpouring of anti-American, anti-rule-of-law rhetoric. None denounced the violence and looting. Ideological claims that our nation is built on widespread oppression are now, more than ever, the official doctrine on campuses. Preferences by identity group, already well-entrenched, will become even more distorting, and the poisonous distrust and accusations used to justify them will grow more extreme.
It is time to walk away from existing universities. Alumni and donors should not give them another cent. Not for cancer research, not for “conservative studies,” not for anything. The imperative now is to create alternative institutions. Erect, if you can, a college dedicated explicitly, through indefeasible legal fetters, to the apolitical cultivation of cultural literacy. Fight the pernicious idea that every student needs to go to college in the first place. Valorize the trades, the mastery of machines, the work that men do with their hands and their brawn. Revive and update the historical traditions of self-instruction, tutoring, and learning through doing and visiting.
We are in a race against time, one perhaps already lost. The more that graduates of our existing colleges enter positions of power, the less chance we have to preserve freedom, prosperity, and knowledge for the next generation of Americans.
This piece originally appeared at Philanthropy Roundtable
_____________________
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of the bestselling War on Cops and The Diversity Delusion. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Philanthropy Roundtable