Almost 30 years ago, the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote an essay in Harper’s with a title that could have been ripped from the headlines today: “Demonizing the Academy.” The political situation Rorty describes will sound familiar. “Among the many convenient targets that Republican politicians and intellectuals have at their disposal,” he begins, “the one at which they direct their fire with perhaps the most delight is the academy.” Politicians like Newt Gingrich, Rorty says, have exploited fear of what was then called “multiculturalism” to convince the American public that the academy was “under the control of a ‘political correctness’ police.” Swap out “woke” for “political correctness” and “DEI” for “multiculturalism,” and you have a good chunk of contemporary Republican attitudinizing, pickled and preserved from the 1990s.
Despite his conviction that this characterization of the academy was dishonest, Rorty himself describes what he sees as the excesses of the campus left in terms almost as harsh as the ones he uses to excoriate the Republicans. “There are more shallow-pated, resentful multiculturalists around than one might have thought”; some scholars “write in a barely intelligible jargon”; campus multiculturalism “has turned into an attempt to get jobs and grants for psychobabbling busybodies.” DeSantis might profit from Rorty’s superior command of invective.
Rorty attempts to resolve his essay’s schizophrenia by insisting that, his derisive portrayal of the campus left notwithstanding, concerns about it are strategically exaggerated, indeed inflated beyond all measure. Perhaps 2 percent of faculty members, Rorty estimates, conform to the caricature pushed by conservative politicians as well as intellectuals like Allan Bloom. (Among humanists, Rorty allows, the share could be as high as 10 percent.) “The right has been astonishingly successful in impugning the integrity of the entire system of higher education by pointing to the frivolity and self-righteousness of this 2 percent.”
Rorty died in 2007. His fellow left-liberal Todd Gitlin, who died last year and who shared Rorty’s bleak assessment of Bloom and company back in the ’90s, lived long enough to decide, in a qualified way, that Bloom had gotten some things right: “Bloom’s exaggerations undermined the case for liberal education. It must also be said that they were, at times, disconcertingly and grimly prophetic.”
If you’re sympathetic to that judgment, you need some account of what changed between 1995 and the last several years. The answer often given — Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Snyder have made a robust version of the case in our pages — is that the political commitments of Rorty’s 2 percent have been institutionalized by campus bureaucracies of various kinds, which today dwarf anything in the administrative landscape of the 1990s. In scores of cases — at Yale and Stanford Law, at Macalester, at Hamline, at Augsburg University, at the University of Michigan, at the University of Southern California, at San Francisco State University, at George Washington University, at American University, at Georgetown University, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, at the New School, and so on and so on — students and faculty members have come into speech-related conflict with diversity administrators. Nor is it obvious that this administrative program is “left” in the way people like Bloom supposed back in the ’90s. The sensitivities of religious conservatives are particularly well-suited to administrative protocols. At American, pro-choice students were targeted for offending Christian conservatives; at Macalester, an Iranian feminist was targeted for offending traditional Muslim sentiment about modest garb.
As The Chronicle’s David Jesse wrote last week, there is in response to all this a sense that college presidents and other senior leaders are reasserting a strong libertarian position on academic freedom and campus free speech. In one of the most prominent cases he mentions — Stanford Law — that rearticulation comes at the expense of administrators hired to manage diversity. When Stanford Law’s dean, Jenny Martinez, issued a powerful rebuke to the students who had disrupted a speech by the conservative appellate judge Kyle Duncan, she also implicitly scolded Tirien Steinbach, Stanford Law’s associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, who was felt to have enabled the protests. (Steinbach has been placed on leave.) From Martinez’s point of view, Steinbach had failed to uphold school policies. From Steinbach’s, as she described in The Wall Street Journal, she was doing exactly what she had been hired to do — and seems to have been punished for it.
The tension here is surely very common and very damaging. As Ariana González Stokas, a philosopher who has served as chief diversity officer at a number of institutions, wrote last week in the Review, the role seems to ask for an impossible balancing act: between upholding university policies on the one hand and, on the other, somehow assuaging the criticisms of activists who suspect that those policies are themselves the root of injustice. “It became quickly apparent,” González Stokas writes, “that one could work on diversity so long as one did not too dramatically unsettle the institution’s traditions and seek to reassemble them, or to open up the arteries of inequity and dig around to find what needed to be abolished.” From this point of view, people like Steinbach have been hired to say what activists want to hear — and then to be fired for saying it. This isn’t fair to anyone.
