The Review

In the last decade or so, as our Karin Fischer discussed last week, presidents and other upper administrators have been expected to weigh in on the most contentious political topics of the day: the Black Lives Matter movement, the war in Ukraine, the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “For many on campus,” Fischer writes, “articulating ... public positions is seen as part of institutional leadership.” The reliability with which administrators issue such statements has apparently produced, among students, an appetite for more of them. The New York Times’s Ginia Bellafante analyzes the dynamic adroitly, with respect to competing activist demands for administrative recognition regarding the war in Gaza. At New York University, for instance, both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protesters shared “the belief that the university was inadequately supporting them.”

That hunger for institutional affirmation, Bellafante observes, reflects a reversal of the demands of an earlier generation of students, who chafed at the presumption that colleges should act in loco parentis. Today, “institutions have sought to reconstruct this role in response to what students and parents paying enormous sums for their education have seemed to want.” In the last two decades, Bellafante says, the amount of money administrations have spent on student services has more than tripled. Blake Smith has elucidated aspects of this phenomenon in our pages: “After rhetoric about the gravity of whatever has happened,” messages from administrators “typically encourage potentially traumatized readers to seek relief through relevant campus resources.” Students are figured as at once political activists, paying customers, and subjects of therapeutic concern.

When it comes to administrative statements, too, activist and therapeutic goals have become oddly blended. “In recent years,” as Tyler Austin Harper put it in a recent Atlantic piece, “college presidents, deans, and HR professionals have cribbed the language of edgy politics, openly framing their institutions and initiatives as aspirationally ‘anti-racist’ and ‘decolonial’ enterprises.” The adoption of an activist political idiom by administrators can have weird results, including confusion among students about the kind and degree of power administrators possess. During a recent protest at Harvard, a student addressed a dean, Rakesh Khurana (“not just a dean, but a friend,” according to his faculty page), this way: “Dean Rakesh, we call on you to use your privilege. We call on you to use your position to free Palestine.” Khurana is surely an accomplished scholar and an able administrator, but this is a tall order.

Universities have long made room for political activists, including political radicals of all stripes, but “there used to be a kind of separation of church and state,” Harper writes. “Universities were refuges for radicals, but they were not themselves radical.” The church/state metaphor is not idle. What else does the blend of ethical and moral prescription, rhetorical intensity, and pastoral care amount to but the insistence that the university become a quasi-religious institution? (Comparisons between aspects of contemporary student activism and religion are controversial; I have argued before that, despite the risks, the analogy sheds more light than not.) There is a push both from students and from administrators to make higher education operate, in many ways, more like a church, replete with sermons and other forms of ritual discourse.

Once established by campus leaders, such rituals become quite general. A representative, if especially robust, example can be found in a five-minute video posted by the Johns Hopkins University’s department of epidemiology. Dated June 2020 — very shortly after the murder of George Floyd, which was the immediate catalyst for many such expressions — the video shows administrators, faculty members, staff members, and students affirming that they “publicly denounce individual and systemic racism in all its forms.” At times, the speakers tether their denunciation to their area of professional expertise — “the systems of institutional racism that drive persistent health and health-care disparities” — but the larger message revolves around police violence. Formally, the message is liturgical and incantatory, a communal-prayer session with strong revivalist overtones. Toward the end, “we must act” is repeated four times, by four different speakers. A loop of four synth organ chords plays churchily throughout.

American colleges have, of course, long been enmeshed with religion, from their colonial origins, when they were instruments of ministerial education, to the founding and funding of the great research institutions at the beginning of the modern era. The University of Chicago, for instance, was established as a Baptist college and endowed by John D. Rockefeller out of confessional zeal. In the mid-19th century, as John Thelin writes in A History of American Higher Education, “most college presidents were ministers”; their “experience in passing collection plates and persuading parishioners to tithe was apt preparation for the hardscrabble course of persistent fund raising that a college demanded.” Moreover, churches saw supporting colleges “as a means of recruiting and educating future clergy.” Religion is in the American university’s bones.

So, too, is resistance to religion, from the conception of academic freedom American colleges borrowed from Germany — where freedom from church interference was a paramount concern — to the role of the professoriate in disseminating evolutionary theory in the face of administrative resistance rooted in religious orthodoxy. Recent debates about whether administrators ought to remain formally neutral when speaking about controversial matters, like the war in Gaza or the overturning of Roe, transpose to a political key an earlier tension that was as often about religion as it was about politics. If administrators do follow the advice of critics like Jeffrey Flier, who would like to see the wide embrace of Kalven Report-style neutrality on matters of politics, they will also, in a way, be re-secularizing their institutions.

Several presidents — at Northwestern, at Williams, at Stanford — have recently made motions in that direction. They will speak from the podium, but not from the pulpit.

Recommended

• “Every 15 minutes, four knights come out to joust. Above the clock an automaton (‘Jack Blandifer’) kicks his heels on bells every quarter hour.” In the London Review of Books, Tom Johnson writes about medieval time (but not Medieval Times) by way of Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm’s Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life.
• “The Troubles are now — and not in a good way — everybody’s trouble: There are, in the United States and Europe, powerful forms of mass political identity that do not ‘adequately manifest’ themselves in loyalty to the institutions, laws, and values that make a democratic state possible.” In The New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole reviews Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke. For a less-impressed take, see Samuel Clowes Huneke on how “Neiman has missed the point.” Neiman responds: “While chiding me for elementary errors, he [Huneke] makes quite a few himself.”
• “A police procedural, for me, I’ll watch it, but I can’t do it. I don’t know how to do it.” That’s Martin Scorsese talking about making his new film, Killers of the Flower Moon, in conversation with The New Yorker’s Richard Brody.

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin