Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, was at an educational conference shortly after Donald Trump took office.
The conference was a strategy session about how colleges and universities should deal with Trump, who was threatening to cut funding. Zimmerman spoke up during one of the sessions, asking whether the schools might have done anything to anger Trump and the American people.
"Could we use it to look in the mirror," Zimmerman asked, "and not just to circle the wagons?" he writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Instead of answering his question, one audience member stood up and said she was "deeply offended by Professor Zimmerman’s use of the term ‘circle the wagons,’ which connotes a hateful history of Native American displacement and genocide."
We've written hundreds of articles at PJ Media about woke academia, woke professors, and woke administrators. We make fun of them, rail against them, and call them out for their racism, antisemitism, and biased teaching.
Even the most closed-minded person is capable of introspection and self-examination. It's a requirement of adulthood. Looking in a mirror and asking tough questions about yourself and your beliefs is something everyone does at one time or another.
Not, apparently, anyone who exists in the higher education bubble.
Zimmerman wrote in Chronicle of Higher Education:
For the past 75 years, academics have been telling a story about how we enhance democratic dialogue and understanding. Yet we don’t really believe it. If we did, the moderator would have asked the objecting scholar to say more about why she bridled at my phraseology. Then the moderator would have asked me to reply, and eventually we might have gotten around to the substance of my question, which concerned the delicate matter of what degree of introspection, what sort of critical self-examination, might be required of professors and teachers amid the current crisis. None of that happened, of course. The moderator drew the panel to a moralistic and satisfyingly evasive close, and we all went out to lunch.
“'Out to lunch' is where much of higher education is — oblivious about how we got here and how we might change course," Zimmerman adds.
Even before Donald Trump was elected, most of America was seeing higher education in a very poor light. "We charge ever-higher sticker prices for degrees of increasingly dubious worth, even as we proclaim our commitment to the public good," Zimmerman writes. "To make good on that ideal, we cannot simply circle the wagons. We need to look in the mirror."
There was an unspoken, unwritten agreement between higher ed and the people it was supposed to serve. The post World War II revolution in education promised that "Universities would receive considerable autonomy in deciding how to use federal dollars and in exchange they would provide the technical know-how and the democratic spirit to sustain the nation," says Zimmerman.
The achievements of university and college labs in creating a dynamic, unparalleled economy are without precedent. But following the campus unrest of the 1960s, the deal between the people and higher education frayed around the edges. In response to the students' radicalism, schools shifted their focus from building a democratic American society.
"Despite the Truman-era promise to educate young people for democracy, universities eliminated core courses designed to introduce students to the liberal traditions of Western thought; in some quarters, the West itself was imagined as a source of oppression rather than liberation," notes Zimmerman.
The radical students graduated and became radical professors in the 1970s and 80s. They, in turn, trained a new cadre of activists and revolutionaries. The idea of going to college to become a better American went out the window.
Despite our rhetorical commitment to “critical thinking,” we typically present one side of an issue — the left-wing side, almost always — and call it a day. Such a practice is not simply a reflection of political bias, although it is surely that. It is also a mark of bad teaching.
Professors generally refuse to admit any of this, which compounds the problem. We are like little children who close their eyes in the hopes that nobody can see them. That was apparent during the fateful testimony by three college presidents in December 2023 before a congressional committee investigating antisemitism on campuses following the Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. Asked whether calls for genocide would be protected speech, the presidents answered — correctly — that it depends on the context.
But here is what they did not say: Universities have not defended this principle consistently. At Harvard, for example, the eminent evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven was effectively pushed out for saying that there are a multiplicity of genders but only two sexes: male and female. “
"In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Harvard president Claudine Gay was asked. She replied that Harvard supports “constructive dialogue, even on the most complex and divisive issues.” Even Democrats called her out on that hypocrisy.
"In Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Most of my colleagues aren’t there yet," Zimmerman dryly observes. Until they get there, American colleges will be under intense scrutiny from the government, the right, and anyone who cares about future generations and their views of the United States.
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