Spectator Life

It’s well known that the question of who can speak and on what topics has become a flashpoint for controversy on our nation’s college and university campuses. I experienced intimidation firsthand after publishing an op-ed in the New York Times in which I questioned some of seemingly liberal, lopsided programming at Sarah Lawrence College (one of the most proudly progressive schools, where I am a tenured professor). I suggested that more balance was needed given our polarized times and reiterated my concerns about collegiate ideological echo chambers. Within hours, my office door and surrounding corridor was vandalized. Pictures of my family were taken and bumper stickers that I had placed on the door to create a welcoming environment for students were stripped off.

In nearly every state, the legislature is nervous about the public universities it finances. And fair enough. Apart from sports, the state colleges in America tend to make the national news only when protests break out, and protests tend to be driven by a radicalism that reveals the school protesters are far to the left of the legislatures of even the more liberal states. Such national news embarrasses the legislators, who send querulous letters to the school officials, with distant threats of cutting state funding. Which tempts those officials to surrender preemptively to activists, in the hope of avoiding protests. Conservatives in America typically blame the radicalism of college administrators for, say, the academic banning of conservative speakers on campus.

‘Don’t quote me on this,’ the professor says. ‘Let’s just say Kavanaugh is not going to be the last professor who’s not going to be teaching at Harvard. And several of them are tenured, and they’re going to have to leave.’ The professor teaches at a top university in the Northeast. We’re talking hours after Brett Kavanaugh’s withdrawal from teaching a course on the history of the Supreme Court at Harvard next January. That would have been the tenth time that Kavanaugh had taught that course. Now, however, he has become part of the Supreme Court’s history, and not in the way that he wanted.

‘Kavanaugh’s Drinking Should Be Investigated,’ says the headline on Slate, a reference to the admission by Mark Judge, a schoolfriend of Brett Kavanaugh’s, that he sometimes got ‘black out’ drunk. This prompted a wit on Twitter to remark: ‘Guys, I think conservatives won the culture wars.’ https://twitter.com/the_pike_man/status/1044763862174715904 Reading that brought me up short. I’m a social liberal and an economic conservative, and have always told myself that people like me have won: liberals won the culture war and conservatives won the economic war, at least in the US and the UK. But what if it’s the other way round? Let’s start with the culture war. If liberals won, how do you explain the following?

What’s gone wrong with the American university? Everything, really: politicised teachers — agit profs, we might call them — inciting know-nothing students; pusillanimous presidents cringing before mobs of ‘activists’; teaching standards hollowed out, with classes taught by grad students and adjuncts; the ‘mission’ turned from teaching something useful to Social Justice, the healing of a universe sullied by white capitalism, and the endless milking of alumni for donations; and all of it at a cost that’s been rising ahead of inflation every year since 1980, while teaching standards and the value of a degree have been steadily dropping. Take Yale University, for instance.

According to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, America’s universities have succumbed to ‘safetyism’, whereby students are protected from anything that might cause them anxiety or discomfort. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, published this week, they attribute the spread of ‘trigger warnings’, ‘safe spaces’ and ‘bias hotlines’ on campus to a misplaced concern about the psychological fragility of students. In their view, millennials aren’t ‘snowflakes’, but imagine themselves to be on account of having been surrounded by over-protective parents and teachers.

Everyone knows the real reason people like Donald Trump are sceptical of climate change is that conservatives are fundamentally anti-science. Some doubt science because it conflicts with their religious beliefs; others because its implications might mean radically shifting the global economy in an anti-growth or heavily statist direction, which goes against their free-market ideology; others because, being conservative, they are prisoners of their dogmatism, need closure and fear uncertainty. I hear this all the time from lefties on social media. And there seems to be some evidence to support it.

Britain seems to be following America down a dangerous path. There’s your politician David Lammy accusing Oxford and Cambridge of racial bias — and refusing to listen when they point out they simply accept whoever gets top grades. Then there’s the author Lionel Shriver, pilloried because she dared to suggest (in this magazine) that privileging identity quotas over talent might be a mistake. It seems the UK is succumbing to the same madness over diversity and quotas that has plagued the US for half a century. The hope is that quotas lead to a fairer, more tolerant society, but the reality is very different. American institutions have enshrined diversity and inclusion as their guiding principles.

Possess the wrong firearm after dark just one block west of Vermont Avenue, and the Los Angeles Police Department will have you pinned to the ground before you can say, “I can’t breathe.” Serially molest hundreds of your patients from your perch as the sole full-time gynaecologist at the University of Southern California Engemann Student Health Center, and it appears the bureaucrats and billionaires who run the school will protect you for years.By now the story has broken into national news, namely that Dr.

Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s Evangelical Christian finishing school, gathers three times a week for “convocation”, a worship service with guest speakers from all backgrounds. Attendance is mandatory, but students say the man delivering today’s sermon would have filled the 8,000-capacity venue regardless. Because today, the Ben Shapiro show has come to Liberty. A lot of people don’t like Shapiro. His critics on the right dislike him even more than his critics on the left - “the alt-right think I’m a cuck Jew,” he tells his podcast audience. A touch of jealousy there, perhaps – Shapiro may be a bit soft for many of his rivals on the internet. What really hurts, however, is that he’s a bigger deal than all of them now. And his fans worship him.

Across the street at the Museum of Fine Arts, there is an extraordinary collection of Georgian furniture and paintings from Boston just before the revolution. It all seems a lot more sumptuous than the sort of thing that would have been found in a contemporary English town of 15,000. The colonials were, of course, more lightly taxed than the British, yet they rebelled. Might it have been to do with sovereignty and ‘taking back control’? I suppose it worked out for them. Still, when I asked my study group at Harvard’s Kennedy School whether Brexit was a good idea, not a single hand went up.

Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76. Here, Kate Chisholm describes listening to the Cambridge professor deliver the 2016 Reith Lectures: You don’t expect to be brought close to tears by the Reith Lectures, which are after all at the most extreme end of Radio 4’s commitment to ‘educating’ its audience. Yet when Stephen Hawking delivered this year’s talks at the Royal Institution in London (in front of a lucky audience of listeners and scientists) there was both much laughter and a heightened sense of emotion.

This week my employer, Harvard University, announced its next president, Lawrence Bacow. The campus newspaper asked what advice I would give our incoming chief, and I reiterated the counsel I had offered the search committee: ‘The President of Harvard University is not just the steward of our institution, but, because of Harvard’s fame, a voice for the integrity of academia as a forum for free inquiry.