The last bastion of statism and the passion for political coercion, the American academy, is slowly changing as the baby boomers reach retirement age.
For four decades, American college and university campuses have been dominated by an overwhelmingly left-wing professoriate that has been in place since the 1960s generation began to infiltrate the campuses as a result of entering graduate programs in order to avoid the Vietnam War and, among women, in search of full-time jobs that pay well but don’t require long hours once one achieves tenure.
Time heals all wounds, however, and that generation is passing by the wayside as they reach retirement age. The low point of the American university has surely been the 1990s and 2000s, with the rise of political correctness, administrative encouragement of sexual license among students, identity-politics curricula, student indoctrination in hatred of whites and males, and other ghastly perversions.
As a recent New York Times article notes, however, the generation that hoped it would die before it got old, and then changed its mind (what was left of it), has indeed got old and is doddering off the stage not a moment too soon:
Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors—less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.
“There’s definitely something happening,” said Peter W. Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, which was created in 1987 to counter attacks on Western culture and values. “I hear from quite a few faculty members and graduate students from around the country. They are not really interested in fighting the battles that have been fought over the last 20 years.”
As a result, the article notes, "there are signs that the intense passions and polemics that roiled campuses during the past couple of decades have begun to fade." The numbers bear this out, the story notes:
[A] new study of the social and political views of American professors by Neil Gross at the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons at George Mason University found that the notion of a generational divide is more than a glancing impression. “Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,” they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third.
When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger.
Don’t expect any immediate change, however, as the academy still tends to draw a multitude of big-government poltiical fanatics, weird dreamers, wacky idealists, sex maniacs, arrogant narcissists, people who hate their parents, and other such human tragedies, and the professoriate has done a fabulous job of cruelly and relentlessly running off nearly everyone with any common sense or human decency. The New York Times article notes this stubborn fact:
Gerald Graff, president of the Modern Language Association and author of the 1992 book “Beyond the Culture Wars,” is more skeptical, saying he hasn’t seen evidence of change at the University of Illinois in Chicago, where he teaches English. “You’d think that the further we get away from the ’60s, where a lot of our political attitudes are nurtured, there would be,” he said, “but I have to say it doesn’t seem to be happening.”
Certainly some disciplines, like literary studies, seem more resistant to change. Elsewhere, senior faculty members are more likely to hire young scholars in their own mold, while some baby boomers have adopted the attitudes and styles of their younger peers.
Still, change will come, over time, and it will be very salutary indeed. The only question is whether it will arrive before the American academy implodes entirely.
At present, it appears it could go either way.
As Ned Flanders said in The Simpsons, "Say your prayers, ’cause the schools can’t force you like they should!"
I think you’re quite right, Bob. Postmodernism never made any sense (which was a great part of its appeal) but it has become simply a bore. The purpose behind academia during the past few decades has been to transform society and indeed Western civilization, through political, social, and cultural means. Hence, truth was low on the priority list.
Truly scholarly people, however, go into the academy looking for real and true meanings in their various subject areas. The baby boomers purged those people and kept them out to the extent possible, to ensure the focus stayed on the civilizational transformation the Great Left sought.
The passing of the baby boomers will surely reverse that process, though change will be inhibited by the damage already done. Still, that generation and their bad works will indeed pass.
Sam,
Such has been the intensity with which it has been pursued that postmodernism looks already used up and ready for the ash heap.
I know that literary theory (New Historicism, Deconstruction, Reader-Response Theory, etc.) was welcomed among academics not simply because of ideological issues but because, after all the work done by the New Critics, there didn’t seem anywhere left to go. So people went left. Now, the postmods are no longer new and exciting. Not really sexy at all. In fact they have become predictable. Tell me from what theoretical perspective a professor teaches, and I will tell you what he will say about any given piece of literature, provided I have read it.
There will be some academic disciplines–anthropology, for instance–that will probably always tack left because they stress material culture, making them fodder for all the postmod theories, which are all materialistic in approach–some vehemently so. But I suspect that slowly, slowly, the postmod grip will loosen, and the academic fads will change out of sheer inertia.