The California Association of Scholars, affiliated with the National Association of Scholars, recently released their assessment of why students in the Golden State’s institutions of higher learning are consistent underachievers academically while being consistent overachievers politically:
Public confidence in academia is dropping as the general public begins to understand that a college education is now much less likely to improve reading, writing, and reasoning skills, as well as general knowledge, than it used to. And this is happening just as the cost of a college education has been rising much faster than inflation. Students are being asked to pay considerably more and get considerably less. We are now seeing much increased concern with student debt and rising tuition costs. As this concern about cost joins with the growing concern about quality, the University must soon face a major crisis of public confidence.
The findings of these studies match all too well the specific complaints that are now commonly heard about the manifestations of a politicized higher education: that requirements for coursework in American history and institutions have been dropped, that writing courses often stress writing far less than tendentious political topics; that prescribed books are frequently no more than journalistic presentations of a simple political message instead of the more complex writings appropriate to an academic context; and that faculty teach what to think rather than how to think: that is, they demand correct attitudes and beliefs of students more than they require independent reading and thought.
This report is concerned with the corruption of the University of California by activist politics, a condition which, as we shall show, sharply lowers the quality of academic teaching, analysis, and research, and results in exactly the troubling deficiencies that are being found in the studies to which we have referred. We shall show that this is an inevitable consequence of any substantial influence of radical politics in academia, because its characteristic interests and modes of thought are the very antithesis of those that should prevail in academic life.
When the Cold War finally ebbed away, a good many ideologues ensconced in academia were left stranded on the beach:
It is often said that it is paradoxical, even ironic, that at the same time that the utopian socialist regimes of the Soviet Union and its satellites were beginning to collapse (during the 1980s), the presence of Marxism on the college campuses of the English-speaking world was growing exponentially. But the simultaneity of these two apparently contradictory trends is not hard to understand. In the real world of practical politics, utopian socialism had suffered a defeat so crushing that it now seemed moribund and irrelevant, and so the remnant of die-hard believers – largely in countries that had no direct experience of its practice – retreated from the everyday world that had treated its cherished ideas so cruelly. They found a refuge from that world in the ivory tower of academia. And so an idea whose presence in the general public was now vanishingly small achieved the disproportionately large on-campus presence that we have documented. — Ibid.
UC Davis English professor Scott Herring has been rubbing elbows with these relics for years:
‘A Crisis of Competence’ is packed with … evidence [proving massive political indoctrination], enough to convince anyone. I was a little disappointed to learn that the literature departments I used to work in are actually just out of the lead in pure leftist bias, behind PoliSci and other departments that have a more overtly political focus. No matter: literature is still in the big leagues. My experience there made it easy to understand the official response the report has generated so far.
— Scott Herring, “The Academic Perpetual Motion Machine”, Dissident Prof, April 25, 2012
Herring briefly sketches his own pilgrim’s progress as “a directionless and frequently stoned undergrad” through the academic hierarchy, and then notes:
It may not surprise you to hear that never once did any of [my teachers and professors] order me to design my courses so that they indoctrinated students into a hard-left ideology. No one even hinted that I should do so. I was not even encouraged to be a Great Society liberal. Of course, every university department I had anything to do with was rotten with far-out leftists. I did not have to be told what to do, because my elders always assumed that I was just like them. Normally, but for my own eccentricities, they would have been correct. I was pulled leftward by the textbooks that the department sometimes selected for me, but when I gained the necessary seniority, I dumped the texts. That was the only political influence my superiors had over me at every campus, in departments that otherwise regularly sounded like one of the crowd scenes in the Warren Beatty movie Reds. — Ibid.
When many kids leave home for college, they find an environment conducive to their own rebellious mindset, especially in the humanities:
Humanities departments are the way they are as the result of a sorting that happens to those pierced, tattooed, and angry kids between high school and the bachelor’s degree. … Our freshmen arrive—the angry ones—already carrying half-formed ideas that take more definite shape when they reach higher education because their anger fits well with totalizing explanations and prescriptions for the world that are demonstrably false and harmful, but that are part of the atmosphere of every university: Marxism, Maoism, anarchism, Freudian psychoanalysis, weirder French versions of psychoanalysis, even weirder French versions of feminism, deconstructive criticism (French, mostly—sorry for the anti-Gallic tone, here, but the French theorists, and the Germans too, have much to answer for). — Ibid.
Once the sorting is underway, C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” emerge and crystallize:
The kids who want a false but totalizing Theory of Everything drift over into the humanities, where evidence matters less and less the further they get from the science buildings. They may end up in the English and Comparative Literature departments I know well, where evidence is just a mass of words, with only imaginary reference points out in reality. A long-standing joke states that the English Department is where old ideas go to die, but it is a poor joke, because the ideas do not die. Those of Marx, those of Freud, they live on and on and on.
In its ideology, at least, these departments have the scientists beat. They have created a perpetual motion machine. — Ibid.
The NAS report (PDF) is here. Herring’s response to it is here. C. P. Snow’s book (PDF) is here.