The New Left vigilantes: academic freedom

National Review, Dec 8, 1989 by John P. Roche

The New Left Vigilantes

SINCE I MET my first class as a graduate instructor at Cornell in February 1947, I have seen a number of odd developments on American campuses ranging from panty raids to the election of a monarchist as the student-body president at the University of Maryland. As a dedicated follower of the Preacher, I have chuckled over recurring intellectual vanities. On my first trip around the academic cycle I labored manfully to create c "core curriculum"; on my second, I was equally vigorous in dismantling one that had evolved into a faculty full-employment gig. In short, I have never been an apocalyptic.

However, over the past decades there has been a development in American higher education which I find profoundly disturbing: the widespread threat to academic freedom from allegedly "radical" lynch mobs within the groves of academe. Forty years ago I considered Senator Joe McCarthy an unprincipled demagogue, but I never accepted the view that he was the sponsor of a reign of academic terror. If anything, the extent of academic freedom increased because of the concerns aroused by the antics of McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and various state roadshows of the same ilk. The total number of people jailed under the Smith Act for conspiring to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the government, or for contempt of Congress, was 140. McCarthy contributed nothing to this total.

I have discussed the "Mythology of McCarthyism" elsewhere (Academic Questions, Spring 1989) and only raise it here because it illuminates my key proposition: since World War II the most significant threat to freedom of ideas on campus has come not from without, from federal, state, or private assault, but--and increasingly since the "Cultural Revolution" of the late Sixties--from within, usually instigated by ex-New Left professors trying to regain the illusion of a revolutionary virility.

The late Sixties, culminating in the Cambodia/Kent State/Bobby Seale orgy in the spring of 1970, saw the development of a relationship between student disrupters and school administrators/faculty which was almost as tightly choreographed as a Russian ballet. Some students would demand that the university fund, say, a "Third World Center." The mock-heroics that followed brought flocks of bored young romantics out as spear-carriers, particularly since the TV wagons were on hand.

While the normally inept president or dean was trying to discover what a Third World Center involved, a building (preferably the president's office) would be seized and declared a "Liberated Zone," and ten "non-negotiable" demands would be made. The authors--as a number of them cynically admitted at the time--looked on these as a joke, but suddenly faculty meetings became guilt rapsessions with the most improbable assassins admitting they had killed Martin Luther King or condoned American militarism and imperialism.

TO SHORTEN a long story (and a tragic one if you cared about the essential nature of an educational institution), throughout the nation's "elite" schools a coalition of administrators and faculty developed pre-emptive capitulation into an art form. But the overwhelming majority of faculty and students never got involved. Generational solidarity kept student bodies from repudiating the nihilists, and the bulk of the faculty said: "Their demands are nonsense, but as long as they leave me alone give them what they want." After my office was firebombed I sensed that a number of my Brandeis colleagues thought it was a shame, but after all Roche brought it on himself by supporting the Vietnam War.

The Great Cultural Revolution imploded when President Richard Nixon abolished the draft. Suddenly, self-anointed student leaders found themselves out in the cold. But despite the essential inability of student activists to do more than discredit traditional American liberalism and serve as recruiting-officers for the Republican Party, they were extremely successful at spotting the soft targets in the "Establishment," notably churches, universities, and guilt-ridden WASP foundations.

When the New Left meltdown occurred, a number of extremely bright young men and women found themselves without an audience for their millenarian message. For a while they salved their egos with the certainty that the masses were suffering from an attack of false consciousness; eventually a number of the brighter ones headed for the sanctuary of the academy via the PhD route.

They were (and remain) big on "new perspectives," which meant that much of their material was speculative. In the course of writing a book on Marxism-Leninism I read three or four PhD dissertations prepared in the Seventies on Marx and found them all to be variations on kindly Karl, the caring social worker. Inevitably the authors got their heavy scholarly metal from the German Ideology, the Paris Notebooks, and the Grundrisse and virtually ignored the Manifesto and Capital. This, comrade (as they say in Tirana), was no accident: the authors--for Engels was Marx's co-author on virtually everything after 1845--of the latter works spent no time weeping for the wretched of the earth. The misery of the peasant and the proletarian was a necessary historical precondition for the coming of socialism.