Why Universities Will Never Openly Admit That They Are Progressive

A recent article in the Washington Post by John Tomasi and Tyler VanderWeele (respectively President of Heterodox Academy and a Professor at Harvard) makes an arresting argument.

At many elite universities today… progressive assumptions influence admissions, hiring, curriculum and student life, but administrations are reluctant to admit it. Perhaps they are unwilling to forgo the prestige of open inquiry, and so hesitate to acknowledge the bet they are making against it.

We propose that universities that are committed to progressive policies simply say so. They should tell students, faculty and the public that, like religious colleges, they have opted to teach and pursue knowledge through a particular lens: roughly, the lens of progressive politics.

They suggest that the elite universities should be as frank as religious colleges in admitting that they have beliefs.

Universities should admit that they are progressive.

I have some sympathy with this suggestion, but there are several problems with it.

First, why sympathy? Well, because, as everyone knows, universities have been silently biased towards the Left and progressivism since the 1960s, informally and confusedly almost balancedly at first, and then, since the 1980s, consciously though still covertly, but with accelerating explicitness since the 2000s: until, happily, by the 2020s we really have to talk about it.

I keep saying and I’ll say it again: the revolution of our time is not that anything is happening but that we have started to be able to talk about what has been happening for some time.

By “Left” and “progressive” I mean, of course, suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, Net Zero Anxiety, European Union Nostalgia, Covid Nothing-To-See-Here-Itis, LGBTQ+ishness, plus, probably, Ardaynia and Gazatronics: and, if doubting these, soon corrected by a Stasi-type Administrator, Line Manager, or Mentor, or quavering Colleague full of good prudential advice.

Take only political science. Academic political science is almost entirely ­– both – claiming to be impartial, straining for impartiality, stultifying itself with methods and datasets and pofacedness – and – complaining about ‘populism’, the ‘far Right’ and ‘democratic backsliding’, as if its job is not to explain anything in politics but instead approve or disapprove of it.

Experts call this sort of thing ‘cognitive dissonance’. Experts rarely notice, however, their own cognitive dissonance. That is what an expert is. An expert is a pot that judiciously calls kettles black.

I am an innocent. I think academic study should be impartial, objective. Or I thought this. I believed it. COVID-19 and its Backwash convinced me that we really have to talk about things and therefore that objectivity and impartiality are no longer ideal. The ideal is now, alas, used against good sense and the old order – the old, odd, eccentric order sketched by Colin Kidd in Twilight of the Dons. So now we have to abandon innocent, impartiality and objectivity, and fight. “Fight” means, in the first instance, talk, write, think, recognise – and on something like equal terms. It means to throw the word ‘Left’ in people’s faces, and turn the word ‘Liberal’, if necessary, into a word of abuse. It means admitting our own partiality, even if this partiality is in defence of an older vision of impartiality. We cannot simply align ourselves with impartiality because this ‘impartiality’ has been used against us by the state and various corporations and collectivities for 60 years.

So I agree, in principle, with Tomasi and  VanderWeele. Let’s have frank progressive and conservative institutions. Let’s have an open, admitted cultural cognitive dissonance or discussion. Let’s have a Right echo chamber so that, at least, we defend certain ideas from the juggernaut of the vast Leftist echo chamber of CNN, BBC, New York Times, Guardian, Princeton, Oxford, NHS, EU etc.

But.

There are problems.

First, it will mean the loss of a single community, the ideal of a single arena for making sense. Instead, our collective way of making sense will be divided from the beginning. We’ll have the Progressive Journal of Political Philosophy and the Conservative Journal of Political Philosophy and the same repeated across all subjects. There won’t even be the pretence of communicating across the barbed wire.

Second, it might mean an entire loss of the academic ideal. The Left will say, ‘We are impartial’ and the Right will say, ‘You are not impartial, and we have to be partial against you in order to defend the old impartiality’ and the Left will say ‘That’s a contradiction’ and the Right will say ‘One you made necessary’ and so on. It will be hard for either to pretend to the old practice of making sense together of, in mild antagonism but in the same chambers, Thucydides, Telos, Tacitus, Thomas, Telescopy, Tides, Termites and Topology.

This is the bind. Explicitness is necessary. The Establishment of the Quinquagenary (the Establishment that ruled without opposition from 1966 to 2016) made it necessary. But explicitness is an admission of a Divided Society. It institutionalises sectarianism. It presupposes war at the heart of a state. It means that stasis, faction, conflict, disorder will not only be at the heart of politics, where it is bracketed so it is found only in elections and parliament, but will be in all thought. Our entire society will become institutionally politicised. And this would kill the university stone dead.

I don’t know what to suggest. It is more complicated than Tomasi and  VanderWeele are willing to admit. We are in a bind. The progressive Left have to come off it a lot. And they won’t.

They end their piece weakly, saying: “If some universities want to be ideological, let them. They just need to admit it.”

Well, that ain’t going to happen. Some universities? No, any reform has to be about all, not some.

And why would they admit it?

My title is ‘Why Universities Will Never Openly Admit That They Are Progressive?’ and I have not quite answered that question yet. It is perhaps the simplest point. Universities will never openly admit they are progressive, because they have too much to lose: they will lose their hegemony over the modern mind. They will, in effect, accept that they are limited, partial, maxing out at 50%, instead of spuriously but influentially being able to lay claim to the entire 100%. In addition, our modern Western states are no longer the shambolic, feudal things they could afford to be in the old casual days of World Domination. They are now, simply, Chinese – bureaucratic, ideological, monological – but with a fantastic overlay of sophisticated Joseph and his Coat of Many Colours, Heraclitus Never Stepping Into the Same River Twice, and Wittgenstein seeing Rabbits and Ducks everywhere but no Truth. The West is still the envy of the world, with its brilliant hypocrisy and self-deception, its endless heartless battle between meritocracy and mediocracy, and its decaying, somewhat foul, beauty. The rot has set into those Caravaggio apples.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.