The Latest Right Wing Assault on Higher Ed, or "Those who make revolutions by halves do but dig themselves a grave."

One of the few lasting institutional impacts of 60s and 70s student activism is the proliferation of identity-based academic departments: black studies, women's (and now gender) studies, queer studies, native studies, Hispanic studies, etc.

Often these departments are the last havens for dissidents in the professoriat, thanks to disciplines like political science and sociology increasingly de-politicized (largely through emphasis on quantitative than qualitative - if it can't have hard numbers ascribed to it, good luck getting funding - or tenure!). Critics of the way universities are run usually come from these departments too, which makes sense as their very creation stemmed from backlash against a privileged and oppressive curricula and governing structure.

In one sense, these departments were strategic concessions by universities, to blunt, divide, and ultimately contain the radical movements whose goal was to remake the entire system of higher education. You could say that many of the radicals were simply bought out - in exchange for the immediate comfort of departments, funding, and tenure slots, revolutionaries became reformers (with many siphoning their frustrated radical politics into ever more ridiculous forays into post-structuralism and post-modernism). And that has continued to this day, with so-called radical professors unwilling to bite the dead hand of bureaucracy now that it has also become the hand that feeds.*

But now, more than ever, these departments are under attack, either directly, through attempts to defund or depopulate through attrition, or indirectly, through the establishment of ideologically opposed departments. The New York Times:

COLORADO SPRINGS — Acknowledging that 20 years and millions of dollars spent loudly and bitterly attacking the liberal leanings of American campuses have failed to make much of a dent in the way undergraduates are educated, some conservatives have decided to try a new strategy.

They are finding like-minded tenured professors and helping them establish academic beachheads for their ideas.

These initiatives, like the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the University of Texas, Austin, or a project at the University of Colorado here in Colorado Springs, to publish a book of classic texts, are mostly financed by conservative organizations and donors, run by conservative professors. But they have a decidedly nonpartisan and nonideological face.

Their goal is to restore what conservative and other critics see as leading casualties of the campus culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s: the teaching of Western culture and a triumphal interpretation of American history.

“These are not ideological courses,” said James Piereson, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, which created the Veritas Fund for Higher Education to funnel donations to these sorts of projects. The initiatives are only political insofar as they “work against the thrust of programs and courses in gender, race and class studies, and postmodernism in general,” he said.

Once again we will have to wage war over the curriculum we learn under, and this time we may not win - authoritarians and conservatives have had several decades to find out exactly where and how to pour their millions onto campus, through departments and endowed chairs of "conservative thought". And here's where I trot out my hobby horse:

If we had won student power - a democratically-controlled university - we'd be much more able to fight off these conservative assaults on academia. It's only where back room deals and high-powered businessmen reign supreme that the money of reaction and privilege can find a beachhead. And because corruption knows no boundaries, these programs may soon get taxpayer dollars to continue:

Now, thanks in part to years of intensive lobbying by the National Association for Scholars, these projects may soon receive federal money as well. The new Higher Education Act, signed into law last month, provides grants for “academic programs or centers” devoted to “traditional American history, free institutions or Western civilization.”

The provision was “fashioned with this movement in mind,” Stephen Balch, a Republican and the founder and president of the association, said after the bill passed Congress, and “will help it gain even greater momentum.”

Once again, the fight is financial power against people power. But this time, we must recognize that merely wringing concessions from the rulers of the university is no guarantee that those concessions are permanent - we must create lasting change by redefining the very institutions of power and decision-making on campus.

The title of this post is the translation of one of the French slogans of May 1968. We in academia are seeing the flowers of the half-revolution of the 60s and 70s wither before our eyes, with the forces of reaction resurgent, flush with cash and momentum. Our task is as difficult as it is important: we must complete the revolution started those decades ago and transform higher education into what the the French radicals of '68 called a université populaire - a people's university.

*I feel obligated to point out two things. First, these hard-won departments do in fact do valuable work, and they cover and examine issues and facets of the human experience that are most often left out of our society's official account of itself. But having these departments also can give the rest of the university a pass - it makes it easier for History departments to focus on white straight wealthy men if those interested in equality and people's history are institutionally sequestered elsewhere. These departments should be seen as a half-step toward a much more ambitious goal. Second, let's be honest: radical faculty have much more to lose in any struggle than radical students. Faculty members rely on the university for the resources to help raise a family and financially support themselves and their loved ones. I still think that radical professors, with a few notable and awesome exceptions, could still do a lot more to help us out even while staying inside their comfort zones.

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Here's a list of the right wing organizations and programs mentioned in the NYTimes article:
VERITAS Fund for Higher Education Reform (needs a Wikipedia page)
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Manhattan Institute
National Association of Scholars
Thomas W. Smith Foundation (needs a Wikipedia page)
John M. Olin Foundation

Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization
Center for Western Civilization at Boulder
Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the University of Texas
Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy at the University of Virginia
Program on Freedom and Free Societies - Cornell (proposed)
Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History