Can our universities be saved? This is the question that I’ve been asked countless times since I penned a Post column on anti-Israel encampments in June.
Sadly, my answer is a qualified no. The universities are not only miseducating students, but they’re failing to abide by their own academic rules. One needn’t look far to see the noxious rise of antisemitism on campus, where Jewish students have routinely become victims of threats and intimidation. Although faculty, unions and administrators frequently make loud public proclamations about how much they’re devoted to the human rights of minority groups, when it comes to the Jews, all we hear is silence.
In fact, the abhorrent tolerance for Jew hatred on campus is a sign of a far deeper problem. Much of it has to do with the widespread embrace of “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI. It not only dictates how the universities are run, but it permeates most academic departments. In fact, when a proposal was put forward in my own department to incorporate DEI into every aspect of learning (course syllabi, hiring, promotion, etc.), I objected that this was akin to a new religious orthodoxy. In effect, it would divide all people into “good” and “bad” racial groups, which I saw as being a new form of racism. The response I received was utter incomprehension. This is because institutionalized racism is now being repackaged as a great act of humanitarianism. Is it any surprise then that Jews are being demonized on university campuses, because according to DEI logic, they’re deemed white and “privileged,” and therefore deserving of loathing?
This fervent adherence to ideology has replaced the open-minded search for truth. As a result, universities cannot be relied on to provide the basic educational training that encourages students to think freely. That is to say, the universities are no longer places for students to receive a genuine education. Instead, for the most part, all they get is four years of radical indoctrination.
This has happened because our universities are now dominated by a neo-Marxist ideology passing itself off as education. At most universities, little remains of free thought, because nowadays anyone who thinks freely either cannot be hired or is politely purged (like our own Jordan Peterson).
But unfortunately, this isn’t as new as it seems.
I got my first taste of this pernicious ideology when I was a student in the mid-1970s. I was taking a law course with a professor who dismissed the very idea of human rights as a mere “bourgeois affectation,” declaring that the only solution for western society is “total revolution.” When I challenged him after class about whether dissenters would be tolerated in his new society, he said no: they should be lined up against a wall and shot. In fact, he boasted that he would be willing to do the shooting himself.
And this was a professor of law!
Though shaken, I dismissed this incident as a one-off, the mere ravings of a sociopath who had stumbled into academia. And I vowed that it would not deter me from pursuing a university career.
Flash forward to the 2020s and meet today’s students. Recently I had a fourth-year student in my class who was shocked that I verbally defended the notion of “human nature.” He said he had never heard a professor say that before. I also had a student complain to me that he could barely find courses to take that were free of Marxist “post-colonialist” theory. And another student told me that it was only in my class that she could speak freely. In other classes, she would fear being failed if she expressed opinions that diverged from those of her professors. Comments like these make one despair that there is anything resembling education going on in our halls of “higher learning.”
So what is to be done? Should concerned parents be sending their children to universities? The good news is that there are a handful of new colleges that have recently been established in the United States, which are specifically designed to provide students with a true liberal education (the University of Austin, the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, Ralston College, etc.). However, these new colleges are few in number, and expensive by Canadian standards. For those who are religiously oriented, there are also traditional Christian and Jewish colleges that tend to be relatively free of DEI, but obviously such colleges aren’t for everyone. In Canada, the only program I know of that is not infected by DEI is the Great Books Program at Carlton University in Ottawa, but it is relatively small and only accepts a select number of highly motivated students.
To find a lasting solution, we must seek a way to heal the universities from the life-threatening sickness that currently afflicts them.
Let me mention several ideas which I consider essential for saving the universities from themselves.
First, governments should institute clear rules of academic conduct that protect the human rights of all students as conditions of university funding. If universities fail to follow those rules, their funding should be cut off.
Second, donors should be highly selective about which universities to support. They should also establish firm legal prerequisites for how their money is used, which permit the withdrawal of funds if the conditions of their gifts aren’t properly followed.
Third, the vast DEI bureaucracies must be shut down. DEI is a malevolent instrument of control that encourages racial hostility among students, enforces ideological conformity and stifles free thought.
Fourth, a way must be found to fix the hiring process, which has been ceded to neo-Marxist faculty who enforce ideological uniformity and whose power is ensured by hiring only their own. As it is today, favoured racial and sexual identities are almost exclusively preferred, which is basically a sly cover for entrenching ideological conformity.
Fifth, a new type of university president must be sought, one who will fight the abuses of academic privilege practiced by the faculty. The example to be followed here is that of the University of Florida and its president, Ben Sasse.
Can we make the same urgently needed changes here in Canada? If the old universities can’t be easily fixed, don’t we need new institutions? Yes, but this will take many years. For now, the only solution may be for donors to establish designated scholarship funds for Canadian students to attend some of the newly established U.S. colleges like the University of Austin and the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center. It isn’t a total solution, or even an adequate one, but it is a start.
Another helpful device may be to set up organizations to advise students on how to avoid the radical professors that dominate most of the university campuses. And parents and students take note: those radicals are no longer limited to the humanities. The sciences, engineering, law, medicine, education and business faculties have all been infected by DEI. True, there still are professors of integrity, but many of them are afraid to speak out for fear of losing their jobs.
These proposals may seem too difficult to achieve. But public outcry will help pressure the politicians to start making necessary changes, since the universities won’t even acknowledge that there’s a problem. After all, if we don’t sound the alarm with blunt words of warning, the entire edifice could soon come crashing down. And unless something dramatically changes, higher education has nowhere to go but down.
National Post
Kenneth Green is a professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto.