Independent Wealth: a Prerequisite for Speaking Up?

“This point deserves all the more consideration today, at a time in recent history that has become uniquely critical of concentrated wealth, both of the inherited and earned variety.”

In my November, 2019 Quillette essay “Elite Colleges Reconsidered,” I drew attention to a number of ailments that I argued were affecting universities, particularly of the so-called elite variety. That essay, which was informed by having attended two such American universities, focused primarily on issues impacting campus culture, as well as a few prevalent mindsets that were likely affecting students’ well-being and individuality. In doing so, I largely refrained from discussing explicitly the—for a lack of a better term—political concerns (i.e. self-censorship, curriculum overhauls, the renaming of things, disinvited speakers, and the near-constant gnashing of teeth over objectively minor grievances). This was primarily because—to the extent they can be separated from one another—I believed that the aforementioned lifestyle concerns had received a paucity of attention relative to the political issues. And, secondly, I had suspected that eventually cooler heads would prevail; that the incessant state of frenzy would wear out its participants; or that, like most fads, it would run its course.

As we now see clearly, this has not happened, and this fever pitch, one whose acute intensity has demonstrated a remarkable longevity, shows little sign of abating. To be clear, though matters have become particularly impassioned and widespread in the time since, say, 2015, the trend is not new. To this point, in 1991, the columnist George Will used his October 20th Washington Post column “Catechism of Correctness” to decry a trend that was already emergent: that of disinviting speakers and seeking to punish academics for being allegedly insufficiently sympathetic to certain left-leaning causes. Will, to this effect, discusses Arizona State University’s September, 1991 decision to cancel a speaking appearance by Linda Chavez, an appointee in the administration of President Ronald Reagan whose 1991 book Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation argued that Hispanic immigrants to the United States should prioritize using the English language. As Will wrote then, in a sentence that looks as if it might have been written today, “And the letter disinviting Chavez used the word ‘cancel.’” In the remainder of the column, the author also draws attention to a number of similar events that were taking place at the time, ones very similar to those that have attracted much attention during the past few years. (For instance, he reviewed the case of Alan Gribeen, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who had to depart the school after voting against various activist-driven curriculum changes.) So much for any good-old-day-ism that might suggest that the campus madness appeared largely out of nowhere in the fall of 2015.

Even though events such as these on university campuses are not precisely new, I will pause briefly to mention two recent events that, in my view, demonstrate the extent to which higher education has been entirely overrun by the forces Will was sounding the alarm about nearly 30 years ago. The first occurred in the fall of 2019 when University of California, Davis mathematics professor Abigail Thompson received a torrent of criticism (much of it ad hominem) for daring to oppose requiring applicants for jobs in mathematics to submit statements affirming commitments to “diversity” (and not diversity of the ideological variety, of course). This episode provided an ironclad rejoinder to those at the time who still pollyannaishly proclaimed that mathematics and the hard sciences were largely immune to the impulses swallowing the humanities and social sciences. Now, as an illustration of how widely this has spread, we see the most respected of medical journals putting out statements affirming commitments to critical race theory and rejecting a “colour-blind” approach to healthcare. (Interestingly enough, Will reprised some of the same arguments he put forward in October of 1991, labeling the Abigail Thompson controversy an example of higher education’s “mandatory political participation.”) And the second incident to which I will quickly draw attention is that of Arizona State University’s (yes, Arizona State again) July, 2020 decision to revoke Sonya Forte Duhé’s already-accepted job offer to become the dean of the university’s journalism school. The proximate cause appears to have been a social media post offered by Duhé in the days following the death of George Floyd: “for the family of George Floyd, the good police officers who keep us safe, my students, faculty and staff. Praying for peace on this #BlackOutTuesday.” Apparently, “praying for peace” is grounds for having one’s job offer rescinded.