Race-obsessed mania could signal the final demise of the American university. It has, however, been a long time dying, and many would say that it has been a long time coming. Those who saw the Academy’s abandonment of the rational foundations on which it was built knew that its collapse was inevitable.
“This is the way the world ends,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “not with a bang but a whimper.” Whether or not the world might end in the way that Eliot prophesied, we can more safely prophesy the impending demise of the American University. Indeed, in this very summer of destructive discontent, we are witnessing before our very eyes its simpering and whimpering suicide.
This apocalyptic view was proclaimed in the headline of an article by Bob Zeidman, titled “The Death of the Liberal American University Occurred This Month,” published on July 15 in The Epoch Times. The reason for Mr. Zeidman’s apocalyptic proclamation was a decision by Cornell University, his alma mater, to begin the practice of systemic racial discrimination. Mr. Zeidman was outraged that Cornell had announced a scholarship for students that is predicated on one criterion—the person’s skin colour. These new scholarships are available for black students only. “The first question I have is, who is black?” writes Mr. Zeidman. “Is it someone descended from a slave in America? Is it someone with at least one parent, one grandparent, or one great grandparent who has identifiably dark skin in a photograph? Does it include students from Africa or only African Americans? Does it include people from India? From Jamaica? Will the administrators of the scholarship perform DNA tests?”
Coming from a working-class Jewish family and writing of the anti-Semitic discrimination he suffered as a young man, Mr. Zeidman nonetheless succeeded as an entrepreneur in the high-tech environment of Silicon Valley. “I believed in Cornell’s motto that even a Jewish student from a working-class family like me could attend and excel,” he writes. “I cherished the environment at Cornell where I sat and befriended people of every ethnic, religious, and class background, where we conversed, debated, and partied on equal footing, without questioning how any of us got admitted or whether any of us belonged there. For me, now, that feeling of pride is gone.”
He then laments that “opinions like mine in this article are rarely tolerated these days, especially by ‘institutes of higher learning,’” citing the recent example of the boycott and protests against the Cornell Law School professor, William A. Jacobson, for his criticisms of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Mr. Zeidman, a longtime donor to Cornell, has informed the university administration that he will no longer be supporting his alma mater financially. He is also contacting other donors hoping to persuade them to withdraw their support. “Perhaps financial pressure will return Cornell to its roots of race-blind, religion-blind, and sex-blind policies, and where true freedom and equality will once again be a core value as intended by its founders.”
Although it’s easy to sympathize with Mr. Zeidman’s perspective, it should be noted that the form of positive discrimination or affirmative action, which he finds objectionable, has been around for a long time. It is a matter for debate whether racial discrimination in favour of disadvantaged groups is justifiable. What is not justifiable is the suggestion that it is not a matter for debate. What is equally unjustifiable is the intolerance which justifies boycotts and threats against those who wish to discuss these issues. What is also unjustifiable is the cowardice of those who do nothing in the face of the intolerance that refuses to debate the issues and which persecutes those who seek to do so.
In truth, and Mr. Zeidman’s spleen-venting aside, the scholarships for “black students only” at Cornell University is relatively trivial compared to the really radical lunacy at other universities around the country, a lunacy that is becoming compulsory.
Take the situation at Vanderbilt University, for instance.
A petition being circulated this summer accuses the school of racism for not having had enough black students and faculty over the past decades. This implies that black students had actually applied and were denied admission due to their race, whereas, in fact, black students and faculty have been highly sought after, as part of the policy of affirmative action which Vanderbilt, like most institutions, actively pursues. In spite of the university’s best proactive efforts to attract black students and faculty, relatively few have been forthcoming. The few who did apply were accepted over more qualified students and were often given full-ride scholarships. The petition seems to demand that Vanderbilt waves a magic wand to change the demographics, not understanding that you can only accept people who have actually applied and that you can’t accept those who haven’t.
Further signs of this race-obsessed mania can be seen in demands that Vanderbilt’s music department practice “equality” by ensuring that all faculty and student recitals and large ensemble concerts be required to program 50% of their music by black and women composers. Perhaps we should sacrifice quality for equality, limiting the performance of Bach or Beethoven to make way for unknown pieces by unknown composers, purely on the grounds of their sex or skin colour, but the bottom line is that there are simply not enough compositions by black composers to make this possible, even were it desirable. There is no music written by black composers for certain instruments and there are not enough living black classical composers to write new music quickly enough to provide the requisite quota of compositions for those instruments. The fact is that these agenda-driven fanatics expect the square peg of their ideological dogmatism to fit into the round hole of actual reality.
This sort of post-rational madness could indeed signal the final demise of the American university. It has, however, been a long time dying, and many would say that it has been a long time coming. Those who saw the Academy’s abandonment of the rational foundations on which it was built knew that its collapse was inevitable. In losing its reason, it has lost its reason to exist. In affirming that all is ultimately meaningless, it confessed that it is itself ultimately meaningless. In condemning the corpus of Western civilization, it was condemning itself. In betraying the corpus, it becomes the corpse. After the “woke” comes the wake; and after the wake, the whimper.
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The featured image is an image of Cornell University, uploaded by LBM1948, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. It appears here, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
I read your well-written concise article, and but for my Faith that tells me the battle has already been won, I could have cried.
Great article, Joseph.
Thank you, Joseph. Reading your articles is like a long, cool drink of water after walking through debilitating hot sands.
The American university is definitely a decaying institution, if not a dying one. University professors and administrators for many decades have been insidiously indoctrinating students rather than educating them. While these same academics may believe they have succeeded in the former, the intellectual lunacy that has engulfed universities all across America as of late proves otherwise. Higher education has succumbed, inexorably, to the madness of the “Woke” crowd, to the mentality of the mob that embraces today’s Cancel Culture. It is pure folly to believe that contemporary universities will produce anything other than a generation of angry, disillusioned malcontents with an axe to grind against the American way of life. How could we expect anything different when public figures like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared on national TV, “America was never great.”? Or when college professors of journalism, political science, and history decry our founders as greedy white rich men who established our country for their own benefit while embracing slavery? Or when the U.S. news media — once a voice of reason when a “free press” understood the true meaning of objective journalism — burns the midnight oil in its efforts to portray our president as an evil villain, and the United States as the world’s bully instead of the defender of liberty that it has always been? In truth, there is no longer a “free press” in our country; it has made itself a proxy of the political far-left. Like many American universities, the mainstream news media has been infiltrated over many years by radical socialists clinging to Marxist ideals, seeking to undermine and ultimately destroy our constitutional Republic. But to replace it with what, exactly?
They cannot answer this question with any clarity. They cannot offer any system of government or commerce that is measurably better than what our Founders created. They cannot point to a single Nation that has done more good for more people all over the globe than America. They cannot discourage those who want to come to America for a better life because ours is the best country in the world offering the most opportunities for self-advancement and success. These are irrefutable facts which cannot be discredited by the extravagant lies of leftist ideologues.
The gradual decay of most American colleges from institutions with the goal of challenging and producing well-rounded, critically-thinking graduates to the business model of degree factories appears to accelerating to an exponential rate.
As they used to say in the olden days: This is where the monkey put the peanut. So how do we avoid the result? And maybe some should reread, or read for the first time, “Redeem the Time” as Kirk reminded us a few years ago..
“music department practice “equality” by ensuring that all faculty and student recitals and large ensemble concerts be required to program 50% of their music by black and women composers.”
I am waiting for the University president to announce: ” Henceforth all buildings on campus must be constructed by 50% women and blacks and all road maintenance work–“
I am a Cornell graduate in liberal arts. I understand Zeidman’s sentiment. I don’t know his age, but there was a time when Cornell used quotas to limit admissions of Jews.
The Cornell history department is home to one of the leading scholars on ways northern economies benefited from slavery. Perhaps Cornell has examined ways it befitted. That is not addressed in the essay. It would be relevant.
A collapse in the flow of overseas students, slashed research funding, students questioning the value of covid-era soft degree programmes – all of this represents a real opportunity for small conservative liberal arts colleges and also for conservative and communitarian/left political parties that seek to transform higher education. This was my take for the UK’s Social Democratic Party which leans left on economy right on culture.
Alongside the atrocious left slant of humanities and social sciences, and the most liberal teachers college/programs, which gives way to the current rot we see in every other university, I’d also add the a number of people who think a university should be largely a white vocational institute. Though I do sympathize with parents who wants their child to enter a profession that is able to pay back the student loans accumulated during undergraduate years. Let’s face it, an English or sociology degree does not carve out a clear path to a career that both pay the bills and pay the loans. In many ways, college tuition is killing the idealism found within such majors.
Now, with that said, does anyone have resources that document the rise of college tuition? I’m a millennial and I’ve heard it was much cheaper to receive a college education decades ago.
I agree with one of the comments above- support the small truly Liberal Arts Colleges and liberal arts elementary/secondary education. Send your kids there and give your money to them, not institutions who don’t even know the meaning of the words “liberal” and “education”. Thank you, Joseph for this article.