At a certain point the cultural Left no longer made any pretense to being liberal, and transformed themselves into “progressives.” They have taken Marcuse’s thesis in Repressive Tolerance to heart.
Though I hope that Dreger and her fellow travelers succeed in rolling back the clock, I suspect that the battle here is lost. She points out, correctly, that the total politicization of academia will destroy its existence as a producer of truth in any independent and objective manner. More concretely, she suggests it is likely that conservatives will simply start to defund and direct higher education even more stridently than they do now, because they will correctly see higher education as purely a tool toward the politics of their antagonists. I happen to be a conservative, and one who is pessimistic about the persistence of a public liberal space for ideas that offend. If progressives give up on liberalism of ideas, and it seems that many are (the most famous defenders of the old ideals are people from earlier generations, such as Nadine Strossen and Wendy Kaminer, with Dreger being a young example), I can’t see those of us in the broadly libertarian wing of conservatism making the last stand alone.
Honestly, I don’t want any of my children learning “liberal arts” from the high priests of the post-colonial cult. In the near future the last resistance on the Left to the ascendency of identity politics will probably be extinguished, as the old guard retires and dies naturally. The battle will be lost. Conservatives who value learning, and intellectual discourse, need to regroup. Currently there is a populist moood in conservatism that has been cresting for a generation. But the wave of identity politics is likely to swallow the campus Left with its intellectual nihilism. Instead of expanding outward it is almost certain that academia will start cannibalizing itself in internecine conflict when all the old enemies have been vanquished.
Let the private universities, such as Oberlin, wallow in their identity politics contradictions. Dreger already points to the path we will probably have to take: gut the public universities even more than we have. Leave STEM and some professional schools intact, and transform them for all practical purposes into technical universities. All the other disciplines? Some private universities, the playgrounds of the rich and successful, will continue to be traditionalist in maintaining “liberal arts,” which properly parrot the latest post-colonial cant. But much learning will be privatized, and knowledge will spread through segregated “safe spaces.” Those of us who read and think will continue to read and think, like we always have. We just won’t have institutional backing, because there’s not going to be a societal consensus for such support.
I hope I’m wrong.
He shares two more conclusions in a comment:
It’s getting worse, not better, and it’s not about tenure or money. It’s about social sanction and approval. so two sad conclusions:
1) Truth can only move in hidden channels now if it conflicts with power. No one gives a shit if you appeal to truth; they know that it is not intrinsic value except in the serve of status and power. I admire Heterodox Academy, but part of me wonders if they’d be better served by being stealth and just creating a secret society that doesn’t put the academy on notice that some people know that reality is different from the official narratives.
2) The post-modernists are right to a first approximation: everything is power. So “we” have to capture and crush; it’s only victory or defeat. The odds are irrelevant. I put we in quotes because it doesn’t matter who you are, the game is on, whether you think you are a player or not.
Open data and crowd-sourcing mean that a whole ecosystem of knowledge can emerge that doesn’t need to be nakedly exposed and put people’s livelihoods and reputations at risk from the kommissars.
Some of my friends have argued this for a long time, and I resisted because I’m a liberal in the old sense. but reality is reality, and the fact is that no one wants the truth, and they’ll destroy you to deny it.
For every Alice Dreger there are 1,000 who support her. but they’ll stand aside while the 100 tear her to shreds, and talk sadly amongst themselves about what happened to her career…