Was the Long March a Dead End? An Exchange on Radicals and the University

Panoramas of twentieth-century college campuses (Library of Congress)

Michael,

Sometimes I think about what higher education looked like to a smart kid in the early 1960s. I’m sure the picture is rosier in hindsight, but even at the time it must have been impressive—wealthy, expanding, dynamic. No wonder young radicals saw higher education as an ideal place to start their long march through the institutions. C. Wright Mills’s “Letter to the New Left” already predicted in 1960 that the young intelligentsia would take over the proletariat’s role as history’s agent of change. That same year, the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins were started by four college freshmen, sparking a new phase in the civil rights movement that drew support from a multiracial youth coalition. In 1962, the Students for a Democratic Society’s Port Huron Statement announced the arrival of a generation of students—“bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities”—ready to change the world. Universities had power, and it looked like they had the potential to change, radically, for the better.

You know what happened next. Real gains were made over the coming decades, especially in diversifying a system dominated at each rung of the ladder—students, faculty, administrators—by white men. The material rewards of education kept rising, especially for postgraduate degrees. Even if the radicalism of the professoriate is overstated, the spectrum of debate within most universities moved decisively to the left.

All of which sounds like a success story, until you consider the other side of the ledger: slashing of state funding for higher education; skyrocketing student debt levels; the waning of tenure-track positions and the rise of the adjunct; the declining position of the humanities and social sciences that don’t put students neatly onto a six-figure career path; and—speaking of six-figure salaries—the metastasizing of a bloated administration.

Most important, with the electorate increasingly divided along educational lines, academia has become a prime battleground in the tribal struggle that defines both parties. Conservatives have been griping about tenured radicals since before William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale was published in 1951. But when Buckley was making his reputation, faculties were a more ideologically mixed lot than today, and college-educated voters were reliably Republican.

Back then, unions made Democrats. Now universities do—and the right knows it. Like other elite institutions, academia has traded the broad influence it developed in the less polarized politics of the postwar years for a more or less open embrace of the Democratic Party.

That’s fine in blue strongholds, though even then it doesn’t guarantee public funding for higher education. But the situation is bleaker in red states, where conservative politicians score easy points by asking why taxpayers should subsidize an arm of the progressive movement.

With all that in my head, I try to think about what higher education looks like to a smart kid in the early 2020s. My guess is that they see it as a place where most people are trying their best but nobody has a real sense of what it’s all supposed to add up to. Sure, deans and college presidents sound high-minded at commencement, but I doubt anybody’s buying it. What’s obvious is that universities do a great job at perpetuating hierarchy. That’s the dark side of pointing to the cash value of a college degree: good news for the 32 percent of the adult population with a BA or higher, a tough break for everyone else. And the higher up you go on the scale of prestige, the blurrier the line gets between meritocracy and aristocracy.

I bet this smart kid also knows that things are about to get even worse. Undergraduate enrollments are shrinking, and forecasters predict the trend is going to accelerate in the coming years. Institutions that are already teetering will be wiped out, and many more will struggle...